Every step is shadowed by a bullet from a Chechen militant or a mine, but the characters of the novel “Special Forces That Will Not Return” stubbornly charge straight ahead to their own, because they know why and for what this stupid war was started. But those who are involved in it want them to stay there—on the battlefield…
Only the special forces themselves didn’t know that, and kept pushing forward to reach their own—through the fire of their own artillery, through the “ironings” of helicopters, through minefields and ambushes. They died a hundred times a day; they rasped, greedily gulping air; they believed, like it was sacred, in the absolute justice of the country that sent them to their deaths. And then everything that had held them alive came to an end. Only the documents carefully folded in a tablet-like case, seized from the militants— and in memory, the places where friends had been secretly buried…