From the first day of the war, the Stolyarov brothers—a fighter pilot and a tanker—fight the fascists. They survived miraculously in the fiery forty-first. They learned to fight in the bloody forty-second. And now it’s 1943—the turning year of the Great Patriotic War. The army of Paulus is defeated and captured near Stalingrad. Ahead are battles for Kharkiv and Kursk—ahead is the Fiery Salient, the Steel Arc, on which the backbone of the fascist beast will be broken!