Trophy from Hell

A war novel about difficult human fates and a deadly high-risk job for the nameless fighters who were brought into the elite “Beria’s special forces” assault unit.

1942. A task force under Major Maksim Shelestov is ordered to track down a geologist, Aristarh Vytold, on territory occupied by the Germans near Stalingrad. The Germans are also hunting him: they need data on underground voids that appeared under the city after gypsum deposits were mined. The fascists hope to use these passages to break into the rear of the Red Army and deliver a sudden blow. In the blazing chaos of the battles for Stalingrad, finding a single man is almost impossible. But the operatives manage to pick up Vytold’s trail. Now the hardest part is to get him out to their own, alive and unharmed—by going through a gauntlet of trials where every step may be the last…

“Part of the strength of this series is that it clearly conveys the key idea: in Lavrenty Beria’s NKVD they knew how to trust people—because the minister himself knew how to trust. The story of Major Shelestov’s group echoes a real case involving a major Abwehr agent, a former staff-captain of the Tsarist army, Nelidov, who ended up at Lubyanka in September 1939. Against the backdrop of Nelidov’s story, the adventures of Maksim Shelestov and his comrades, as portrayed in the novel, look especially plausible.” – S. Kremlov

The total print run of A. Tamonikov’s books exceeds 10 million copies.