This novel is mainly set in Kiev and is about the dismay of Russian commanders as they see the Soviet Union disintegrating around them. They resolve to do something about it. In reality, one of them, Vladimir Putin, actually did. Kiev, Ukraine, January 1998: Colonel General Igor Pavlovich Yavlinsky was not a happy man. As he gazed out of the seventh floor window of his office on Krechatik, the main street of Kiev, he pondered on what might have been; what should have been. H