A real woman is a woman who has something for which everything else can be forgiven. It is precisely such a woman that the hero of the novel encounters when, in the late 90s, he has to carry out an illegal assignment on the territory of one of the CIS countries, to which, for political reasons, it is impossible to involve the special services. The story of a crashed cruise missile, which must be returned to its homeland, ahead of the envoys of Western “partners,” forces the hero to go through a whole series of tragicomic circumstances, where man-made mysteries, eroticism, murder, escapes from prison and the loss of friends are intertwined into one bizarre ball. The book is like a werewolf: at one point it almost turns into a spy detective story. But living people act in it, with their passions, vices, illusions and beliefs, many of which collapse at the turn of the era, in that deadly whirlpool in which the global and the personal swirl together.