The novel presents for the first time a detailed fictional version of a little-known, at the same time symbolic event of the last years of the Soviet era - the uprising of our and Afghan prisoners of war in April 1985 in the Pakistani fortress of Badaber. For the first time in Russian fiction, the curtain of mystery has been lifted over the most closed of the Soviet intelligence services - the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces. For the first time, the story is told about a unique university in the country, which in Soviet times was called the Military Institute of Foreign Languages. For the first time, the author’s version of the events described comes from professional orientalist practitioners who, among other things, proposed a brief “artistic encyclopedia” of the ten-year Afghan war. The creative union of writer Andrei Konstantinov and journalist Boris Podoprigora for the first time acquired full literary significance after their joint debut - the war novel “Rota”. Only now the truth of the participant in the Chechen war is complemented by the truth about the Afghan war. For the first time, a war novel encourages us to comprehend the modern origins of our national dignity. “If anyone hears me” sounds like a call to save it.