To outsiders, the former USSR is always been a place where everything is strangely different. All the more so in the Exclusion Zone around the ill-fated Chernobyl power plant, where after a secret experiment went wrong in 2006, the laws of physics are bent and mysterious phenomena manifest.In 2011, Al Qaeda detonates nuclear warheads in Kabul. In what was once the Afghan wilderness, apparently a New Zone is created.Three years later a scientific expedition tries to find out if the creation of the New Zone could be connected to the Chernobyl experiment. When the researchers disappear, a search and rescue operation is launched.For Major Mikhailo Tarasov, a veteran of the Exclusion Zone, this mission into post-apocalyptic Afghanistan is more than just another dangerous task: in the land where his father died, he must also confront the ghosts of the Soviet past.Major Tarasov and his Spetsnaz commandos soon find themselves at the mercy of a hostile environment worse than anything they had encountered before. But beyond all the perils of the New Zone, the most lethal danger awaits: betrayal.John Mason is a pseudonym used by the author Balázs Pataki.