Two interwoven narratives unfold across decades: one set in the late 1970s in the USSR, the other during the Great Patriotic War across Poland and Nazi Germany.
In the present-day thread, a dismembered body is found near the road to the airport of Nardyn. Police colonel Vladislav Nikolaevich Kostenko travels from Moscow to lead the investigation into this brutal and unusual crime. At first, a taxi driver named Grigoriy Milinko seems tied to the case, but the trail soon pushes the investigators backward in time as deeper connections emerge.
With the aid of his assistant, Kardava, the team discovers that the man identified as Milinko is not the real Milinko—the Red Army Marine who bore that name was killed in 1945 near Wrocław. Forensic clues from the Nardyn case are sent to East Germany, and a Berlin archive starts to reveal the person behind the fingerprints and the deceit.
The archive points to a dark past: Nikolai Ivanovich Krotov, a traitor who defected to the German side in the summer of 1941. In a brutal bid to prove his loyalty to the Nazis, Krotov even carries the wounded political leader George Kozel, who is later shot. Krotov operates as a provocateur, and through his denunciations a large group of Soviet prisoners of war attempting to organize underground resistance in a concentration camp are executed. After his temporary release, German authorities send him to a hospital for an experimental treatment for his stutter, then to the Abwehr’s commando school, and finally back into rear areas of the USSR for sabotage assignments. He also attempts to rob a German female jeweler with whom he resided, and is sent to a concentration camp again; after a year, the German Security Service assigns him to secret and dirty missions, his past crimes seemingly forgotten.
In 1945, as part of Vlasov’s Army, Krotov fights in the defense of Breslau but deserts. He kills Grigoriy Milinko and steals Milinko’s documents and military uniform, then slips into the ranks of the Red Army and, after the war, goes north to the USSR, taking up work as a taxi driver in Nardyn.
Years pass, and Krotov, ever wary of exposure, schemes to escape to the West with a cache of gold. He partners with Anna Petrova, an organizer of a gold-minding operation, and the two embark on illegal plundering. They murder Michael Gonchakov and fail to seize a massive gold nugget, and Krotov ends up killing and dismembering his former mistress when Petrova becomes pregnant. With the help of relatives in Smolensk, Krotov robs a jewelry store, accumulating gold and jewels in his eyes for one final break to a foreign country.
But the net tightens as the police close in. Kostenko and Kardava shadow Krotov in Adler; surrounded on all sides, Krotov seizes a hostage and attempts to hijack a plane. The operation is halted by the courage and professionalism of a specialized forces unit, and the savage criminal is stopped and arrested.
