Based on the audacious, now-legendary "Operation Spider's Web," this novel reveals the untold story of the spies, soldiers, and scientists who wove a web of deception across Russia and changed the face of modern warfare forever. If you love high-stakes thrillers from Tom Clancy and Brad Thor, you won’t be able to put down The Glacier.

For eighteen agonizing months, the war had fallen into a brutal rhythm. From the sanctuary of airbases deep within their own borders, Russia’s Tu-95 and Tu-22M strategic bombers flew with chilling impunity. Their payloads of cruise missiles were the daily terror of Ukrainian life, striking not just military positions, but apartment blocks, power stations, and train stations crowded with refugees. The world watched, but the missiles kept falling.

For Dr. Olena Koval, a civilian AI engineer whose life was shattered in one such strike at Kramatorsk, the rhythm of war is the rhythm of her own broken heart. In a sterile, subterranean GUR bunker in Kyiv, she has turned her back on a world that no longer holds her husband and daughter. The ghosts of her past now fuel a single, all-consuming obsession: to create a weapon that can reach the untouchable. She pours her sorrow, her brilliance, and her rage into lines of code, giving birth to an AI she names "Mriya"—Dream. It is an AI trained on museum aircraft and satellite imagery, designed not for indiscriminate terror, but for surgical, righteous vengeance against the very machines that destroyed her world.

But a weapon is useless without a way to deliver it to the heart of the enemy. That near-impossible task falls to Major Taras "Ronin" Petrenko, a man who is Olena's opposite in every way. A legend in the GUR special forces, Taras is a battle-hardened operator who sees the world in shades of blood and mud, a landscape of objectives and acceptable losses. He trusts the weight of a rifle in his hands, not the ghostly logic of an algorithm. Recruited to lead the operational side of the newly codenamed Operation PAVUK (Spider's Web), his mission is to build the physical web that will carry Olena’s digital spiders.

Working from the shadows, Taras devises an ingenious "Trojan Horse" strategy, a plan of breathtaking audacity. Over one hundred small, explosive-laden drones will be smuggled into Russia piece by piece. They will be assembled in secret by a small team of Ukrainian patriots, led by a quiet freight business owner in Chelyabinsk. Then, they will be hidden in specially constructed wooden cabins and loaded onto trucks. The final delivery will be made by the mission’s most unlikely agents: ordinary Russian truck drivers, hired for a long-haul job, completely unaware they are carrying the seeds of their own nation's humiliation.

Based on the stunningly successful and meticulously documented real-life "Operation Spider's Web" of June 2025, PAVUK is more than a military thriller. It is a gripping, deeply human story of an unlikely partnership forged in the crucible of war. It is the story of a scientist who must learn to trust the brutal calculus of a soldier, and a soldier who must place the fate of his country in the hands of an AI he cannot comprehend. As they weave their web of deception across five Russian time zones, a relentless FSB colonel, a hunter of ghosts and shadows, begins to sense their presence, threatening to unravel the entire, fragile plan before the trap can be sprung.

From the high-tech pressure cooker of the Kyiv command center to the paranoia-drenched streets of a Russian military town, PAVUK is a testament to the quiet courage of those who operate in the shadows, a harrowing look at the human cost of a high-tech war, and a breathtaking, moment-by-moment account of one of the most brilliant and audacious covert operations in modern history.