Echo of the Cold War: Project S.H.I.L.O.
Tagline: Victory goes not to whoever has the most accurate missiles, but to whoever believes most sincerely in the impossible.
Full Public Blurb
August 1990. Inside a polluted rock cavern on the Kola Peninsula sits the Soviet Northern Fleet’s strangest vessel: K-1313 Ivasi, an unchartable titanium midget submarine clad in ten thousand tons of melted-down Thai orthopedic pillows. Commanded by pragmatic Captain First Rank Ivan Grimlivy, the boat serves as the seaborne relay for Zeus, a planetary 82-Hertz transmitter driven into the Arctic granite. Because no Soviet computer can separate that signal from whale songs, communications officer Dzhamshed Rahmonzoda drinks half a liter of 95-percent technical spirit and headbutts a titanium frame until his skull resonates with the hull.
The patrol unravels when the crew rescues Adun Hestviken, the lone survivor of a sunken Norwegian fishing seiner. Adun wears a gold Breitling watch worth 85,000 West German marks, engraved to a royal nephew, and carries a micro-camera hidden in the bezel. When he films Dzhamshed’s ritual and smuggles the tape off the boat inside a brick of 72-percent Soviet laundry soap, a synesthetic NSA cryptographer at Fort Meade concludes Moscow has deployed a biochemical superweapon.
Short Blurb
In August 1990, a stealth Soviet submarine clad in Thai orthopedic pillows rescues a Norwegian fisherman wearing a royal Breitling watch. When he smuggles out footage of a communications officer decoding 82-Hertz signals with technical alcohol and headbutts, American intelligence mistakes a naval hangover cure for a Cold War superweapon.
Specification Sheet
Editorial and bibliographic overview.
| Title | Echo of the Cold War: Project S.H.I.L.O. |
|---|---|
| Author | Alexey Tuzov |
| Genre | Cold War naval and espionage satire / upmarket historical dark comedy |
| Length | Approximately 60,000 words (25 chapters, epilogue, and author’s afterword) |
| Setting | August 1990 (Kola Peninsula, Norwegian Sea, Fort Meade, Abkhazia, and the United States) |
| Manuscript Status | Complete English manuscript available |
| Translation | Author’s own English translation from his original Russian edition (Ust-Kamenogorsk, 2026, 169 pages) |
| Rights Status | [TODO: author to confirm contract with the Russian publisher] |
| Comparable Works | Catch-22 (Joseph Heller), Slow Horses (Mick Herron), Endling (Maria Reva), The Death of Stalin, Jonas Jonasson, Jaroslav Hasek, Mikhail Bulgakov |
For Fans Of
For readers who enjoy the institutional military farce of Catch-22, the cynical intelligence misfires of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, the bureaucratic satire of The Death of Stalin, and the post-Soviet deadpan of Maria Reva’s Endling.
Core Themes
- Institutional paranoia versus everyday human improvisation: how opposing intelligence agencies construct elaborate conspiracy theories out of mundane supply shortages and bureaucratic mistakes.
- The unwritten language of closed military communities: the gap between official naval regulations and how sailors actually keep iron afloat three hundred meters below the sea.
- The twilight of the Soviet Empire in 1990: the collision of nuclear deterrence, black-market consumer dreams, and late-Soviet absurdity.
- Brandolini’s Law and Hanlon’s Razor at sea: why refuting a convenient intelligence myth requires an order of magnitude more energy than inventing one.
Content Notes
Contains satirical depictions of military alcohol consumption (including industrial technical spirit), non-graphic Cold War espionage hazards, barracks profanity, and institutional psychiatric confinement. Shilo disclaimer: industrial solvents and fuel are poisonous; the drinking scenes are satire, not advice.
Press and rights inquiries: author@matrostuzov.com.
