“Where there are no tigers, the wolves come.” — Udege saying

Primorsky Krai. The last place in the world where the Siberian tiger prowls in the wild. The native Udege people’s word for tiger is amba, “spirit of the forest.”

Yuri Kaskilev was a sniper with the elite Russian special forces known as spetsnaz—until he left the army in disgust and found a sense of purpose in the twelve-man Anti-Poaching Brigade. When Yuri rescues two tiger cubs from their dying mother, he unleashes a chain of events that he could not have foreseen.

Dr. Miko Katanabe is one of the world’s leading tiger experts, and she is brought in to attempt something that has never been tried before: she will train the motherless cubs and introduce them into the wild when they reach maturity. Should her Project succeed, more tigers born in captivity could be similarly “reintroduced.” Yuri doubts Miko’s logical, data-driven models; she is equally wary of him and his violent past.

Major Ivan Iliakov recruited Yuri into spetsnaz from the Yakutsk Home for Orphaned Boys. Wherever the Major went, Yuri followed—until Chechnya. Now, Iliakov has come to Primorsky Krai, lured by the lucrative possibilities opening up in the freebooting world of Russian capitalism—where a tiger’s body parts can bring tens of thousands of dollars on the black market.

Khagan, the “king of kings,” is an enormous rogue male tiger, wounded, aging, and eternally hungry. Khagan does not take kindly to the sudden intrusion of these strange people and their cubs in his territory…