1985 year. The young Arab military translator Andrei Obnorsky finds himself in practice in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, where a group of Soviet military advisers are working to help form and train the Yemeni army. Directly from a student's bench, the young man falls into a turbulent maelstrom of events - the real African heat, the confrontation between the southerners and northerners of the once united Yemeni state, political feuds in the NDRY itself, resulting in a military coup, and finally, the games of the Soviet special services.