Stalin’s Army of Apes: The Mechanized Puppeteers by Itamar Friedman

What if Stalin's deadliest weapon wasn't nuclear — but genetic?When masked figures storm a Ugandan rainforest and steal Kibo, his alpha chimp, Professor Benjamin Fioretti loses more than his life's work. They moved like men but fought like something else. They knew exactly what they came for. And they vanished in a flash of white light.Lured to the frozen wastes of Siberia by the promise of answers, Benjamin discovers the horrifying truth: his groundbreaking research on the "warrior gene" has been twisted into Stalin's ultimate weapon. Deep beneath the permafrost, thousands of creatures are being manufactured — something between man and ape. Something that follows orders. Something bred for total war.Betrayed by the men he trusted most, hunted through a secret world of underground bunkers and Cold War conspiracies, Benjamin fights to survive. But the deeper he descends, the more he feels it — something in his veins answering something in theirs.Because the darkest secret in Stalin's bunker isn't what they built. It's who they built it from.Inspired by the true experiments of Soviet geneticist Ilya Ivanov, Stalin's Army of Apes is a thriller that asks: What happens when the line between man and monster is written in your own DNA?