Vulkan: the evil empire's last gamble - Couverture souple

Shirreff, David

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0993296904 ISBN 13 : 9780993296901

Editeur : Crunch Books, 2015

Synopsis

This is a gripping debut thriller by journalist David Shirreff. The Soviet empire is crumbling – a plight made worse by its efforts to match President Ronald Reagan’s multi-billion-dollar Star Wars programme. What better - and cheaper - response can there be than to smuggle a compact nuclear warhead into the heart of every metropolis in the Western alliance? Moscow’s top-secret mission is run by a bunch of patriotic, but fallible, former cosmonauts. Only by chance do Western agents get wind of it, with a predictably flat-footed response. And only one man, William Pike, publisher of a magazine on specialist weaponry, sees the full magnitude of the threat posed by Project Vulkan. A chase ensues across various continents to locate and neutralise the hidden weapons before millions of lives are lost. Dark forces are at work – darker than the openly friendly regime of Mikhail Gorbachev. The technology has a potential far more sinister than the deterrent it was designed to be - if it falls into the wrong hands. This novel is no mere fantasy. For several decades, Nordic countries have experienced unexplained activity in their home waters. Here is a plausible scenario for what lies behind it: not just Soviet submarines in trouble, but a device to terrorise the entire Western world by stealth. If that technology could create panic in the dying days of the Cold War, how much more can it do so today, in the hands of a terrorist group? As William Pike speculates: “If they can fly planes into the twin towers they can certainly turn other forms of transport into lethal weapons.”

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

David Shirreff has been a writer all his life, but this is his first thriller to see the light of day. After university and some years on the hippie trail he started as a reporter in Turkey and then on the wider Middle East. That was followed by a career at Euromoney and The Economist, based in London, Frankfurt and Berlin. He travelled extensively during this period, mostly in Western and Eastern Europe. Vulkan was a long time cooking, having been conceived in the uncertain years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It languished in a bottom drawer when interest in the Cold War waned. But today’s geopolitics show that the spirit of the Cold War, and the level of distrust that accompanied it, are far from dead. As well as many articles, David Shirreff has written two serious books on finance (“Dealing With Financial Risk”, 2004 and “Don’t Start From Here – We Need A Banking Revolution”, 2014). He has also written and produced three musicals in collaboration with composer Russell Sarre (“Broke Britannia!” 2009, “EuroCrash!” 2011, and “Barack and the Beanstalk”, 2014). David has two sons and lives in London.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Crunch Books
• Date d'édition: 2015
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0993296904
• ISBN 13: 9780993296901
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 352
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Printed by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg