Fourth Protocol (Hardcover)

Another Forsyth countdown thriller - this time in 1987 Britain, where (in the novel's last 150 pages) the men of MI5 will be madly scrambling in order to prevent a USSR-engineered nuclear "accident." Before the countdown begins, however, Forsyth teasingly moves back and forth between two slowly-developing plots, which will link up only in the novel's final moments. Plot #1: British Intelligence accidentally learns (thanks to the patriotism of a top jewel-thief) that there's a leak high up in the Defense Ministry; John Preston of MI5 eventually traces this leak to right-winger George Berenson, who thinks he's been slipping secrets to South Africa. . . but has really been slipping them to a Soviet mole within South Africa's diplomatic corps! (Preston's sleuthing takes him to South Africa, and back into WW II archives.) More central, however, is Plot #2: in Moscow aged Kim Philby (a nice cameo) is helping the USSR General Secretary to formulate "Plan Aurora" - whereby a nuclear accident in England will swing the upcoming general election over to the Labour Party (which now belongs to the "Hard Left"), ushering in a Marxist-Leninist "British Revolution," not to mention the end of NATO. And Plan Aurora involves the infiltration of a dozen or so Soviet (non-KGB) agents into England, each one carrying some ingredient for Moscow's violation of the "Fourth Protocol." (One of the secret clauses in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, this Protocol bans the hostile use of miniature, smuggled-in nuclear weapons.) Preston of MI5 begins to suspect what Moscow is up to when one of the Soviet couriers is accidentally apprehended in Scotland, carrying "a disk of pure polonium" - which, when placed next to a disk of lithium, becomes a nuclear-bomb "initiator." A search for other Soviet infiltrators begins, eventually focusing (with SAS support) on the key bomb-man, an English-speaking mole. But, though Preston & Co. are super-efficient, successfully closing in on the villains before the explosion, it's eventually revealed that the English were being aided all along by certain forces within Russia - a development which links up (too predictably, too late) with that other, Defense Ministry-leak subplot. This not-quite-satisfactory interplay between the plot-pieces is only one weakness of Forsyth's new thriller: the characters are all rather flat; the countdown lacks Jackal-level tension;the political material (Labour Party background, etc.) is ladled on with a heavy hand. No matter. With his no-nonsense style and shrewd sense of variety and pacing, Forsyth remains a superior (if unoriginal and unmesmerizing) entertainer - and this lesser effort is sure to grab the same no-frills readership (not a speck of romance or sex here) that has made him a top-seller again and again. (Kirkus Reviews)

A title first published in 1984, in which MI5 investigator John Preston works against an urgent deadline in an operation to prevent an act of destruction aimed at casting Britain into revolution.