The Cold War is over, but Russia’s arsenal of nuclear weapons is still in place. And when an emissary from an international terrorist group makes a disaffected Russian minister an offer he can't refuse, the survival of the West hangs in the balance… America and Europe have been seeded with nuclear weapons – strategically located in major city centers – by a group of renegade Russians and their secretive Arab allies. Maverick trouble-shooter Paul Richter finds himself up against a mastermind determined to bomb America back into the Stone Age. Caught up in a tense battle of wits and bullets, he only realizes the full horror of what is about to be unleashed on the world as the attack on the West begins. Richter is the only man with the knowledge and ability to stop it. And time is running out

Off the island of Crete an illicit diver finds a 30-year-old aircraft wreck on the seabed. From amongst the corpses still strapped inside he recovers a steel case containing four sealed flasks. The rogue diver manages to cut one of them open… but within twelve hours succumbs to a hideous death. Agency trouble-shooter Paul Richter is delegated to investigate the source of the mystery killer, but encounters far more questions than answers. Why has the CIA directed total destruction of the aircraft’s remnants? Why is a hit team roaming the island to eliminate anyone with close knowledge of the missing flasks? Who is now picking off members of the hit team itself? And why are retired agents back in America getting professionally eliminated? As Richter gets ever closer to unravelling a decades-old secret, even he is unprepared for the sheer horror of the truth about to be disclosed

Back in 1976, a Russian front-line pilot defected to Japan in a MiG-25 Foxbat interceptor, flying virtually at sea level to avoid pursuing fighters and surface-to-air missiles. With about thirty seconds of fuel remaining, he landed at Hakodate Airport, bursting a tyre and skidding off the runway. Before the aircraft was handed back to the Russians, American intelligence agencies reduced it to a pile of components and then rebuilt it. Despite the wealth of intelligence gleaned, they completely failed to realise the purpose for which the Foxbat was created. Moving to the present, American satellites have detected unusual activity at several Algerian air bases, and at Aïn Oussera one large hangar has been cordoned off and armed guards posted outside. Western intelligence agencies suspect that Algeria might be working-up its forces prior to launching an attack on Libya or Morocco, with potentially destabilising effects in the region. They’re also concerned that they might have obtained new aircraft or weapon systems, perhaps secreted in the guarded hangar at Aïn Oussera. The only way to find out is to get someone to look inside the building, and it will have to be a covert insertion. This is where Paul Richter is called in, as ‘a deniable asset’, in an exciting non-stop thriller that moves rapidly through Bulgaria, Russia, and ultimately North Korea