VULKAN

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 acti