Review
------
Praise for The Fox
One of the Washington Post's Best Thrillers and Mysteries of 2018
One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2018
“Ingenious, expertly written and a serious look at international
conflicts that threaten the future of the world…Forsyth is
supremely well-informed about world affairs, politics, diplomacy,
weaponry and the mysteries of craft. In The Fox, as in all his
novels, he lays them out in brilliant detail.”--The Washington
Post
"The Fox is scant on dialogue, leaving room for the action
sequences that have made Mr. Forsyth's novels best sellers for
decades. The author's spooky scenarios are somehow soothing: How
comforting to think that bad actors might be stopped by the
teamwork of one ‘anxious boy with spectacular gifts’ and ‘an
elderly Englishman who sat at the back and remained
silent.’”--The Wall Street Journal
"This timely, well-written thriller has it all. Great plot with
surprising twists and turns. Intriguing characters. Spellbinding
suspense. A fast, tremendously entertaining read. Since The Day
of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth has been considered a giant of
the political and espionage thriller genre. This giant just
became even more towering."--The Washington Times
"The Fox is essential reading for followers of geopolitical
dramas unfolding in the world today."--BBC Culture
“A terrifically entertaining thriller in the classic
tradition...Genre fans will be enthralled.”—Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
"The Fox is just the kind of stunning, relevant, full-throttle
story that thriller fans have been waiting for."--CrimeReads
"The master of the modern espionage novel returns . . . this is
Forsyth at his spellbinding best." --Daily Mail
"Forsyth deserves his place among the thriller greats." --The
Times (UK)
"Master of the hair-trigger thriller . . . What makes Forsyth
such a great narrator of the espionage genre is his fluency in
speak and acronyms and abbreviations that make a compelling
read all th more authentic. Equally satisfying is the way the
good guys are good at what they do and the baddies get their
comeuppance. The five year wait for Forsyth’s latest sensation
has been worth every second." --Daily Express (UK)
More Praise for Frederick Forsyth
“When it comes to espionage, international intrigue and suspense,
Frederick Forsyth is a master.”—The Washington Post
“Forsyth is truly the world’s reigning master of suspense.”—Los
Angeles Times
“Inventive, organized, believable, and absolutely
spellbinding...Suspense fiction at its very best and a
cliffhanger par excellence.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A masterpiece tour de force of crisp, sharp, suspenseful
writing...It’s an awful cliché to say that ‘you won’t be able to
put this book down,’ but cliché or not, it’s the truth.”—The Wall
Street Journal
“Forsyth can tell a suspenseful tale better than anyone.”—Fort
Worth Star-Telegram
“There are writers in the intelligence genre who make a point of
knowing something about their subject before sitting down to
write. The king of the pack is Frederick Forsyth.”—The Washington
Times
“Suspense taut as a violin string...Will keep you reading into
the wee hours of the morning.”—The New York Times
“Not only exciting by truly surprising.”—The Atlantic
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About the Author
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Frederick Forsyth is the #1 New York Times
bestselling author of seventeen novels, including The Day of the
Jackal and The Odessa File, as well as short story collections
and a memoir. A former Air Force pilot, and one-time print and
television reporter for the BBC, he has had four movies and two
television miniseries made from his works. He is the winner of
three Edgar Awards, and in 2012 he won the Diamond Dagger Award
from the Crime Writers' Association, a lifetime achievement award
for sustained excellence. He lives in Hertfordshire, England.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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One
No one saw them. No one heard them. They were not supposed to.
The black-clad Special Forces soldiers slipped unseen through the
pitch-dark night toward the target house.
In most town and city centers there is always a glimmer of light,
even in deepest night, but this was the outer suburb of an
English provincial town and all public lighting had ceased at one
in the morning. This was the darkest hour, two a.m. A solitary
fox watched them pass but instinct bade him not interfere with
fellow hunters. No house lights broke the gloom.
They encountered two single humans, both on foot, both drunk
after late-night partying with friends. The soldiers melted into
gardens and shrubbery, disappearing black on black until the
wanderers had stumbled toward their homes.
They knew exactly where they were, having studied the streets and
the target house in detail for many hours. The pictures
had been taken by cruising cars and overhead drones. Much
d and pinned to the wall of the briefing room at Stirling
Lines, the headquarters of the SAS outside Hereford, the images
had been memorized to the last stone and curb. The soft-booted
men did not trip or stumble.
There were a dozen of them, and they included two Americans,
inserted at the insistence of the U.S. team that had installed
itself in the embassy in London. And there were two from the
British SRR, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, a unit even
more clandestine than the SAS and the SBS, the Special Air
Service and the Special Boat Service, respectively. The
authorities had elected to use the SAS, known simply as "the
Regiment."
One of the two from the SRR was a woman. The Americans presumed
this was to establish gender equality. It was the reverse.
Observation had revealed that one of the inhabitants of the
target house was female and even the British hard squads try to
observe a little gallantry. The point of the presence of the SRR,
sometimes referred to in the club as "Her Majesty's burglars,"
was to practice one of their many skill sets-covert entry.
The mission was not only to enter and subdue the target house and
its denizens but to ensure they were not seen by any watcher
inside and that no one escaped. They approached from all angles,
appeared simultaneously around the garden fence, front, back and
sides, crossed the garden and ringed the house, still unseen and
unheard, by neighbor or inhabitant.
No one heard the slight squeak of the diamond-tipped glass cutter
as it described a neat circle in a kitchen window, nor the low
crack as the disk was removed with a suction pad. A gloved hand
came through the hole and unlatched the window. A black figure
climbed over the sill into the sink, jumped quietly to the floor
and opened the back door. The team slipped in.
Though they had all studied the architect's plan, filed with the
registry when the house was built, they still used head-ed
penlights in case of owner-installed obstructions or even booby
traps. They began with the ground floor, moving from room to room
to confirm there were no sentries or ing figures, trip wires
or silent alarms.
After ten minutes the team leader was satisfied and with a nod of
his head led a single-file column of five up the narrow staircase
of what was evidently a very ordinary detached four-bedroom
family home. The two Americans, increasingly bewildered, remained
below. This was not the way they would have subdued a thoroughly
dangerous nest of terrorists. Such a house invasion back home
would have involved several magazines of ammunition by now.
Clearly, the Limeys were pretty weird.
Those below heard startled exclamations from above. These quickly
ceased. After ten more minutes of muttered instructions the team
leader uttered his first report. He did not use Internet or cell
phone-interceptible-but old-fashioned encrypted radio. "Target
subdued," he said softly. "Inhabitants four. Await sunrise."
Those who listened to him knew what would happen next. It had all
been preplanned and rehearsed.
The two Americans, both U.S. Navy SEALs, also reported in to
their embassy on the south side of the Thames in London.
The reason for the "hard" takeover of the building was simple.
Despite a week of covert surveillance, it was still possible,
bearing in mind the a of damage to the defenses of the
entire Western world that had come out of that harmless-looking
suburban house, that it might contain armed men. There might be
terrorists, fanatics, mercenaries hiding behind the innocent
faade. That was why the Regiment had been told there was no
alternative to a "worst case" operation.
But an hour later the team leader communicated again.
"You are not going to believe what we have found here."
In the very early morning of 3 April 2019, a telephone rang in a
modest bedroom under the eaves of the Special Forces Club in an
anonymous townhouse in Knightsbridge, a wealthy district of
LondonÕs West End. At the third ring the bedside light came on.
The er was awake and fully functioning-the outcome of a
lifetime of practice. He swung his feet to the floor and glanced
at the illuminated panel before putting the apparatus to his ear.
He also glanced at the clock beside the lamp. Four in the
morning. Did this woman never ?
"Yes, Prime Minister."
The person at the other end clearly had not been to bed at all.
"Adrian, sorry to wake you at this hour. Could you be with me at
nine? I have to greet the Americans. I suspect they will be on
the warpath and I would appreciate your assessment and advice.
They are due at ten."
Always the old-fashioned courtesy. She was giving an order, not
making a request. For friendship she would use his given name. He
would always call her by her title.
"Of course, Prime Minister."
There was nothing more to say, so the connection ended. Sir
Adrian Weston rose and went into the small but sufficient
bathroom to shower and shave. At half past four he went
downstairs, past the black-framed portraits of all the agents who
had gone into Nazi-occupied Europe so long ago and never come
back, nodded to the night watch behind the lobby desk and let
himself out. He knew a hotel on Sloane Street with an all-night
cafŽ.
Shortly before 9 a.m. on a bright autumn morning, 11 September
2001, a four-jet American airliner out of Boston for Los Angeles
designated American Airlines 11 swerved out of the sky over
Manhattan and slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade
Center. It had been hijacked in midair by five terrorists in the
service of the group al-Qaeda. The man at the controls was an
Egyptian. He was supported by four Saudis who, armed with
box-cutter knives, had subdued the cabin staff and hustled him
onto the flight deck.
Minutes later, another airliner, flying far too low, appeared
over New York. It was United Airlines 175, also out of Boston for
Los Angeles, also hijacked by five al-Qaeda terrorists.
America and, within moments, the entire world watched in
disbelief as what had been presumed a tragic accident revealed it
was nothing of the sort. The second Boeing 767 flew deliberately
into the South Tower of the Trade Center. Both skyscrapers
sustained terminal damage in the midsections. Aided by the fuel
from the full tanks of the airliners, savage fires erupted and
began to melt the steel girders that held the buildings rigid. A
minute before ten a.m., the South Tower collapsed into a ain
of red-hot rubble, followed by the North Tower half an hour
later.
At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 out of Washington's
Dulles International Airport, also bound for Los Angeles with
full tanks, dived into the Pentagon, on the Virginia side of the
Potomac. It had also been hijacked by five Arabs.
The fourth airliner, United Airlines 93, out of Newark for San
Francisco, again hijacked in midair, was recaptured by a
passenger revolt, but too late to save the aircraft, which, with
its fanatical hijacker still at the controls, dived into farmland
in Pennsylvania.
Before sundown that day, now known simply as 9/11, a fraction
under three thousand Americans and others were dead. They
included the crews and passengers of all four airliners, almost
all those in the World Trade Center's two skyscraper towers and
125 in the Pentagon. Plus the nineteen terrorists who committed
suicide. That single day left the United States not simply
shocked but traumatized. She still is.
When an American government is wounded that badly, it does two
things. It demands and exacts revenge, and it spends.
Over the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency and the
first four years of that of Barack Obama, the United States spent
a trillion dollars constructing the biggest, the most cumbersome,
the most duplicated and possibly the most inefficient national
security structure the world has ever seen.
If the nine inner U.S. intelligence agencies and the seven outer
agencies had been doing their jobs in 2001, 9/11 would never have
occurred. There were signs, hints, reports, tip-offs, indications
and oddities that were noted, reported, filed and ignored.
What followed 9/11 was an explosion of expenditure that is
literally breathtaking. Something had to be done, and be seen to
be done, by the great American public, so it was. A raft of new
agencies was created to duplicate and mirror the work of the
existing ones. Thousands of new skyscrapers sprang up, entire
cities of them, most owned and run by private sector-contracted
enterprises eager for the homless dollar harvest.
Government expenditure on the single pandemic word "security"
detonated like a nuke over Bikini Atoll, all uncomplainingly paid
for by the ever-trusting, ever-hopeful, ever-gullible American
taxpayer. The exercise generated an explosion of reports, on
paper and online, so vast that only about 10 percent of them have
ever been read. There simply is not the time or, despite the
massive payroll, the staff to begin to cope with the information.
And something else happened in those twelve years. The computer
and its archive, the database, became rulers of the world.
When the Englishman seeking an early breakfast off Sloane Street
was a young officer in the Paras, then in MI6, records were
created on paper and stored on paper. It took time, and the
storage of archives took space, but penetration, the copying or
removal and theft of secret archives-that is, espionage-was hard
and the quantity removable at any one time or from any one place
was modest.
During the Cold War, which supposedly ended with the Soviet
reformer Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, the great spies like Oleg
Penkovsky could abstract only as many documents as they could
carry about their person. Then the Minox camera and its product,
microfilm, enabled up to a hundred documents to be concealed in a
small canister. The microdot made copied documents even smaller
and more transportable. But the computer revolutionized the lot.
When defector and traitor Edward Snowden flew from Hawaii to
Moscow it is believed he carried over one and a half million
documents on a memory stick small enough to be inserted during a
border check into the human anus. "Back in the day," as the
veterans put it, a column of trucks would have been needed, and a
convoy moving through the gate tends to be noticeable.
So as the computer took over from the human, the archives
containing trillions of secrets came to be stored on databases.
As the complexities of this mysterious dimension called
"cyberspace" became more and more weird and increasingly
complicated, fewer and fewer human brains could understand how
they worked. Matching pace, crime also changed, gravitating from
shoplifting through financial embezzlement to today's daily
computer fraud, which enables more wealth to be stolen than ever
before in the history of finance. Thus the modern world has given
rise to the concept of computerized hidden wealth but also to the
computer hacker. The burglar of cyberspace.
But some hackers do not steal money; they steal secrets. Which is
why a harmless-looking suburban house in a provincial English
town was invaded in the night by an Anglo-American team of
Special Forces soldiers and its inhabitants detained. And why one
of those soldiers murmured into a radio mic: "You are not going
to believe what we have found here."
Three months before the raid, a team of American computer aces
working at the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland,
discovered what they also could not believe. The most secret
database in the United States, probably in the world, had
apparently been hacked.
Fort Meade, as the word "fort" implies, is technically an army
base. But it is a lot more than that. It is the home of the
fearsome National Security Agency, or NSA. Heavily shielded from
unwanted view by forests and forbidden access roads, it is the
size of a city. But instead of a mayor it has a four-star army
general as its commanding officer.
It is the home of that branch of all intelligence agencies known
as ELINT, or electronic intelligence. Inside its perimeter, rank
upon rank of computers eavesdrop on the world. ELINT intercepts,
it listens, it records, it stores. If something it intercepts is
dangerous, it warns.
Because not everyone speaks English, it translates from every
language, dialect and patois used on planet Earth. It encrypts
and decodes. It hoards the secrets of the United States and it
does this inside a range of supercomputers which house the most
clandestine databases in the country.
These databases are protected not by a few traps or pitfalls but
by firewalls so complicated that those who constructed them and
who monitor them on a daily basis were utterly convinced they
were impenetrable. Then one day these guardians of the American
cybersoul stared in disbelief at the evidence before them.
They checked and checked again. It could not be. It was not
possible. Finally, three of them were forced to seek an interview
with the general and destroy his day. Their principal database
had been hacked. In theory, the access codes were so opaque that
no one without them could enter the heartland of the
supercomputer. No one could get through the protective device
known simply as the "air gap." But someone had.
Worldwide, there are thousands of hacker attacks per day. The
vast bulk are attempts to steal money. There are endeavors to
penetrate the bank accounts of citizens who have deposited their
savings where they believed they would be safe. If the hacks are
successful, the swindler can pretend to be the account holder and
instruct the bank's computer to transfer assets to the thief's
account, many miles and often many countries away.
All banks, all financial institutions, now have to encircle their
clients' accounts with walls of protection, usually in the form
of codes of personal identification which the hacker cannot know
and without which the bank's computer will not agree to transfer
a penny. This is one of the prices the developed world now pays
for its utter dependence on computers. It is extremely tiresome
but better than impoverishment and is now an irreversible
characteristic of modern life.
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