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GRIPPING NOVELS BY

FREDERICK FORSYTH

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL

THE ODESSA FILE

THE DOGS OF WAR

THE DEVIL’S ALTERNATIVE

NO COMEBACKS

THE FOURTH PROTOCOL

THE NEGOTIATOR

THE DECEIVER

THE FIST OF GOD

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finds the master in world-class form. … [It’s]

masterful blend of fact and fiction will have fans

wondering if they are turning the pages of a novel or

the morning paper.”

—People

Summer 1999. Russia stands on the threshold of anarchy. An interim president sits powerless in Moscow as his nation is wracked by famine and inflation, crime and corruption, and seething hordes of the unemployed roam the streets. For them, only one man holds out hope. The striking voice of Igor Komarov, waiting in the wings for the presidential election of January 2000, rings out over the airwaves, mesmerizing the masses with the promise of law, order, and prosperity—and the return to glory of their once great land.

Then a document falls into the hands of British Intelligence. Quickly dubbed the Black Manifesto, it outlines Komarov’s secret plan for a regime as autocratic and evil as Hitler’s Third Reich. Officially the West can do nothing, but in secret a group of elder statesmen sends the only person who can expose the truth about Komarov into the heart of the inferno. Ex-CIA agent Jason Monk has a dual mission: to stop Komarov, whatever it takes, and to prepare the way for an icon worthy of the Russian people. But to do this, Monk must
stay alive—
and the forces allied against him are ruthless, the time frighteningly short. …

Only Frederick Forsyth, the unparalleled master of the novel of international intrigue, could create this riveting thriller, as timely and unsettling as tomorrow’s headlines.

BOOKS BY FREDERICK FORSYTH

The Biafra Story

The Day of the Jackal

The Odessa File

The Dogs of War

The Shepherd

The Devil’s Alternative

No Comebacks

The Fourth Protocol

The Negotiator

The Deceiver

The Fist of God

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FREDERICK

FORSYTH

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BANTAM BOOKS

NEW YORK TORONTO LONDON SYDNEY AUCKLAND

This edition contains the complete text

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Bantam hardcover edition published November 1996

Bantam export edition /JuIy 1997

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Copyright © 1996 by Bantam Books.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-23434

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PART 1

CHAPTER 1

IT WAS THE SUMMER WHEN THE PRICE OF A SMALL LOAF OF
bread topped a million rubles.

It was the summer of the third consecutive year of wheat crop failures and the second of hyperinflation.

It was the summer when in the back alleys of the faraway provincial towns the first Russians began dying of malnutrition.

It was the summer when the president collapsed in his limousine too far from help to be saved, and an old office cleaner stole a document.

After that nothing would ever be the same.

It was the summer of 1999.

¯

IT was hot that afternoon, oppressively hot, and it took several blasts on the horn before the gatekeeper scurried from his hut to haul open the great timber doors of the Cabinet building.

The presidential bodyguard dropped his window to call to the man to shape up as the long black Mercedes 600 eased under the arch and out into Staraya Ploshad. The wretched gatekeeper threw what he hoped passed for a salute as the second car, a Russian Chaika with four more bodyguards, followed the limousine. Then they were gone.

In the back of the Mercedes President Cherkassov sat alone, slumped in thought. In the front were his militia driver and the personal bodyguard assigned to him from the Alpha Group.

As the last drab outskirts of Moscow gave way to the fields and trees of the open countryside, the mood of the president of Russia was one of profound gloom, as well it might be. He had been three years in the office he had won after stepping in to replace the ailing Boris Yeltsin, and as he watched his country crashing into destitution, they had been the three most miserable years of his life.

Back in the winter of 1995 when he had been the prime minister, appointed by Yeltsin himself as a “technocrat” premier to lick the economy into shape, the Russian people had gone to the polls to elect a new Parliament, or Duma.

The Duma elections were important but not vital. In the preceding years more and more power had passed from the Parliament to the presidency, most of this process the work of Boris Yeltsin. By the winter of 1995 the big Siberian, who four years earlier had straddled a tank in the attempted coup of August 1991, earned the admiration of not only Russia but also the West as the great fighter for democracy, and seized the presidency for himself, had become a broken reed.

Recovering from a second heart attack in three months, puffing and bloated by medications, he watched the parliamentary elections from a clinic in the Sparrow Hills, formerly the Lenin Hills, northeast of Moscow, and saw his own political protégés hammered into third place among the delegates. That this was not as crucial as it might have been in a western democracy was largely due to the fact that because of Yeltsin, the great majority of actual power lay in the hands of the president himself. Like the United States, Russia had an executive presidency, but unlike the United States, the web of checks and balances that the Congress can impose upon the White House did not exist. Yeltsin could in effect rule by decree, and did.

But the parliamentary elections did at least show which way the wind was blowing and give an indication of the trend for the much more important presidential elections slated for June 1996.

The new force on the political horizon in the winter of 1995 was, ironically enough, the Communists. After seventy years of Communist tyranny, five years of Gorbachev reforms, and five years of Yeltsin, the Russian people began to look back with nostalgia to the old days.

The Communists, under their leader Gennadi Zyuganov painted a rosy picture of the way things used to be guaranteed jobs assured salaries affordable food and law and order. No mention was made of the despotism of the KGB the Gulag archipelago of slave labor camps the suppression of all freedom of movement and expression.

The Russian voters were already in a state of profound disillusion with the two once-heralded saviors capitalism and democracy. The second word was uttered with contempt. For many Russians looking around at the all-embracing corruption and pandemic crime it had all been a big lie. When the parliamentary votes were counted, the crypto-Communists had the biggest single bloc of deputies in the Duma and the right to appoint the speaker.

At the other extreme were their apparently diametric opposites, the neo-Fascists of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leading the ironically named Liberal Democratic Party. In the 1991 elections this crude demagogue with his taste for bizarre behavior and scatological expressions had done amazingly well, but his star was falling. Nevertheless it had not fallen enough to rob him of the second largest bloc of deputies.

In the middle were the political center parties, clinging to the economic and social reforms they had introduced. They came in third.

But the real effect of those elections was to prepare the ground for the presidential race of 1996. There had been forty-three separate parties contesting the Duma elections and most of the leaders of the main parties realized that they would be best served by a program of coalescence.

Before the summer the crypto-Communists allied with their natural friends, the Agrarian or Peasants’ Party, to form the Socialist Union, a clever title inasmuch as it employed two of the initials of the old USSR. The leader remained Zyuganov.

In the ultra-right-wing moves for unification were also afoot, but were fiercely resisted by Zhirinovsky. Vlad the Mad reckoned he could win the presidency without help from the other right-wing factions.

Russian presidential elections, like the French, are held in two parts. In the first round all candidates compete against one another. Only those candidates coming in first and second qualify for the runoff vote of the second round. Coming in third is no use. Zhirinovsky came in third. The smarter political thinkers on the extreme right were furious with him.

The dozen parties of the center united, more or less, into the Democratic Alliance, with the key question throughout the spring of 1996 whether Boris Yeltsin would be fit enough to stand for, and win, the presidency again.

His downfall would later be ascribed by historians to a single word—Chechnya.

Exasperated to the breaking point twelve months earlier, Yeltsin had launched the full might of the Russian army and air force against a small, warlike mountain tribe whose self-appointed leader was insisting on complete independence from Moscow. There was nothing new about trouble from the Chechens—their resistance went back to the days of the czars and beyond. They had somehow survived pogroms launched against them by several czars, and by the cruelest tyrant of them all, Josef Stalin. Somehow they had survived the repeated devastation of their tiny homeland, the deportations and genocide, and continued to fight back.

Launching the full might of the Russian armed forces against the Chechens was an impetuous decision that led not to a quick and glorious victory but to the utter destruction—on camera and in glorious Technicolor—of the Chechen capital of Grozny and to the endless train of Russian soldiers in body bags coming back from the campaign.

With their capital reduced to rubble, but still armed to the teeth with weapons largely sold to them by corrupt Russian generals, the Chechens took to the hills they know so well and refused to be flushed out. The same Russian army that had met its inglorious Vietnam in attempting to invade and hold Afghanistan had now created a second one in the wild foothills of the Caucasus Range.

If Boris Yeltsin had launched his Chechen campaign to prove he was a strong man in the traditional Russian mold it became a gesture that had failed. All through 1995 he lusted for his final victory and always it eluded him. As they saw their young sons coming back from the Caucasus in sacks, the Russian people turned viciously anti-Chechen. They also turned against the man who could not deliver them a victory.