A spy out in the lukewarm

FREDDIE FORSYTH'S new thriller is set in the Russia of 1999. That summer in Moscow "the price of a small loaf of bread topped a million roubles". The country is suffering hyper inflation and on the verge of economic and social collapse.

Yeltsin is dead; the communist revival of recent years has fizzled out and the middle ground reformers are at sixes and sevens. The Chechens, still smarting under the destruction of their capital, Grozny, now form the largest mafia block west of the Urals and lead a growing number of ethnic minorities who want out of the Russian Federation.

There is nothing to stop Igor Komarov, leader of the right wing UPF Party, from sweeping the elections set for New Year's Day. He has projected himself as the new "Icon", who will reform the currency, curb crime and, with his election as president, restore Mother Russia to her former glory.

He seems unstoppable until a secret document, the Black Manifesto, is stolen from his desk, which leaves the authorities in the West pale when they read it. It is a blueprint for a Nazi style revolution which makes Ivan the Terrible seem like a choirboy. When in power, Kamorov plans to reopen the gulags, crush all opposition parties, suppress the news media and, in a new holocaust, exterminate ethnic minorities.

Officially, the NATO powers cannot interfere, but there is enough of the old guard still around who are determined that history will not be repeated: people such as Henry the K., Margaret Thatcher ("This is no time to be wobbly, boys!"), a sprinkling of international Jewish bankers, and Sir Nigel Irvine, retired Chief of British Secret Intelligence, who divides his time between pruning his roses, fishing in Scotland and playing the international spook.

At a secret barbecue cook out in the Rocky Mountains, this group conspires to foil Komorov's election through an alliance between the Russian Orthodox Church, the middle ground politicians, and a mad, Rasputin style monk who has begun a crusade throughout Russia for the restoration of the monarchy.

They select Jason Monk, one of the finest agent runners the CIA ever had, as their instrument. He is lured out of retirement and takes the assignment to settle an old score with his long term enemy, Kamorov's chief executioner and henchman, Col Anatoli Grishin.

Grishin had tortured and killed fourteen of Monk's best KGB recruits, who were betrayed by the CIA's Aldrich Ames in the espionage scandal of the century (all because he wanted a Jaguar and a high lifestyle).

While the plot is set in the future, most of the action takes place in the last years of the Cold War. Forsyth is at his best when showing off his detailed research, describing the nitty gritty workings of the rival secret services, the tortures inflicted on victims in the dungeons of the notorious Lefortovo Prison, or the ridiculous "drop systems" used by spooks to leave and pick up messages.

It is a nostalgic recall of the old days when the great spy game was run by gentlemen rather than bureaucrats. However, the pace is too slow; the only real suspense is towards the end when all hell breaks loose on New Year's Eve as Grishin's Black Guards clash with the old Russian military right under the walls of the Kremlin.

Icon is a brave attempt to inject new life into an old genre, but without the Iron Curtain and the clash of the superpowers, it would seem that the Russian spy thriller is like old style Communism: down the tubes.