2024. The USSR reigns supreme and the USA is in decline. Europe is in thrall to the revitalised Soviet Union, and China is now the world’s second power. Shahzoda Aleksandrovna Eshonto’rayeva, half-Russian, half-Uzbek, and daughter of a prominent member of the Politburo, had been living the life she always dreamed of, filled with shopping in Louis Vuitton and treading red carpets in San Tropez and Nice. But then everything changed.
Somehow, and she wasn’t quite sure how, she found herself signed up to the KGB and promoted to the rank of Major. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, she now found herself plucked from her cosy desk, where she’d been soullessly monitoring mindless and generally inane pseudo-intellectual telephone conversations, and despatched to London to track down a traitor who was in possession of something that threatened both her father and herself, before then finding herself in Harare trying to solve the mystery of a murdered girl. But not just any murdered girl. Of course not. That would have been too easy. This girl had been the mistress of the President, and was also the daughter of one of his ministers. She’d also been having an affair with a Red Army Captain. It didn’t help that there seemed to be a conspiracy underlying it all, involving almost every aspect of the Soviet military and diplomatic force in Zimbabwe.
Shahzoda somehow survives both missions, only to find out that a bigger game is in play, one that places her in the greatest danger she’s ever faced. And all played out on an island in the frozen wastes of the Bering Strait, only 2.4 miles away from the great enemy, the USA.
‘I trust your father, so I’m going to trust you, Major.’ These were President Bere’s last words to me. Luckily, he ended the call at that point, because I had no idea what to say to that. Only a lunatic would trust my father. Maybe that was the point? Or, maybe, it was simply a threat.
‘You’re the rotting heart of our state, Marshal. You, the American collaborator,’ I shouted at him, more angry than I could ever remember being.