Preview The Fox
ABOUT THE BOOK Most weapons do what you tell them. Most weapons you can control. But what if the most dangerous weapon in the world isn’t a smart missile or a stealth submarine or even an AI computer programme? What if it’s an eighteen-year-old boy with a blisteringly brilliant mind who can run rings around the most sophisticated security services across the globe, who can manipulate that weaponry and turn it against the superpowers themselves? How valuable would he be? And what wouldn’t you do to get hold of him? The Fox is a race-against-time thriller across continents to find and capture – or protect and save – an asset with the means to change the balance of world power. Whatever happens, he must not fall into the wrong hands. Because what follows after that is unthinkable … Contents Cover About the Book Title Page Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two List of Characters and Organizations About the Author Also by Frederick Forsyth Copyright THE FOX Frederick Forsyth With grateful thanks to my ace researcher Marcus Scriven, who traced so many hidden experts, and to Jamie Jackson, whose knowledge of all things military is awesome. And to those others who talked behind the hand on the basis of anonymity. Chapter 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 towards the target house. In most town and city centres 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, 2 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 towards their homes. They knew exactly where they were, having studied the streets and the target house in intimate detail for many hours. The pictures had been taken by cruising cars and overhead drones. Much enlarged 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 kerb. 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 US 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 practise 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 neighbour 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 disc 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-mounted night-vision goggles (NVGs) 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 sleeping 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 cellphone – 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 pre- planned and rehearsed. The two Americans, both US 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 amount of damage to the defences 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 façade. 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 London’s West End. At the third ring the bedside light came on. The sleeper 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 sleep? ‘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 café. Shortly before 9 a.m. on a bright autumn morning, 11 September 2001, a twin-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 mid-air by five Arabs in the service of terrorist 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 on to 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 mid-sections. 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 10 a.m. the South Tower collapsed into a mountain 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 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 mid-air, 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 3,000 Americans and others were dead. They included the crews and passengers of all four airliners, almost all those in the
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