Aurora....Changing the Face of World History... Review on Fourth Protocol, The - Frederick Forsyth

Plan Aurora, hatched in a remote dacha outside Moscow by a chess grandmaster is as simple as it sounds ..yet it is destined to change the face of World History forever. Initiated with relentless brilliance and skill, Aurora is a plan that in its madness and spine-chilling ingenuity breaches the Fourth Protocol and turns the fears that shaped it into a living nightmare. From a deceptively simple beginning, Forsyth goes on to gradually unleash the details of this plan designed to shatter the defenses of the West, and catapult Britain back into the Dark Ages. Forsyth’s portrayal of the cynical ruthlessness is guaranteed to shock the reader.

In 1968, the three major powers namely US, USSR and UK signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which consisted of four Protocols. With the passage of time, the first three became insignificant but the fourth gained importance. The Fourth Protocol bans the entry and usage of miniaturized Nuclear weapons, which have become a reality today. The atomic bomb, which destroyed Hiroshima, can now be constructed on a normal workbench with the right materials and is about the size of a cannon.

During the consecutive losses of the Labour Party of Britain against the Conservative for the past few decades …the Soviet take advantage of the growing restlessness in the Party to put in their own people and fill it with Communists until they now hold the power to take over the Party completely. The only problem is to shift the support of the masses from the Conservatives to the Labour Party. And to achieve this Plan Aurora was hatched.

A crack Soviet agent, placed under cover in a quiet English county town, begins to assemble a jigsaw of devastation ingenuously smuggled to him. The plan is simply foolproof and all he has to do is to create a Nuclear Bomb and detonate it a week before the elections and blame it on the recklessness of the American Nuclear Aircraft Facility placed there by the Conservative Party. Then begins a roller-coaster of treachery, counter-treachery and espionage as MI5 investigator John Preston, working blind against time and against the power games inside his own organization, leads an operation to prevent the act of murderous devastation aimed at tumbling Britain into revolution knowing wholly that failure would mean fatal and victory would yet humiliate Soviet and result in the Cold War once again. Basically, the face of World History would never be the same again bar a miracle. But, then again, miracles do occur…..