Countdown

A high-tension espionage thriller as gripping as Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, or Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October. A Soviet Agent is found dead inside an Israeli nuclear weapons stockpile so secret the United States doesn't know it exists. A Pershing missile that is guarded around the clock is hijacked from a maximum-security installation at a West German Air Force Base. The U.S.S. Indianapolis, a submarine on training maneuvers off the coast of Italy, suddenly ceases transmitting -- then vanishes without a trace. Two men are behind this deadly wave of terror. Colonel Valentin Baranov, the new head of the KGB, a man intent on destroying glasnost and rekindling the Cold War. And Arkady Kurshin, the ruthless assassin who is Baranov's finest weapon. To stop them, the CIA must turn to maverick agent Kirk McGarvey, a trained killer as deadly as Kurshin. Driven by a vendetta against Baranov, McGarvey stalks Kurshin across the face of Europe, determined to find him before the clock runs out on an act of terrorism so devastating it could alter the balance of world power forever. But a mole inside the Agency is monitoring McGarvery's every move. And the KGB has captured the woman McGavery has come to love...

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.