This is a gripping debut thriller by journalist David Shirreff. The Soviet empire is crumbling - a plight made worse by its efforts to match President Ronald Reagan's multi-billion-dollar Star Wars programme. What better - and cheaper - response can there be than to smuggle a compact nuclear warhead into the heart of every metropolis in the Western alliance? Moscow's top-secret mission is run by a bunch of patriotic, but fallible, former cosmonauts. Only by chance do Western agents get wind of it, with a predictably flat-footed response. And only one man, William Pike, publisher of a magazine...