The Nazi's Son: A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 5

by Andrew Turpin

Overview

A deadly legacy of the Cold War . . .A mysterious Nazi source. A desperate escape bid through northern Russia. And life-threatening secrets being leaked by a mole at the heart of Western intelligence.

In the fifth book of this thriller series, ex-CIA war crimes investigator Joe Johnson heads to Berlin to assist with the supposedly straightforward debriefing of a Russian defector. The defector knows the background to the terrorist bombing of the city's famous La Belle nightclub in the 1980s as well as the identity of a Russian agent who is funneling American and British military secrets to Moscow.

But things go wrong. Johnson is pursued by his nemesis, the vengeful Russian oligarch Yuri Severinov. And subsequent events turn out to be vastly more complex and terrifying than he expected.

Why are ex-KGB and Stasi intelligence chiefs so anxious to prevent Johnson from getting to the heart of what really happened? And what are the Kremlin connections that suck him into a life-or-death chase in St. Petersburg?

Johnson and his ex-MI6 colleague Jayne Robinson find themselves battling against the odds to dig out truths that have been concealed for almost thirty years.

At the same time, the pair find themselves inexorably drawn toward resuming the brief love affair they once had in Islamabad.

The key to solving the conundrum around the Berlin bombing comes from an unlikely direction, and the identity of the Russian mole who is wreaking havoc in the West turns out to be equally surprising.

The story works its way to a climax in London and Leipzig as Johnson battles against overwhelming odds to outwit the forces arrayed against him.

The Nazi's Son is a thriller with many unexpected twists that will keep the reader guessing right to the end.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788750127
Publisher:	Write Direction Publishing
Publication date:	11/06/2019
Series:	Joe Johnson Thriller , #5
Pages:	434
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.97(d)

Table of Contents

Berlin found itself at the center of a perfect storm in the 1980s. A raft of terrorist organizations, including the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Red Army Faction, were highly active across Europe at that time, striking at any number of American, Israeli, and other Western targets.

Many of them found a natural home in Berlin, partly because there were plenty of American targets available in the western part of the city, but also because the East German communist regime—the German Democratic Republic—often facilitated or provided them with the shelter, assistance, training, weapons, and equipment they needed.

The GDR leader, Erich Honecker, allowed many of the terrorist groups to use East Berlin as a base. Several of the Arab embassies there were in effect permitted to act as weapons and explosives storage centers for the terrorists.

Most of this facilitating work was coordinated by the Stasi, the East German security service.

Notorious terrorists such as Venezuelan Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, operated from East Berlin and orchestrated many deadly bombings across Western Europe. They included, in August 1983, an attack on the French consulate in West Berlin, which killed one person and injured twenty-three.

The Red Army Faction—also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang after two of their key operators, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof—was a terrorist group with a far-left political agenda that carried out a long series of bombings, shootings, and kidnappings in West Germany from their base in East Berlin. Most of the attacks were during the 1970s and 1980s but continued into the ’90s.

In 1986, it was the turn of the Libyans. The bombing of the La Belle disco, described in The Nazi’s Son, was carried out by a gang that operated from East Berlin. Five people were later convicted for the attack. Of these, Yasser Mohammed Chreidi held a job for the Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin, and Musbah Abdulghasem Eter was an employee at the Libyan embassy in East Berlin.

Of course, given the control that the USSR had during that period over its satellite states in Eastern Europe, the KGB and the Kremlin would have been fully aware of what was going on. Indeed, it went a lot further than that—they effectively sponsored the wave of terrorism that flowed across the continent at that time. The Soviets were the puppet masters. In the sense that the various terrorist groups all had an anti-American, pro-Palestinian, far-left agenda, their interests were aligned with Moscow, which maximized the value it got from that situation. The terrorists were an invaluable weapon for the Kremlin as the Cold War unfolded.

However, no Stasi or KGB officers were ever prosecuted over the La Belle bombing—although many Stasi employees were prosecuted for other crimes after German reunification in 1990.

Given all this, it is hardly surprising that the Cold War period in Berlin has yielded a rich vein of material and ideas for fiction writers and filmmakers over the years. It was not just about Russia and the United States—many other players became involved, adding multiple layers of complexity to the political and military drama that played out between the West and the communist East.

So this is the historical backdrop against which The Nazi’s Son is set.

Editorial Reviews

AMAZON REVIEWERS ON THE JOE JOHNSON SERIES:

★★★★★ “Every bit a match for Lee Child and Tom Clancy.”

★★★★★ “A great read, has more twists than a country road.”

★★★★★ “Right up there with Daniel Silva/Gabriel Allon.”

★★★★★ “More than a touch of Forsyth.”

★★★★★ “Far better than Ludlum.”

★★★★★ “If you enjoy the work of Vince Flynn and Nelson DeMille, you’ll be happy to discover Andrew Turpin.”

★★★★★ “He is right up with the likes of Clancy, Follett, and La Plante.”

From the Publisher