Firefox Down

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My thanks, especially on this occasion, to my wife, Jill, for her editing of the manuscript, and for bullying and cajoling me through the writing process! Thanks, too, to T. R. Jones, for acting as my technical adviser.

Acknowledgement must also be made to Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to quote from Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes.

The quotation from Fire and Ice by Robert Frost is reproduced by kind permission of Jonathan Cape and Holt, Rinehart & Winston, on behalf of the estate of Robert Frost, and comes from the collection Poetry edited by Edward Connery Latham.

One of the perils of writing a sequel, especially to a novel which I originally completed early in 1975, is the very passage of time. The present novel takes tip the story of Mitchell Gant and the MiG-31 at precisely the point where its predecessor left them. One of the principal characters of the earlier novel was Yuri Andropov, then Chairman of the Soviet intelligence service and secret police, the KGB. Events have overtaken me, since that gentleman is now, following the demise of Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the Soviet Union. For the sake of continuity, I have had to keep him in his former job. However, I shall always think of him, in company, no doubt, with millions of Soviet citizens, as the head of the most powerful and repressive secret police force the modern world has ever experienced.

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