Excerpt: ' Stephen Lodge reported back to Sir Geoffrey Cheeseman's office soon after he landed from Saigon. He was angry. "When did we start taking jobs from commercial companies!?" Stephen shouted at him. "Always," cried Sir Geoffrey. "We do what the Ministry tells us to do." "But this was for purely commercial reasons. A company putting profit before the environment!" "What's so new about that?" swore Sir Geoffrey. "It's not what we do. This is my ninth job for you and all the others have been military!" "Don't be so naive," Sir Geoffrey told him. "There's good commercial reasoning behind all our assignments! How the hell do you think we get paid?" "By little fat men in the House, who line their own pockets by every lobbyist that comes near them!" Stephen spat the words out. "And those same little fat men are our lords and masters, and we do what they tell us!" Sir Geoffrey had gone red in the face. "That's our job and we obey the orders we are given!" Sir Geoffrey shouted. "And besides, I couldn't give a toss about the biofuel." Stephen had told him the story. "That's not why I sent you!" "Then why did you send me?" Stephen's voice was raised. "Regardless of that, Con Trai T?t was not a military target, and we only do military targets!" "No," said Sir Geoffrey, suddenly calming down but still with steel in his voice, "he was not a military target, He was worse than a military target." '
Blurb:
The KGB seek revenge for the death of an agent in Saigon, Vietnam. They know who is responsible and pursue Lieutenant Stephen Lodge RN to the UK.
Following a personal tragedy, Stephen goes AWOL from the navy and hides away in a small Dorset village, but the KGB and his employers track him down.
Events take a turn for the worse in the village, but the Russians fail in their first attempt to assassinate Lt Lodge. However, one agent returns months later on a more personal revenge mission to finish the job.
Author's comment:
At the suggestion of some readers of the early individual editions, this volume combines the first two books from the Lodge Looks Back series. Accepting that the two stories are intrinsically linked, the author, K.S.Ford, has agreed to merge them together into a more satisfactory single read, but not to replace the two individual books nor place this single volume in the series.
