The report went on for several more paragraphs on page one, and a line in italics at the bottom said it was continued on page three.
Putin stabbed a finger at the text. “Look at this dermo, this shit. It is even implicating me in this rubbish. I had nothing to do with it. My reputation is being shredded, and so is the reputation of the Rodina, the Motherland.”
Putin picked up the sheet of paper, screwed it into a large ball, and threw it at Severinov; it hit him squarely in the chest before falling to the floor.
“As punishment for your incompetence, I have decided to remove another portion of the equity you hold in those three Siberian oil and gas fields,” Putin said. “Your stake will come down by another third. It will be transferred from Besoi Energy to either Rosneft or Gazprom. I don’t know which yet. We will decide.”
Severinov felt his stomach sink to the floor and he felt suddenly dizzy. Surely this wasn’t happening? Rosneft and Gazprom were the two largest state-owned oil and gas companies. Losing another third of his revenues to them would put his business under so much financial pressure that it would be at high risk of collapsing. He could not see how he could possibly meet his banking covenants and his monthly repayments if that cash flow disappeared.
And Putin didn’t seem to have been informed about Balagula’s death in Leipzig. He certainly hadn’t mentioned it. Given that Balagula had carried out various special freelance operations for the president’s office, it was likely to result in another backlash once Putin learned of it.
“Finally,” Putin said, “there are a couple of other orders I want you to carry out in the near future in which I do not want the Motherland implicated. They will need to be done at arm’s length and not involve Moscow Center.” He fixed his gaze on Severinov from beneath lowered eyebrows.
Severinov nodded. “I understand. What are those?” he asked, his voice cracking.
The president briefly detailed the first item that he had in mind, then paused, his eyes still focused unblinkingly on Severinov.
“I think that is doable,” Severinov said. “Yes, I am certain I can deliver that.”
“Good. You will receive further instructions in due course,” Putin said. “And second, if you want to keep the final third of your equity, you still need to deliver on my instructions regarding Johnson. I want that to be done.”
Putin slammed his fist down on the table, his first sign of temper, and turned his gaze back to Severinov, then pointed at the door. “Now. Poshël ty.” Piss off.
Severinov was too stunned to reply. He simply turned and walked out of the room.
Other books in the series and reader updates
If you enjoyed this book, I would like to keep in touch. This is not always easy, as I usually only publish a couple of books a year and there are many authors and books out there. So the best way is for you to be on my Readers Group email list. I can then send you updates on the next book, plus occasional special offers. There’s no spam and you can unsubscribe at any time.
If you would like to join my Readers Group and receive the email updates, I will send you, FREE of charge, the ebook version of another Joe Johnson thriller, The Afghan, which is a prequel to the series and normally sells at $2.99/£2.99 (paperback $9.99/£9.99).
The Afghan is a thriller set in 1988 when Johnson was still in the CIA. Most of the action takes place in Afghanistan, then occupied by the Soviet Union, and in Washington, DC. Some of the characters and story lines that emerge in the other books have their roots in this period. I think you will enjoy it!
The Afghan can be downloaded FREE from the following link:
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Have you read the other thrillers in the Joe Johnson series?
Prequel: The Afghan
1.The Last Nazi
2. The Old Bridge
3. Bandit Country
4. Stalin’s Final Sting
5. The Nazi’s Son
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Thanks and acknowledgements
Thank you to everyone who reads my books. You are the reason I began to write in the first place, and I hope I can provide you with entertainment and interest for a long time into the future.
Every time I get an encouraging email from a reader, or a positive comment on my Facebook page, or a nice review on Amazon, it spurs me on to press ahead with my research and writing for the next book. So keep them coming!
Specifically with regard to The Nazi’s Son, there are several people who have helped me during the long process of research, writing, and editing.
I have two editors who consistently provide helpful advice, food for thought, great ideas, and constructive criticism, and between them have enabled me to considerably improve the initial draft. Katrina Diaz Arnold, owner of Refine Editing, again gave me a lot of valuable feedback at the structural and line levels, and Jon Ford, as ever, helped me to maintain the authenticity of the story in many areas through his great eye for detail. I would like to thank both of them—the responsibility for any remaining mistakes lies solely with me.
As always, my brother, Adrian Turpin, was a very helpful reader of my early drafts and highlighted areas where I need to improve. Others, such as Martin Scales, Valeriya Salt, and Warren Smith, have done likewise. The small but dedicated team in my Advance Readers group went through the final version prior to proofreading and also highlighted a number of issues that required changes and improvements—a big thank-you to them all.
I would also like to thank the team at Damonza for what I think is a great cover design.
Author’s note
In 1989, I was right at the start of my career in journalism and was fascinated by the newspaper and TV coverage of events in Eastern Europe as, one by one, the communist regimes across that region were toppled in a series of revolutions, each feeding off the others—Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania.
The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev accepted during 1989 that the USSR could not continue to control its satellite states, and the Berlin Wall finally fell in November of that year following demonstrations in Leipzig and Berlin.
These revolutions mainly came about as the result of widespread and persistent demonstrations, but they were almost all peaceful in nature. Despite the presence of military and riot police, the rumors of planned massacres never turned into reality. There was l
ittle violence, apart from in Romania. Indeed, the move to overthrow the communist regime in Czechoslovakia was dubbed the Velvet Revolution for that reason.
A few months later, in 1990, I visited Berlin and Prague. The inhabitants of both cities were still partying like there was no tomorrow. Beer cost the equivalent of ten pence (or eight US cents) a pint, the bars and clubs were full, and everyone seemed to be permanently drunk or high on euphoria.
The capitalists had moved in, and along Unter den Linden and Pariser Platz in Berlin, hawkers were selling pieces of concrete from the wall to souvenir hunters. Not that you needed to buy a piece—large chunks of the wall were still standing, and it was possible to simply go and remove a piece of concrete to take home, complete with a colored piece of graffiti visible, as I did.
I have been back to Berlin a few times since then, but the atmosphere has never been as vibrant and joyful as it was in 1990.
It was hard to believe then that a short period earlier, the street scenes in both Berlin and Prague were so very different. Berlin was divided, with a hard-line Soviet-controlled regime still in place in the eastern half of the city, and security was enforced with an iron fist. Protesters and defectors were dealt with summarily.
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. For those of you who are interested enough in the history to read more, I have listed a good selection of the sources I drew on in the Research and Bibliography section that follows this one.
Finally, a point that I include in all my author’s notes—just in case readers want to know! As with all the books in this series, because my protagonist, Joe Johnson, is from the United States, and most scenes are from his point of view, it seemed to make sense to try to use American spellings and terminology wherever possible, rather than my native British. If I have missed some or could have done this better, please email and let me know. I will aim to correct them.
Research and bibliography
The research process for The Nazi’s Son was a fairly lengthy one and proved fascinating. I know that many of my readers like to check out some of the sources I have drawn on and do their own background reading into the factual backdrops I use for my fictional stories, so here is just a flavor of some of the main websites, books, and articles that proved useful to me.
To get an overview of the fall of the Soviet empire and the domino-style collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, there is no better starting point than the Pulitzer Prize–winning book by David Remnick entitled Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. It is a combination of history and modern journalism by a writer who was a Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. You can find it on Amazon HERE.
Another good overview can be found in The Fall of the GDR: Germany’s Road to Unity, by David Childs, available on Amazon HERE.
A thorough and interesting review of Childs’s book can be found here: https://archives.history.ac.uk/history-in-focus/cold/reviews/palmowski.html
At the time of the 1989 revolutions, Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in East Germany, based in Dresden. There has been speculation that the spectacle of the USSR’s empire crumbling has been one factor that has driven his current hard-line stance toward former Soviet countries. This includes the Ukraine, where during 2014 Russia took military action to annex the Crimea. The Crimea crisis features in The Nazi’s Son and the Putin theory is featured in The Guardian newspaper here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/01/putin-power-east-germany-russia-kgb-dresden
The strong links between the Stasi, the KGB, and various terrorist groups operating out of East Berlin during the 1970s and 1980s is a theme that is closely examined in a number of articles that are easily found online.
One of these is in The Washington Post, headlined “East Germany’s Dirty Secret.” The article includes an interview with an unnamed former Stasi agent who describes the way in which the Stasi and the KGB protected and assisted a variety of international terrorist organizations. You can find it at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/10/14/east-germanys-dirty-secret/09375b6f-2ae1-4173-a0dc-77a9c276aa4b/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4b3fb186aaf1
This feature tells how the head of the Stasi until 1986, Markus Wolf, had responsibility for the department that was most closely connected with Arab terrorism. The unnamed agent confirms how the Stasi and the KGB both knew that La Belle discotheque was to be bombed by the Libyan terrorists and did nothing to prevent it from happening.
A book that also describes this scenario is Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police, by John O. Koehler, which can be found HERE.
A good review of Koehler’s book by Frank Bourgholtzer, entitled “The Agony and the Ex-Stasi,” can be found in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2968/055004017
An insight into how the Soviet Union effectively acted as a state sponsor of terro
rism during that period can be found in The Atlantic here: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/how-the-soviet-union-transformed-terrorism/250433/
And The Times has reported how the Stasi acted as a proxy consultant, facilitator, and provider of weapons and training for the KGB, delivering on the anti-American and anti-Western projects that the Kremlin wanted to implement during the Cold War period. These might have included the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988. See: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lockerbie-reveals-stasi-s-history-of-exporting-terror-6rwvmq5fh
The bombing of La Belle itself is detailed in many news articles available online. For example, The New York Times coverage can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/06/world/2-killed-155-hurt-in-bomb-explosion-at-club-in-berlin.html
There is a YouTube video that shows footage from the time, including all the damage outside the nightclub. Ignore the propaganda text below the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpNcZVepLKw
And the BBC’s website carried a flashback in 2001: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1653848.stm
There is a short summary of the La Belle bombing and its aftermath on the Wikipedia website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_West_Berlin_discotheque_bombing
One issue that is not in doubt is that the attack on La Belle led directly to President Ronald Reagan ordering the US bombing of Libya on April 15, 1986. This strike, involving F-111 strike aircraft based in the United Kingdom, hit a Tripoli airfield, an army barracks in Tripoli, and a frogman training center. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had a residence at the barracks but managed to escape after receiving advance warning.
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