There’s a strong sense of déjà vu about the early parts of this novel.

Like his previous novels Avenger and The Afghan it is about Islamic terrorism. The focus is very American, with scores of pages giving a factual account of the mushrooming of US security and intelligence forces after 9/11, including J-SOC (Joint Special Operations Command – ‘a component command of the United States Special Operations Command, USSOCOM’) and TOSA (Technical Operations Support Activity) the agency which will end up running ‘the Tracker’.

Like the previous books the protagonists don’t really have ‘characters’, they have CVs and functions, more like the avatars in a computer game than characters in a traditional ‘novel’. As in Forsyth’s most recent books, they barely even have names but are more commonly referred to by their roles: thus ‘the Preacher’ is delivering blood-thirsty sermons on the internet instructing young Muslims to carry out personal attacks on individuals inside the Great Satan, and this is leading to a wave of fanatical young men stabbing or shooting US senators and other VIPs.

When one of these fanatics shoots dead the retired general father of lifelong US Marine Christopher ‘Kit’ Carson, a fluent Arab speaker who has seen action in Afghanistan and the Gulf – it becomes ‘personal’ (p.99). (As in a thousand action movie trailers, the character actually says that phrase.) Carson morphs into The Tracker and that’s how he’s referred to by everyone he subsequently encounters and the narrator for the rest of the book.

Not only are the themes and many of the organisations and the character ‘types’ repeated from previous novels, but so are some of the scenes. For example, this is the third novel where Forsyth references the massacre at Qala-i-Jangi fortress in Afghanistan in 2001, picking out the death of the first American casualty in Afghanistan, Johnny Spann, who was beaten to death by Taliban prisoners.

There is yet another reference to the battle of Shah-i-Kot, where three Chinook helicopters full of special forces were attacked by Taliban fighters and, when a SEAL fell out of one as it did emergency evasion manoeuvres, the others went back overland to rescue him, leading to a prolonged firefight with the baddies. Forsyth places the protagonist of this book, Carson, at the heart of this very battle, where he saves the life of a fellow American who later rises to power in one of the countless security services and – very conveniently – helps Carson get the job to tracking down The Preacher.

The repetitions continue: late in the book there is a page devoted to the method of East German security chief Markus Wolf, who dispatched Adonis-like young men to seduce the ageing spinsters who worked as personal secretaries to numerous West German politicians, thus extracting priceless intel over decades (p.279). This is historical fact. Forsyth uses it as a roundabout introduction to an elderly (aged 75) lady who works as the tea lady at a hostage negotiating firm, but who also happens to be an agent of MI5 and reports back everything she hears of the hostage negotiations (see below). But what strikes this reader is that Forsyth included the same page-length explanation of Wolf’s technique in his previous novel, The Cobra (where a cocaine cartel’s daughter was seduced by just such a good-looking man, who was an agent leading her on).

Similarly, mention of the SAS prompts Forsyth to retell the story of how his heroes ‘took out’ the West Side Boyz in Sierra Leone, in Operation Barras, August 2000 (p.338) – an incident which is mentioned in several of his previous novels. Elsewhere Forsyth gives a couple of pages explanation of the hundi method of money transfer, by which terrorists can avoid using banks (p.309) – also a repeat from previous work.

So throughout the novel the reader stumbles on passages which are strongly reminiscent of, or plain copies from, previous novels.

The truth about Islam

A large example is the scene where – as part of his long and minutely-described military career in Egypt learning Arabic – Carson has several conversations with a peaceable Koranic scholar, who explains how unIslamic Islamic terrorists are, in the way they take small quotes from the Koran or hadith out of context and distort them for their hate-filled purposes. This repeats the scenes in the previous two Islamic novels where Koranic scholars have delivered ‘Author’s Messages’ about how the Koran specifically bans the murder of civilians, the murder of women or children, the taking of hostages etc.

I dare say the teaching is correct, it’s just a) the naivety of dumping it into the book like a piece of newspaper editorial, as if b) Forsyth’s page or two asserting that Islamic terrorists are plain wrong about their own religion will have any impact on any real life terrorists and c) the fact that the same message has recurred in all the recent predecessor books.

Critics could call it laziness or repetitiveness – using more or less the same plot, on the same subject, incorporating many of the same incidents and the same them-and-us, black-and-white Daily Mail point of view. But I see Forsyth’s ‘novels’ as being so devoid of character, so lacking in suspense and – towards the end of each one – so lacking in plausibility, that they become almost avant-garde.

They are like the shiny metal surface of one of his beloved fighter planes. Smoothly tooled and assembled from identikit parts, they present the same forces-of-law-and-order-worshipping worldview in the same super-factual style, devoid of any psychology or character – about as subtle and characterful – but as sleek and shiny – as a cruise missile.

The plot

The Preacher is publishing videos of hate on the internet. Kit Carson aka the Tracker is commissioned to track him down and eliminate him, by a special Presidential Order relayed to him via Gray Fox, director of TOSA. He recruits a computer whizz who he codenames Ariel, and who tracks the Preacher’s ‘secret’ IP address to Kismayo in south Somalia.

[As in the previous novels, the good guy is helped out by a computer whizz kid, this time a teenager with Asperger’s syndrome, who is scared to come out of his bedroom but can work miracles online – one Roger Kendrick (p.79). (Even when Forsyth characters actually have names, they are generally bland, empty and characterless; monikers like the Tracker, the Preacher, the Killer, the Geek, have more flavour and depth than the various Rogers or Christophers or Bobs.) Forsyth tells us the Preacher has his own techno whizzkid, a British-born Muslim alumnus of Manchester University, who our guys nickname the Troll – so one recurring strand in the text is the conflict entirely in cyber-space between these two hackers.]

Amid a wealth of false passports and background info about the country’s notorious Intelligence Service, the ISI, the Tracker visits Pakistan, where he is hosted and given a good backgrounder by the local CIA officer. Using intel from various sources he establishes that the Preacher is the runaway son of a Pakistani General, that his name is Zulfikar Ali Shah, that he was radicalised during the Afghan War during which he took the nom de guerre Abu Azzam.

The Tracker concocts a childishly simple plan, which is to recreate in a Hollywood studio the exact backdrop and look of the room which the Preacher uses, to hire an actor (Hollywood bit-part player, Tony Suarez) who looks like him and a voice mimic who can sound like him, and to impersonate one of the Preacher’s broadcasts – then use Ariel to get it published via the Preacher’s authentic website.

But, in this fake video, the Preacher will abjectly apologise for inciting violence, saying Islam is really a religion of peace and love, and begging forgiveness for his errors (p.264). The idea is that his many millions of followers will be so disgusted by his ‘apostasy’ from the cause that one or more of them will kill him in revenge. Forsyth goes into the mechanics of hiring studio, actor, mimic and so on with his customary thoroughness – but the reader can’t help thinking it’s a silly plan.

Luckily, Forsyth throws a massive spanner into this linear plot, and the thing which – for all its repetitions – makes The Kill List different from its predecessors and a genuinely interesting read. He introduces the Somali pirates.

Somali pirates

A Swedish cargo ship, the Malmö, a 22,000-tonne general cargo freighter carrying Volvos to the East (p.203), is hijacked by Somali pirates, led by one of the most cruel and sadistic, Al-Afrit, meaning ‘the Devil’. Forsyth gives fascinating background information about Somalia the country, its geography and recent terrible history, the reason for the rise of the pirates and the evolution of their methods, which have reached such a maturity that London shipping companies now employ professionals to negotiate the release of their hijacked ships, and some of the London negotiators have become quite familiar with their Somali negotiator opposite numbers.

Thus when news come through that the Malmö has been hijacked, the London insurance firm of Chauncey Reynolds turns to the experienced Somali-hijack-negotiator Gareth Evans who is himself delighted to find, in the first phone call the firm receives, that the pirates are represented by Mr Ali Abdi, a suave, Western-educated lawyer, with whom he has done business previously.

We learn that the Western ship owners are always in a hurry to secure the release of their ship but how that works in favour of the pirates, who have all the time in the world. Forsyth tells us the ransoms normally start out around $20 million and invariably fall, through lengthy and protracted discussions, to around $5 million. This, like so much else in the book, is eye-opening stuff, like a well-written article in a high-end newspaper.

But this (fairly routine) hijacking impinges on the plot because the ship’s owner, Harry Andersson, had sent his youngest son, Ove Carlsson (19), aboard the ship as his first experience at sea. It turns out to be a very bad experience as, when the ship is anchored off shore and Al-Afrit visits, he takes a fancy to the tall blonde boy and has him dragged of the ship, thrown into a dungeon, chained and whipped. Just for kicks.

Opal

After the broadcast of the fake sermon begging forgiveness, the Preacher obviously knows someone is out to get him and has hacked into his computers. This is confirmed when his computer whizz kid, the Troll, is murdered by Israeli agents in a typically complicated and well-organised raid from an inflatable dinghy, which Forsyth describes in mind-boggling detail. The Israeli operatives rendezvous with their permanent agent in Somalia, codenamed Opal, on a deserted beach, before arranging the Troll’s assassination.

In a plot development which stretches credulity, Opal is then tasked with taking the package the Troll was carrying up to the Preacher’s compound in the north. Here he is to play the innocent who just happened to come across the Troll dying in a car wreck (in fact carefully staged by the Israelis), and say that the Troll asked with his dying breath for Opal to deliver the package.

On arriving at the Preacher’s compound with the Troll’s package and this unlikely cover story, it is no surprise that Opal is imprisoned while his story is checked out. So good is the Mossad arrangement of the Troll’s ‘accidental’ car crash that the Preacher’s men return and say Opal’s story checks out, so he is kept hanging around the Preacher, and then – as his knowledge of languages becomes known – the Preacher realises he may be able to use Opal and asks him if he wants to work for him as fixer and translator. Perfect. ‘We’ have an agent inside the enemy camp.

This was the Tracker’s plan all along. The compound had been identified using computer technology to track it down as the source of the internet sermons and is under surveillance by a Global Hawk permanently monitoring it from five miles up in the sky. But there is no replacement for human intel, and it is only when Opal, as instructed, slips on the red baseball cap the Mossad agents gave him, that our boys can be really certain that the Preacher is actually there, in residence in the compound. So the Tracker and his team finally have all their suspicions confirmed.

At this point all their planning hits a roadblock, for the powers-that-be ie the President, as advised by his chiefs of staff, vetoes all the options for taking the Preacher out. The compound is in the heart of Mogadishu ie too near innocent civilians to send cruise missiles. And no US President is going to send in troops after the catastrophe of Black Hawk Down (the 1993 debacle when some 18 US Rangers were massacred in a botched raid).

Fortunately for the Tracker, though less so for the victims, what changes official attitudes is a further Preacher-inspired attack in the States, this time a ruthless machine gun attack on a coach load of CIA employees which turns the coach, stuck in rush hour traffic, into a charnel house. Within hours a message is relayed down to the Tracker from the Top – terminate the Preacher.

The blonde hostage

Through his contacts in the Somali underworld, the Preacher becomes aware that the notorious Al-Afrit has hijacked a Western ship and has taken captive a very Western-looking blonde boy. He has a brainwave. The cruel murder and decapitation of the hostage on live TV, in the best Taliban-ISIS tradition, might just restore his image among his disillusioned internet audience as a scourge of the West.

So the Preacher sends a message to Al-Afrit offering to buy the boy. In the parallel conversations which have been going on all this time between the Somali negotiator Abdin and Gareth Evans in London, Abdin tells the Brit that his ‘principal’ has agreed to the $5 million ransom and that the Malmö will finally be released – hooray – but then has to reluctantly admit it will be without the blonde boy, who has been sold on to what Abdin thinks is the Islamic terrorist group Al-Shabaab. Gareth puts his head in his hands.

Taking out the Preacher

The novel builds to a surprisingly effective climax. The spy-in-the-sky tracks the Preacher as he and his bodyguards depart his compound in a Toyota Landcruiser and drive south to the rendezvous point with Al-Afrit’s men, there to buy the blonde boy. (Opal’s presence is vital because he manages to sit in the exposed back end of the truck and once again puts on his red baseball cap to confirm to the via-satellite-watchers that the Preacher is there in person. But Opal’s presence also means they can’t take the convoy out with a cruise missile: Mossad would never forgive them.)

Therefore, it has to be a boots-on-the-ground operation. And there is an entertaining and plausible account of how the Tracker escalates a request via TOSA to the Prez himself, to ask him to phone British PM David Cameron, and request use of an SAS squadron, he’s found out just happens to be training in the Gulf.

Thus the final fifty pages or so are another hymn to the rugged professionalism of the Special Air Service, the unit Forsyth hero worships and who appear in nearly all his novels, each time with much the same detailed backgrounder on their history and structure and training etc (p.352ff).

But, for the first time in several novels, this final sequence is actually very gripping because, instead of giving us his usual high-level and brief summary of an action, Forsyth’s narrative descends ‘into the action’, as it were, with page after page describing the tense build-up to the parachute drop of the six SAS men and the Tracker into the Somali desert near the rendezvous point. I was gripped by this blow-by-blow account like I haven’t been for ages.

Our boys parachute into the desert, ‘tab’ the 8 or so klicks to the village, chuck doped steak to the pye dogs to make them sleep, then attack. In a textbook engagement, they ‘slot’ or ‘take out’ all the Somalis pirates in one village house, then slot the Preacher’s bodyguard as they run across the village square, meantime managing not to kill the Israeli agent, Opal, who slipped his identifying red cap on as soon as the shooting started.

And the whole movie, er, novels builds to a traditional climax when the Tracker comes face to face with the Preacher on the dusty, flat roof of one of the peasant houses. Here the two men have a short, intense knife fight among billowing washing hanging from the peasants’ washing lines by moonlight, which ends with the Tracker nutting the Preacher and, taking advantage of the latter’s momentary loss of grip, stabbing him in the heart. As the light goes out of the baddy’s distinctively amber eyes, our hero gets to whisper in his ear the words his father whispered to him as he died, the motto of the Marine Corps, semper fidelis, shortened to semper fi.

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Thoughts

Anyone saddened by the steady decline in Forsyth’s books will be surprised: in my opinion the plot is more interesting and believable than its three predecessors and, because of this, it actually builds to a thrilling and gripping conclusion. It is certainly a return to form after the strange fizzling-out of the previous novel, The Cobra.

Many critics deplore Forsyth’s lack of character or credible plot. Many others dislike his enthusiastic depiction of his heroes’ outside-the-law, vigilante approach to ‘justice’. All true – but I find the books interesting. Hundreds of their pages may consist of little more than detailed background research linked together by far-fetched plots, but it is background information on extremely relevant subjects ie the international drugs trade, international terrorism.

As a tiny example, Forsyth can’t describe a meeting of Mossad officials discussing whether to co-operate with the Tracker’s scheme and commit Opal to his plan, without mentioning that they’re meeting in the same room where their predecessors planned ‘Operation Wrath of God’ to avenge the Israeli athletes murdered at the 1974 Munich Olympics.

The stories are so geopolitical in nature that they are larded with interesting information and insights into recent (war) history on almost every page. Snippets like this are interesting in themselves but also link the action back to previous conflicts. Through the hundreds of similar references, Forsyth’s fictions create a matrix or web bringing together the history of recent conflicts, wars, insurgencies, international crises and weaving them into a compelling (and terrifying) worldview.

It is the coherence of this worldview which I find compelling and, seen from this angle, the repetitions of accounts of recent conflicts aren’t a negative, they positively reinforce his military point-of-view.

Also I admire his ability to keep up to date. There is none of the ‘chaps meeting in gentlemen’s clubs’ which I associate with thrillers of the 1970s, 80s and even 90s. Instead US operatives sit in darkened bunkers staring at screens on which they see the images from Global Hawk predator drones relayed to them by America’s global network of spy satellites. They waggle joy sticks and press a button and a cruise missile obliterates the target they’ve identified.

The protagonists of the last few novels can’t get anywhere without the assistance of young digerati, computer dudes, surfing the dark net, hacking into banks and hidden internet IPs, setting screen against screen.

I admire Forsyth for, after 40 years in the trade, keeping up with not just the latest technology, but the way the hyper-digital world of today shapes every aspect of crime, terrorism and the efforts to combat it.

So, in conclusion, the lack of characterisation and the sometimes simple-minded plots don’t matter to me compared to Forsyth’s compelling vision of the world we live in now, a fast-moving and very dangerous world of skilled terrorists, throwaway mobile phones, 6-mile-high drones, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and the infinite complexities of cyberspace.

A world in which men with grievances born in Palestine or Afghanistan or Yemen might start machine gunning us on beaches in Tunisia or concert halls in Paris or nightclubs in Florida, with no warning – while, on the other hand, an unprecedented level of surveillance of every aspect of our lives by numerous ‘security services’ has slowly insidiously grown up in the last fifteen years.

Forsyth’s latter books are not great novels – from a purist point of view they are lamentably bad novels – but I think they offer fascinating, compelling and snappily-written visions of the dark side of the world we live in now, a world in which terrorists can attack anywhere at any moment, and our side ‘kill people based on metadata’, and most of us are caught in the middle.

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Credit

The Kill List by Frederick Forsyth was published by Bantam Press in 2013. All quotes and references are from the 2014 Corgi paperback edition.

Related links

• The Kill List on Amazon
• The Kill List Wikipedia article
• Frederick Forsyth Wikipedia article
• Forsyth’s column in the Daily Express
• ‘Death by drone strike, dished out by algorithm’ Guardian article
• ‘Obama’s secret kill list’ Guardian article
• ‘Life as a drone operator’ Guardian article

Forsyth’s books

1971 The Day of the Jackal – It is 1963. An international assassin is hired by right-wing paramilitary organisation, the OAS, to assassinate French President, Charles de Gaulle. The novel follows the meticulous preparations of the assassin, code-name Chacal, and the equally thorough attempts of the ‘best detective in France’, Commissaire Lebel, to track him down. Surely one of the most thoroughly researched and gripping thrillers ever written.
1972 The Odessa File – It is 1963. German journalist Peter Miller goes on a quest to track down an evil former SS commandant and gets caught up in a high-level Nazi plot to help Egypt manufacture long-range missiles to attack and destroy Israel.
1974 The Dogs of War – City magnate Sir James Manson hires seasoned mercenary Cat Shannon to overthrow the dictator of the (fictional) West African country of Zangaro, so that Manson’s mining company can get its hands on a mountain virtually made of platinum. This very long novel almost entirely amounts to a mind-bogglingly detailed manual on how to organise and fund a military coup.
1975 The Shepherd – A neat slick Christmas ghost story about a post-war RAF pilot whose instruments black out over the North Sea but who is guided to safety by an apparently phantom Mosquito, flown by a pilot who disappeared without trace during the war.
1979 The Devil’s Alternative – A Cold War, geopolitical thriller confidently describing machinations at the highest levels of the White House, Downing Street and a Soviet Politburo riven by murderous factions and which is plunged into emergency by a looming grain shortage in Russia. A plot to overthrow the reforming leader of the Soviet Union evolves into a nailbiting crisis when the unexpected hijacking of an oil supertanker by fanatical Ukrainian terrorists looks like it might lead to the victory of the hawks in the Politburo, who are seeking a Russian invasion of Western Europe.
1982 No Comebacks Ten short stories combining Forsyth’s strengths of gripping technical description and clear fluent prose, with his weaknesses of cardboard characters and improbable plots, but the big surprise is how many of them are clearly comic in intention.
1984 The Fourth Protocol – Handsome, former public schoolboy, Paratroop Regiment soldier and MI5 agent John Preston, first of all uncovers the ‘mole’ working in MI5, and then tracks down the fiendish Soviet swine who is assembling a tactical nuclear device in Suffolk with a view to vaporising a nearby US Air Force base. the baddies’ plan is to rally anti-nuclear opinion against the Conservatives in the forthcoming General Election, ensuring a Labour Party victory and then (part two of the plan) replace the moderate Labour leader with an (unspecified) hard-Left figure who would leave NATO and effectively hand the UK over to the Russians. A lunatic, right-wing fantasy turned into a ‘novel’.
1989 The Negotiator – Taciturn Clint Eastwood-lookalike Quinn (no first name, just ‘Quinn’) is the best negotiator in the business, so when the President’s son is kidnapped Quinn is pulled out of quiet retirement in a Spanish village and sent to negotiate his release. What he doesn’t realise is the kidnap is just the start of a bigger conspiracy to overthrow the President himself!
1991 The Deceiver – A set of four self-contained, long short stories relating exciting incidents in the career of Sam McCready, senior officer in the British Intelligence Service, as he approaches retirement. More gripping than the previous two novels, with the fourth and final story being genuinely funny, in the style of an Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness.
1994 The Fist of God – A journalistic account of Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing US-led ‘Desert Storm’ operation to throw him out, complete with insider accounts of the Western military and intelligence services and lavish descriptions of scores of hi-tech weaponry. Against this backdrop is set the story of one man – dark-skinned, Arabic-speaking Mike Martin who goes undercover posing as an Arab, first in occupied Kuwait, then – even more perilously – in Baghdad itself, before undertaking a final mission to locate and assist the destruction of Saddam’s atom bomb (!) and the Supergun designed to fire it at the Allies. Simultaneously gripping in detail and preposterous in outline.
1996 Icon – Hot shot CIA agent Jason Monk is brought out of retirement to foil a fascist coup in post-communist Russia in a novel which starts out embedded in fascinating contemporary history of Russia but quickly escalates to heights of absurdity, capped by an ending in which the Russian people are persuaded to install a distant cousin of our very own Queen as the new Tsar of All The Russias! Sure.
2001 The Veteran – Five very readable short stories: The Veteran, The Art of the Matter, The Miracle, The Citizen, and Whispering Wind – well engineered, sleek and almost devoid of real human psychology. Nonetheless, the vigilante twist of The Veteran is imaginatively powerful, and the long final story about a cowboy who wakes from a century-long magic sleep to be reunited with a reincarnation of his lost love has the eerie, primal power of a yarn by Rider Haggard.
2003 Avenger – A multi-stranded narrative which weaves together the Battle of Britain, the murder of a young American aid worker in Bosnia, the death of a young woman in America, before setting the tracking down of a Serbian war criminal to South America against a desperate plot to assassinate Osama bin Laden. The least far-fetched and most gripping Forsyth thriller for years.
2006 The Afghan – Ex-SAS man Colonel Mike Martin, hero of The Fist of God, is called out of retirement to impersonate an Afghan inmate of Guantanamo Bay in order to infiltrate Al Qaeda and prevent their next terrorist attack. Quite a gripping thriller with an amazing amount of detailed background information about Afghanistan, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Islamic terrorism and so on.
2010 The Cobra – Two lead characters from Avenger, Paul Devereaux and Cal Dexter, are handed the task of wiping out the illegal cocaine trade on the authority of Barack Obama himself. Which leads to an awesome display of Forsyth’s trademark factual research, scores of pages building up a comprehensive picture of the drugs industry, and to the detailed description of the multi-stranded operation which almost succeeds, until lily-livered politicians step in to halt it.
2013 The Kill List – Another one about Islamic terrorism. The Preacher, who has been posting jihadi sermons online and inspiring a wave of terrorist assassinations, is tracked down and terminated by US marine Christopher Carson, aka The Tracker, with a fascinating side plot about Somali piracy thrown in. Like all Forsyth’s novels it’s packed with interesting background information but unlike many of his later novels it this one actually becomes genuinely gripping at the end.
2015 The Outsider – At age 76 Forsyth writes his autobiography in the form of a series of vignettes, anecdotes and tall tales displaying his characteristic briskness and dry humour. What an extraordinary life he’s led, and what simple, boyish fun this book is.