The Negotiator Quotes

“staring intently at the”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Negotiator

“the five services of the Soviet Union: the Army, Navy, Air Force, Strategic Rocket Forces and Air Defence of the Homeland”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Negotiator

“When a man has nothing more to lose, he can become very dangerous.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Negotiator

“All men dream, but they are most dangerous who dream with their eyes open.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Negotiator

“girl to stand still. She obeyed. But she stared across at her rescuer with huge dark eyes. Not long now, kid. Hang in there, baby. The bandit flicked through the rolls of banknotes in the case until satisfied he had not been cheated. The tall man and the girl looked at each other. He winked; she gave a small flicker of a smile. The bandit closed the case and began to retreat, facing forward, to his side of the clearing. He had reached the trees when it happened. It was not the Carabinieri man from Rome; it was the local fool. There was a clatter of rifle-fire, the bandit with the case stumbled and fell. Of course, his friends were strung out through the pine trees behind him, in cover. They fired back. In a second the clearing was torn by chains of flying bullets. He screamed ‘Down!’ in Italian, but she did not hear, or panicked, and tried to run towards him. He came off his knees and hurled himself across the twenty feet between them. He almost made it. He could see her there, just beyond his fingertips, inches beyond the hard right hand that would drag her down to safety in the long grass; he could see the fright in her huge eyes, the little white teeth in her screaming mouth … and then the bright crimson rose that bloomed on the front of her thin cotton dress. She went down then as if punched in the back, and he recalled lying over her, covering her with his body until the firing stopped and the mafioso escaped through the forest. He remembered sitting there holding her, cradling the tiny limp body in his arms, weeping and shouting at the uncomprehending and too-late-apologetic local police: ‘No, no, sweet Jesus, not again.…’ CHAPTER ONE November 1989 Winter had come early that year. Already by the end of the month the first forward scouts, borne on a bitter wind out of the north-eastern steppes, were racing across the rooftops to probe Moscow’s defences. The Soviet General Staff headquarters building stands at 19 Ulitsa Frunze, a greystone edifice dating from the 1930s facing its much more modern eight-storey multi-rise annexe across the street. At his window on the top floor of the old block the Soviet Chief of Staff Stood staring out at the icy flurries, and his mood was as bleak as the coming winter. Marshal Ivan K. Koslov was sixty-seven, two years older than the statutory retirement age, but in the Soviet Union as everywhere else those who made the rules never deemed they should apply to them. At the beginning of the year he had succeeded the veteran Marshal Akhromeyev, to the surprise of most in the military hierarchy. The two men were as unalike as chalk and cheese. Where Akhromeyev had been a small stick-thin intellectual, Koslov was a big, bluff, whitehaired giant, a soldier’s soldier, son, grandson and nephew of soldiers. Although only the third-ranking First Deputy Chief before his promotion, he had jumped the two men ahead of him, who had slipped quietly into retirement. No one had any doubts as to why he had gone to the top; from 1987 to 1989 he had quietly and expertly supervised the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan,”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Negotiator