Imagine at the height of the cold war the Soviets suddenly invaded West Germany and achieved their political-military aims, and in addition forced the UK to surrender and join the Warsaw Pact?

          This is the premise of this novel, set in the late 70s/early 80s, and picks up just after the arrival of Soviet 'advisors’ and military personnel to oversee the transition from a democratic to a marxist-leninist autocracy. The hero of the story is a British MI6 agent who was in Washington DC at the time and is sent back on a seemingly improbable mission to force the Soviets out of the UK and return it to a western-style government.

          His mission, then, is to contact 'sleepers’ throughout the UK who have been hypnotically programmed by the CIA over the past decade or so, and all of them hide inside their subconscious three things; two other names of sleepers and a clue to the next stage of the mission, half disguised in code.

          The hero has to avoid detection from the KGB who have by now exerted control over the police and also to find his way through a labyrinth to find the location of a secret installation which will bring down the Soviet apparatus in Britain. The danger is of course that any of the sleepers might have been turned by the Soviets (this has happened in fact to one of them) but activation of a code phrase sends the 'sleeper’ in to a hypnotic trance where they relay the information completely without their knowledge – they wake up after an hour or so.

          The Soviets eventually pick up the trail and begin to pursue him…