Winds Of Spring: Safeguarding the Orion Protocols

Monolith Corporation's systems security officer Anne Hopkins becomes immersed in the world of cyber crime when pursued by the planet's most dangerous terrorist, the mysterious Khaled Benwalid, who wants her to provide him with the protocols for the Orion System Six avionics software that powers the flight decks of virtually every commercial jetliner. Benwalid's possession of the protocols could enable him to "simultaneously cause hundreds of airliners to crash without placing a single hijacker aboard any of them" - an act capable of plunging the world into total chaos. To protect the Orion source codes, the US President's Special Counter-Terrorism Adviser sends Hopkins to Lausanne, Switzerland, to work with undercover agent Steve Loftis, the managing director of an exclusive private bank in the Olympic Capital, and Netwar specialist Bruce Campbell in unmasking the elusive Doctor Benwalid. She finds Lausanne swamped with refugees having fled a wave of unprecedented atrocities in the Middle East and North Africa that discredited the "Arab Spring" uprisings instead of bringing hope and democracy to the region. Days after Hopkins' arrival in the city, fanatical extremists manipulate Lausanne's refugees into rising against their Swiss hosts. The uprising occurs during a decadent two-day Techno music festival, qualified by the leader of the refugees and Amir of the militant jihadist Vanguard Abdul Qadar Wardak as an "outrage against Allah". The radicalised refugees unleash an orgy of arson and violence unknown in Europe since the religious wars of the Middle Ages. They rampage through the streets of the city burning vehicles and buildings, and killing anyone in their path. Winds of Spring is a fast-moving thriller that will make those who read it think about what lies ahead in the multi-cultural environment that is slowly transforming the world in which we live. The plot climaxes with a series of unexpected twists, demonstrating that neither side on the religious divide has all the answers.

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Robert Hutchison read economics and political science at McGill University, interrupting his studies to travel and begin a career in journalism. He is the author of seven books: Vesco (Praeger, 1974); Off The Books (Morrow, 1986); Juggernaut (Heinemann, 1987), published as Danger: Heavy Goods (Morrow, 1988) in US; In the Tracks of the Yeti (Macdonald, 1989); Their Kingdom Come (Doubleday, 1997); Raja of Harsil (Roli Books, 2010); Garden of Fools (Palimpsest, 2012). From 1961 to 1976, he was a correspondent for the Sunday and Daily Telegraph, London, covering the 1967 Middle East war from Cairo and the 1969 Islamic Summit in Rabat, which reshaped the face of political Islam. His articles in The Financial Post, Toronto, on the sale of Canadian reactors to Argentina won a National Business Writing Award.