Stanley Johnson: Kompromat

The large Amur tiger lazed in the sun on the banks of the Ussuri River. From time to time he raised his head and licked his balls. Just to check they were still there. They hadn’t seen much action recently. Female tigers on the Chinese side of the frontier seemed to be few and far between. He looked upstream, then he looked downstream, then – to be sure – he looked upstream again. The coast seemed to be clear.

The tiger got to his feet, sticking his hindquarters into the air first, then pushing up on his front paws. He ambled down to the river and sniffed at the water. At this time of year, the flow in the Ussuri was sluggish, but still it was cool and refreshing. He would enjoy the swim. And there would be more females too on the Russian side. That was obvious. It wasn’t just the grass which was greener the other side of the river.

Later that day, Jang Ling-Go, director of Forestry and Wildlife in China’s Heilongjiang Province, received a message from one of the rangers. ‘Amur tiger seen crossing Ussuri into Russia at 11a.m. today. This is visual sighting, but please check with GPS too.’

Jang Ling-Go switched on the bio-monitoring tracking system.

Within seconds he had picked up the slow-moving pulsing blip that denoted the Amur tiger 127’s progress as it left the river and headed back into the immense birch forest of Russia’s Far East.

The steady pace of the moving dot indicated that this was a tiger with a very clear idea of where he wanted to go.

STANLEY JOHNSONis a former politician, environmental campaigner, journalist and author of twenty-five books including ten thrillers, one of which, The Commissioner , was made into a feature film starring John Hurt. Stanley won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry and has awards from Greenpeace and the RSPCA. He recently received the RSPB Medal as well as WWF’s Leader of the Living Planet Award, both awarded for services to conservation. He is an Ambassador for the United Nations Convention on Migratory Species, and Hon. President of the Gorilla Organization.

In the run-up to the EU Referendum in 2016, he founded and co-chaired Environmentalists for Europe. Stanley Johnson was one of the first presenters of More 4’s The Last Word and he has also appeared on Have I Got News For You, The One Show, Pointless and, most recently, The Fake News Programme .

Gold Drain

Panther Jones for President

The Urbane Guerilla

The Marburg Virus [republished as The Virus ]

Tunnel

The Commissioner

The Doomsday Deposit

Dragon River

Icecap [republished as The Warming ]

Life without Birth: A Journey Through the Third World in Search of the Population Explosion

The Green Revolution

The Population Problem

The Politics of Environment

Pollution Control Policy of the EEC

Antarctica: The Last Great Wilderness

World Population and the United Nations

The Earth Summit: The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED)

World Population – Turning the Tide

The Environmental Policy of the European Communities The Politics of Population: Cairo, 1994

Survival: Saving Endangered Migratory Species [co-authored with Robert Vagg]

Where the Wild Things Were: Travels of a Conservationist

UNEP: The First 40 Years

Stanley I Presume

Stanley I Resume

A Point Blank Book

First published by Point Blank, an imprint of Oneworld Publications Ltd, 2017

This ebook published 2017

Copyright © Stanley Johnson 2017

The moral right of Stanley Johnson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved

Copyright under Berne Convention

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78607-246-7 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-78607-360-0 (trade paperback)

ISBN 978-1-78607-247-4 (ebook)

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Oneworld Publications Ltd

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