Armstrong works for the Studies Centre in London, where wargames are played with computer assistance, using the latest intelligence data on Soviet electronic warfare capabilities.

The story opens with Armstrong and his colleague Ferdy Foxwell returning from a six-week mission aboard a nuclear submarine, gathering data on Soviet communications and electronic warfare techniques in the Arctic Ocean.

When he leaves the flat thinking that a taxi he ordered has arrived, he is confronted by Special Branch officers who have a former member of the Studies Centre verify who he is before releasing him.

Shortly after his return, Armstrong is about to leave his flat when it is ransacked by KGB Colonel Oleg Stok and two assistants, who even blow open a safe left by the previous occupant.

Leaving the restaurant, he is met by a high-ranking police officer who escorts him to Battersea, from where a helicopter takes him to Heathrow Airport, from whence he is flown north in a small single-engine aircraft.

It appears that they have been running their own unauthorised intelligence operation to arrange the defection of Admiral Remoziva, who will die within a year if he does not receive treatment for a kidney condition.

At the end of the book it is revealed that the scheme was to discredit Remoziva and by association, his siblings; his sister is forced to step down from the German Re-unification negotiations, causing the talks to collapse.

A noteworthy win involves simulating the ability of Soviet amphibians to land on ice on the Bering Strait in winter, which extends their range and allows them to act as a deterrent to warships, which US Navy officers did not expect.

One simulation discussed is a re-run of the Battle of Britain exploring what might have happened if the Germans had fitted drop tanks to Luftwaffe Bf 109 E-4 fighters.

The TLS critic praised Deighton's "impeccable handling of the widely different locations", but complained that "the story [and] the characters are empty (though not by the standards of the genre)."

We have been to these, or similar, locations before on spying trips: an isolated castle in Scotland, a nuclear submarine under the northern ice-pack, a party of brittle richesse in Camden.

Too laconic for an old-fashioned cliffhanger, Mr Deighton yet produces a sort of dispassionate cerebral excitement which, like the polar ice itself, is nine-tenths submerged and all the more menacing for that.

Deighton seems to know the places he writes about—the bone-buckling cold and interminable rain of the Highlands will be familiar to anyone who has ever tramped across those wastes of appalling beauty.

"[8] Gene Lyons, writing in The New York Times Book Review noted that Deighton's success as a writer of spy thrillers "has always rested on his recognition of the humorous possibilities of the form."

Lyons calls the book a "superior entertainment" and remarks that "Deighton seeks a literate audience" but that protagonist Patrick Armstrong "display[s] only the vestigial personal memory needed to flesh him out, so that he may neither learn significantly from previous adventures, nor (God forbid) intellectualize overmuch.

At the time, his obsessive reliance on the blurred and intangible, on loaded pauses and mysteriously disjointed dialogue, did convey the shadowy meanness of the spy's world, with its elusive loyalties, camouflaged identities and weary brutality.