Carl A. Posey

The story. After the suspicious hit-and-run death of a colleague in Vienna, John Turner, an American nuclear safeguards inspector and former U.S. Navy pilot, is drafted as a substitute for an inspection of a Bulgarian reactor at Kozloduy, on the Danube. But Turner also plans to bring home the world’s first molecular microchip, a Bulgarian invention that could fundamentally alter world technologies.

Turner takes with him his two young daughters and his Bulgarian lover, but what begins as a winter holiday in an ancient land quickly becomes a terrifying journey through a labyrinth of manipulation, murder, and deceit. Turner finds that he and his companions are pawns in a much larger game being played out between Moscow and Washington’s sinister Admiral Carney and his dangerous associate, Juan Levy. Although the ageing spymaster is the Turner girls’ adoring grandfather, he sees his former son-in-law as the most expendable of men.

Too late, Turner finds himself marked as a spy and his loved ones trapped in Bulgaria. They begin a harrowing night-time escape in a stolen Antonov crop-duster in a desperate bid to regain the safety of Vienna.

Benchley’s Chip is set in the winter of 1987, when change was in the eastern European air, but what kind of change, no one could say. The novel is a relic from the final throes of the Cold War. Not quite two years on, the Wall would fall, taking world Communism with it.