The Kobra Manifesto

Conscious that he is living on borrowed time, the ace 'shadow executive' Quiller allows the London Bureau to throw him into a mission that seems already to be running out of control as one agent after another is reported missing or dead, out there in the field. On the French Riviera a defector from behind the Curtain crashlands his plane, uttering only one word before dying: 'Kobra'; at Rome Airport a fuel tanker explodes as a dead man's car loses direction, in Cambodia a man sipping his coffee under a palm tree crashes back in his chair as a bullet shatters his skull--until there is only one executive left to carry the mission, and Quiller is ordered in.