Fault Line: Background and Genesis.

I have been lucky in living an eclectic and adventurous life, including a military career, an international business career and, through climbing (which I continue to do), several expeditions to The Himalaya, Alaska and Tibet.
In my business career, I have worked in over forty countries around the world and can therefore with some degree of legitimacy claim to have acquired a global outlook.
As I have travelled in my work and adventures, I have long been fascinated by the the way in which conflict often arises in some of the most beautiful a parts of the world. This is no coincidence: the geological forces that create such natural beauty also forge geological fault lines that in turn become the geo-political fault lines of humanity.  As with geological fault lines, so with geo-political fault lines: some are dormant, others are active, but often we do not know where the next violent eruption will be. We assume that the visible and active fault lines will erupt, yet this is rarely the case. It is the danger that lurks unseen which poses the biggest threat.
In the world we live in, geo-political eruptions receive their spark and are fuelled by the asymmetric nature of modern conflict: in short, factions and “terrorists” now have the ability to raise the necessary funds and wage war on an international scale using unconventional tactics for their own localised objectives.  This exposes the geo-political fault lines around the world as never before to the sudden risk of fracture – and potential risk to the current world order as know it.
And yet behind most of these conflicts is a tale of human oppression, greed, dislocation and suffering. It is this perspective and interest that forms and informs the background and motivation to the book, ending as it does on that great fault line that splits the Indian sub-continent across the Greater Himalaya chain and intensifies its fracture lines – both geological and political – in that most beautiful of areas, Kashmir and Baltistan.
This asymmetric world presents peculiar challenges to those who seek to maintain the current world order and peace. For Security Services and counter-terrorism units alike, the world is evermore blurred and chaotic. It is this obfuscation and asymmetric uncertainty that provides the backbone to Fault Line, which plays out simultaneously over three continents, perhaps, as one reviewer suggested, like a modern-day Thirty Nine Steps.
Who is our enemy? Where is the real threat coming from? How is it being financed (always follow the money!). And if illicit finance is involved, where does the money laundering operation or fraud originate? Where are the funds heading to and for what purpose? How are we to interpret a set of seemingly random but coincidental occurrences? What is the common thread that leads to the source and perpetrators– the “head-shed”?

The old doctrine of “know thine enemy” has been replaced with “who is our enemy?”.

Duncan Sperry
3rd January 2019

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