When I woke up this morning, I noted with mild interest an article from Reuters correspondent Mike Collett-White about the new Frederick Forsyth novel and terrorism as the new thriller-driving engine of the post-Cold War era. The point seemed fairly obvious, after all, the sort of thing other thriller writers had figured out by early 2002 if not sooner. But then Collett-White realized he had an even better story: Forsyth once stumbled onto plans for a real-life coup while researching his 1974 thriller The Dogs of War. Or, even better, may have helped set plans to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea in motion while posing as an arms dealer so he could chat up mercenaries about their profession. "I was thinking of that -- would it be feasible ... to take out an entire government," he recalled. "The answer was, if it's small enough, fragile and chaotic enough and badly run enough, 40 armed men should do it." According to the article, they were pretty into it by the time he went back home to England, until somebody else in the group ratted out the scheme. Now if it had been Graham Greene, I suppose he would've been nice enough to ring up MI5 as soon as he got home and filled them in himself...