In the Central American republic of Guatemala, government-sponsored torture and mass murder had reduced the Mayan Indian population to a despairing acquiescence, and after five hundred years of struggle it began to seem as if the conqueror's peace could at last be claimed in the capital. Then, at the beginning of 1995, a guerrilla leader whom the authorities had long believed dead sprang mysteriously back to life. No loyal Guatemalan could identify him, and the government was compelled to seek help elsewhere, from one of the two SAS soldiers who had helped to mediate a hostage crisis with the guerrilla almost fifteen years earlier. To the government in Whitehall it appeared a straightforward enough exercise, but for the soldier and his comrades the mission soon turned into a nightmare of impossible choices, and then land of Guatemala, magical and cruel by turns, proved much easier to enter than to escape.

Guillermo Macias disappeared in 1976, in Argentina's 'Dirty War'. Twenty years later, in 1996, his terminally-ill father was determined that someone should find out what had happened to him and why. He had the names of two men he wanted questioned one in Mexico City, the other in a prison on the Colombian island of Providencia but no one to ask the questions. A friend of the family suggested retired SAS hero Jamie Docherty, now living with his Argentine wife in neighbouring Chile. Marysa Salcedo had disappeared on a picnic the previous year, along with four other young women. Her family had given her up for dead when her older sister Carmen stumbled upon a Miami newspaper story that mentioned two of the friends. One had just died of a drug overdose; the other, half-deranged, told a garbled story of sexual slavery on a Caribbean island which sounded suspiciously like Providencia. MI6 and the British Government were also more than a little interested in the island. They were certain that a huge drug-trafficking empire was run from the prison, and knew that at least some of the profits were being funnelled by its Argentine 'guest' into the financing of a mercenary invasion of the Falklands. Ignored by the Colombian authorities and mysteriously obstructed by their American allies, the British had no choice but to send their own elite force the SAS.

Terrorist bombs in town and city streets, an ever-rising tide of crime and a teenage drug problem that was rapidly escalating out of control this was the ugly face of Great Britain in 1995. The conventional police forces were already stretched beyond their limit and now a new threat was looming. A fanatical right-wing movement that in recent months had wreaked murder and chaos in mainland Europe was spreading its evil tentacles into the UK. Using terrorism and crime to fund its undercover activities, and a frightening new drug to spur on its growing army of bullyboys to unprecedented extremes of violence, it threatened to turn the streets of Britain's towns and inner cities into battlegrounds of anarchic brutality. In desperation, the civil authorities turned to the only group of men who might be able to confront and beat these fanatics on their own terms: the legendary Special Air Service the SAS! Guided by a maverick undercover drug cop, the SAS team were pitted against an enemy as ruthless and deadly as any the regiment had faced in its chequered and splendid history. The SAS were at war, and that war was just outside the window a war on the streets.

In June 1966, after completing final training for Vietnam on Exercise Traiim Nau in the jungles and swamps of New Guinea, 3 Squadron SAS (Australian Special Air Service) embarked by boat and plane from Australia to set up a Forward Operating Base in Phuoc Tuy province, a swampy hell of jungle and paddy-fields forty-five miles east of Saigon. The Viet Cong main forces units had a series of bases in the jungle, and the political cadres controlled most of the villages. Arriving in Phoc Tuy province, the Australians found they had to build their camp in the middle of wet season, which had turned the ground into a mud-bath. They were also compelled to build in the heart of an enemy-dominated region while living under ponchos and being constantly sniped at. The Aussies were still working under these appalling conditions when three members of the legendary 22 SAS arrived secretly from Bradbury Lines, Hereford, to give assistance in what was to be a major assault against the Viet Cong. These three were Sergeant Jimmy 'Jimbo' Ashman, who had been with the Regiment since its foundation in North Africa in 1941; Sergeant Richard 'Dead-eye Dick' Parker, who had previously fought with the SAS in Malaya, Borneo and Aden; and Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick 'Paddy' Callaghan, who had been pulled out of administration specially for this secret mission. The presence of the British SAS among the proud Australians, initially a source of resentment and conflict, eventually led to mutual respect. Working side by side, Brits and Aussies forged themselves into a potent fighting machine which was tasked with the fearsome job of rooting the Viet Cong out of the labyrinth tunnel system where they lived and died. It was a journey into hell, from which some would never return.

In 1948 Communist terrorists were waging a bloody war against estates and rubber-plantation owners in Malaya. Chased into the interior by British Army units, the guerrillas soon became experts at survival and evasion, emerging from the jungle only to launch increasingly ferocious attacks. In 1952, on the recommendation of Lieutenant-Colonel 'Mad' Mike Calvert, veteran of the Chindit campaigns in Burma, 22 SAS was formed as a special counter-insurgency force. Three years later the re-formed SAS began their jungle patrols. They learned how to survive for weeks at a time in hostile terrain, often waist-deep in water, and under attack from wild animals, leeches and poisonous insects. That extraordinary campaign climaxed in a nightmarish two weeks in the Telok Anson swamp tracking the troops of the notorious 'Baby Killer', Ah Hoi, while the regiment's dreadful and unforgettable experiences in the Malayan jungle laid the foundations for the SAS's legendary survival skills. Soldier F SAS: Guerrillas in the Jungle is the sixth in a series of novels based on this extraordinary regiment a thrilling 'factoid' adventure about the most daring soldiers in military history: the SAS!

In the 1990s, in the bleak, snow-capped mountains of Kazakhstan, the SAS return to settle a score which goes back almost half a century and to face a new and terrifying enemy an enemy that is silent, deadly and invisible and that will test their endurance, and their equipment, to the limit. Almost fifty years earlier in 1945, even as treaties were being signed in Berlin, treachery was being planned. An SAS patrol on a routine mission was ambushed and massacred by a cynical and ruthless Russian KGB Major with an insane dream of a new and terrible form of biological welfare. In the post-war years captured Nazi medical personnel and the cream of the USSR's scientists were established in a high-security research facility in the remote, mountainous region of Kazakhstan, close to the Mongolian border. Although the complex's inhuman experiments were devastatingly successful and although it was still funded by the KGB, by the early 1980s the virtually autonomous complex, with its well-armed security unit and fanatically independent community, was almost forgotten by the Soviet authorities. Until, that is, sketchy reports of an accident possibly a plague or leak of a mutated virus form a biological experiment filtered through to American intelligence. A Russian army team sent in to investigate disappeared without trace. The Chinese, terrified that their territory might be threatened by the leak, turned to Britain, an unlikely ally, for help. Only one group of men was deemed capable of discovering the truth behind the underground facility the legendary Special Air Service the SAS!