Firewall - Softcover

McNab Andy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593046684 ISBN 13: 9780593046685

Publisher: Bantam Press, 2000

Synopsis

The Russians were serious players. If things didn't go as planned, Sergei said, I'd be lucky to be shot dead in the hotel lobby. If they captured me, I'd be taken to a remote bit of wasteland have my stomach slit open. They'd pull my intestines out and leave me to watch them squirm around on my chest like a bucket of freshly caught eels for the thirty minutes if would take me to die. These things happen, he had explained, when you mess with the main men in ROC (Russian organized crime). But I didn't have a choice...

Helsinki, December 1999. Nick Stone, ex-SAS, now a 'K' working for British Intelligence on deniable operations, is tough, resourceful, ruthless, highly trained - and desperately in need of cash...

Offered the lucrative freelance job of kidnapping a mafia warlord and delivering him to St Petersburg, it seems to Stone that his problems are over. In fact, they are only just beginning.

Stone enters the bleak underworld of the former Soviet republic of Estonia, where unknown aggressors stalk the bitter landscape, and he soon finds himself caught between implacable enemies. For Russia has embarked upon a concerted cyber-espionage offensive, hacking into some of the West's most sensitive military secrets. American and British intelligence agencies are determined to thwart them. And the mafia are waiting in the wings with their own chillingly brutal solution...

About this title

Review

In his third outing (following Remote Control and Crisis Four), Nick Stone, Andy McNab's series SAS agent, is off the Firm's regular payroll owing to a major screwup in his last assignment that left his best friend's family slaughtered--except for the one child who survived. Little Kelly needs expensive treatment for the post-traumatic stress that's turned her nearly catatonic, so Nick takes on a freelance assignment that gets him mixed up with Russian organized crime--in particular, with an enigmatic mob boss who has designs on some Finnish cybertechnology. When Nick realizes it's not industrial espionage that he's involved with but military secrets, he's caught between warring factions of the Russian Mafia and the Anglo-American alliance of intelligence agencies. The Westerners will do anything to keep the Echelon program out of the hands of Valentin Lebed--the Chechnyan Mafioso who makes Nick an offer he can't refuse--and the Maliskia, a gang of rival Russian criminals who want to derail Lebed's plans and take over Echelon themselves.

The action ranges from Helsinki to St. Petersburg to London, the weaponry is fully detailed, and the techniques of infiltration and retrieval carefully outlined; McNab, a former SAS commando who, according to the author's note "is still wanted by a number of terrorist organizations and is therefore forbidden to reveal his face or current location," obviously remembers every ache, pain, bruise, and injury he suffered in his life of derring-do, since they're all completely and graphically described here, too. --Jane Adams

About the Author

ANDY McNAB joined the infantry at the age of sixteen and was a British soldier for eighteen years. ‘Badged’ as a member of 22 Special Air Service Regiment in 1984, he was involved for the next ten years in both covert and overt special operations worldwide. During the Gulf War he commanded Bravo Two Zero, a patrol that, in the words of his commanding officer, ‘will remain in regimental history for ever’. Awarded both the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Military Medal (MM) during his military career, McNab was the British Army’s most highly decorated serving soldier when he finally left the SAS. He wrote about his experiences in three books: the phenomenal bestseller Bravo Two Zero, Immediate Action and Seven Troop. He is the author of the bestselling Nick Stone thrillers. Besides his writing work, he lectures to security and intelligence agencies in both the USA and UK and is on the board of a private security company operating in hazardous environments.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593046684
• ISBN 13: 9780593046685
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 411