Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But can the SAS pull off a daring prison break and escape from Communist-run Ethiopia alive? In 1975 Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, recently deposed in a Communist revolution, is declared dead. In the hands of the brutal army officer Mengitsu Haile Mariam, the country has descended into chaos and bloodshed. Then an astonishing truth emerges. The emperor is being kept alive in prison by Mengitsu, but only until he reveals the location of his billion-pound fortune.

Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But can the SAS prevent Britain descending into war-torn anarchy? Great Britain, 1995: With terrorist bombs destroying town and city streets, rising crime and a teenage drug problem that is out of control, police forces are stretched beyond their limits. And now a new threat is looming. A fanatical right-wing movement is spreading into the UK.

It's 1996. A terminally ill father desperately seeks answers to what happened to his son, missing for 20 years. He has the names of two Argentine men - one in Mexico City, the other imprisoned on the Colombian island of Providencia - but no one to ask the questions. A missing girl's family have given her up for dead when they stumble upon a Miami newspaper story mentioning two of her friends. One has just died; the other, half deranged, tells a garbled story of sexual slavery on a Caribbean island which sounds suspiciously like Providencia.

In the Central American republic of Guatemala, government-sponsored torture and mass murder have reduced the Mayan Indian population to a despairing acquiescence. After 500 years of struggle, it seems as if the conqueror's peace can at last be proclaimed in the capital. Then a guerrilla leader whom the authorities have long believed dead springs mysteriously back to life. No loyal Guatemalan can identify him, and the government is compelled to seek help elsewhere.

For Captain Don Headley of the SAS, the police antiterrorist exercise on the outskirts of Heathrow Airport was to have been just another training job. But in the grey suburban sprawl on the edge of London, another far more sinister plot is about to unfold - a plot that sees him dispatched on a hostage-rescue mission to the Indian subcontinent.