Showing results by narrator "Paul Thornley" in All Categories

"So if you can’t find a helicopter anywhere in Sierra Leone for a lift-out, you’d better order up four body bags instead.” Spider Shepherd and his SAS mates are stranded, low on rations and ammunition, waiting for a ride to Freetown before they are overrun by rebels. Upon their return to the capital, they are pressed into service by MI6, tasked with destroying a rebel arms dump. But to do this, they must wade through infested swamps and face rebel soldiers. Many of the soldiers are boys.

When an ISIS bombmaker arrives at Heathrow Airport asking for asylum in exchange for revealing details of his paymasters, Shepherd is given the case. The bombmaker specialises in drone strikes, and homegrown jihadists that he has trained are already back in the UK, planning their attacks. But before he'll agree to talk, the terrorist insists that his wife and son are rescued from a refugee camp in Turkey. Shepherd is tasked with bringing the family back to London, but he soon discovers that dark forces are out to stop him. And if he fails, hundreds will die.

Somalia - a lawless, violent land, ignored by the West, ripped apart by civil war and famine, fought over by drug-fuelled, gun-crazy clan fighters. They want the world to sit up and take notice. They have a new and terrifying weapon - pirates. And now, the pirates have in their possession the young son of a Russian oligarch, snatched from a luxury yacht in the Seychelles. His father wants him back, will pay anything, stop at nothing to retrieve his boy. Up to now everything he has tried has failed.

Ex-deniable operator Nick Stone seems to be living his dream, not a care in the world as he steers his camper van round the surfing and parachuting paradise of Australia, a board on the roof, a freefall rig behind him, and a beautiful young backpacker at his side.But when he sees a news report of the massacre of women and children in a terrorist outrage the other side of the world, long-suppressed memories are triggered, and Nick knows he must risk everything to repay a longstanding debt of friendship.

When the beautiful 20-year-old daughter of a Moldovan businessman goes missing from her university, British Intelligence are unusually interested in her safe return. They will do anything in their power to track her down. Only one man is skilled and ruthless enough for the job - but for the first time in his life, Nick Stone doesn't want to play ball.

Ex-special forces soldier Nick Stone is recuperating in Switzerland. His latest mission cost the life of one of his closest friends. And the woman he went to bed with last night has left without saying goodbye. When she fails to reappear, Stone begins his quest to find her. Once in Africa and in the heart of a very dirty Congo war, it isn't long before the past comes knocking on the door.

If Nick Stone wasn't so desperate for his American citizenship, he probably wouldn't have agreed to do this one last job with the CIA. But Carrie is over there and he simply can't refuse the chance of a new life with the woman he loves.The job seems simple enough - and he is certainly skilled enough. Infiltrate the hostile, violent republic of Algeria, kill a money-laundering businessman, and bring back his severed head.

Dan 'Spider' Shepherd's career path - soldier, policeman, MI5 officer - has always put a strain on his family. So he is far from happy to learn that MI5 is using teenagers as informants. Parents are being kept in the dark and Shepherd fears that the children are being exploited. As an undercover specialist, Shepherd is tasked with protecting a 15-year-old schoolboy who is being used to gather evidence against violent drug dealers and a right-wing terrorist group. But when the boy's life is threatened, Shepherd has no choice but to step in and take the heat.

Outside of Pakistan, the world's highest concentration of al-Qaeda lurks in Southeast Asia and there, Nick Stone's bosses get wind of an act of terror that will dwarf even the nightmare of 9/11. When Stone is dispatched to Malaysia by the CIA to assassinate a biochemist, he expects his mission to be a straightforward part of the fight against Bin Laden. But there are complications, not least because he is working alongside an attractive woman whose motives he doesn't fully understand.

When a young trooper is shot in the head at the Regiment’s renowned Killing House, Nick Stone is perfectly qualified to investigate the mysterious circumstances more deeply. He has just returned from Moscow – still trying to come to terms with the fact that his girlfriend and baby son are safer there without him – so combines an unrivalled understanding of the Special Forces landscape with a detachment that should allow him to remain in cover.

Not all terrorists are driven by religion or politics. Dan "Spider" Shepherd and his SAS team are on the trail of a terrorist whose motives are much more personal. Sabit Kusen wants revenge and doesn’t care how many innocents he kills along the way. Shepherd and his team hunt their quarry around the world - from Athens to Paris to Zurich to Singapore and on to Sydney - but the elusive Kusen is always one step ahead of them. Can Shepherd catch Sabit Kusen before he carries out his most audacious attack? And does he have what it takes to pull the trigger to end the fanatic’s reign of terror?

When Navy SEALS track down and kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, it's obvious there was a traitor on the inside. After the false friends are revealed to be two British students, Malik and Chaudhry - former Islamic fundamentalists recruited by MI5 - they become targets themselves. Dan 'Spider' Shepherd must teach the pair how to survive undercover with al-Qaeda closing in. But Spider is not used to playing the handler.

South Armagh, 1989: cheering mobs stand over the body of a British soldier. He is the ninth to have been killed by the so-called Border Fox, an IRA sniper whose activities have helped make this area of the United Kingdom the most feared killing ground in Western Europe. The British government is determined to break the tightly knit South Armagh Brigade of the IRA before more lives are lost.

Murderous jihadists have been crossing the English Channel, passing themselves off as asylum seekers. MI5 have been keeping them under surveillance, but what starts as a simple terrorist takedown goes badly wrong, and dozens of innocent civilians are killed in the heart of London. And the screw is tightened when a bomb takes out senior members of the Secret Intelligence Service.

Jack Nightingale found it hard enough to save lives when he was a cop. Now he needs to save a soul – his sister's. But to save her he has to find her and they’ve been separated since birth. When everyone Jack talks to about his sister dies horribly, he realises that someone, or something, is determined to keep them apart. If he's going to save his sister, he's going to have to do what he does best - negotiate. But any negotiation with the forces of darkness comes at a terrible price.

Two murders, thousands of miles apart: one in London, one in Bangkok. The bodies brutally mutilated: an ace of spades impaled upon their chests. In Washington, a US senator receives photographs of the corpses. And realises that his past has come back to haunt him. Nick Wright is the detective trying to solve the mystery of the double killing.

When a murdered young girl miraculously returns to life saying she's spoken to God, it's clear that sinister forces are at play. And when those who speak to her inexplicably commit suicide shortly afterwards, Nightingale is called in. He discovers a demon has possessed the girl's body…and the only way to banish it is to kill her. And that's not all he has to deal with. After a farmer kills eight people before turning the gun on himself, the press label him as a Satanist.

Out on the ice, polar bears aren't the only natural born killers. Nick Stone is suffering. The two people he cared for most are gone. Thousands of miles away, five ex-servicemen, badly wounded in Afghanistan, are preparing for a trek to the North Pole in an attempt to begin to rebuild their shattered bodies and minds. When Stone is summoned as close protection for the trek by an old SAS officer, he accepts unthinkingly, desperate for the chance to escape his own misery.

Teenagers are being possessed and turning into sadistic murderers. Priests can't help, nor can psychiatrists. So who is behind the demonic possessions? Jack Nightingale is called in to investigate and finds his own soul is on the line.

El Narco is the story of the ultraviolent criminal organizations that have turned huge areas of Mexico into a combat zone. It is a piercing portrait of a drug trade that turns ordinary men into mass murderers, as well as a diagnosis of what drives the cartels and what gives them such power. Veteran Mexico correspondent Ioan Grillo traces the gangs from their origins as smugglers to their present status as criminal empires.