Table Of ContentCRISIS FOUR [030-011-4.5]
By: andy McNab
Category: fiction spies
Synopsis:
Andy McNab’s British intelligence agent, Nick Stone, is enough of a rebel to be
denied a permanent place on the SAS roster, but he’s dragooned into a freelance
assignment with an ultimatum from his former employers. He’s to find Sarah
Greenwood, a missing agent who’s thought to have defected from the service to
aid Muslim militants intent on blowing up the world, or go to prison and also
lose the only other female he’s ever loved besides Sarah: a 9-year-old girl whose
dead parents, Nick’s closest friends, left her in his care.
Nick manages to locate Sarah without much difficulty, but when he’s ordered to
kill her, he has a change of heart. The hunter turns into the hunted, as Nick and
Sarah flee her hiding place in the North Carolina woods and try to outwit the
police, the intelligence services, and a team of assassins directed by Osama bin
Laden. As they make their way to Washington to preempt a plan to kill Yasser
Arafat and Benjamin Netanyahu, Nick tries to sort out his conflicted feelings
about Sarah. Is she part of bin Laden’s team, a so-called runner who’s a threat to
the CIA and the SAS, or is she a loyal operative trying to outwit a highly placed
traitor in the White House?
Crisis Four is strong on its depiction of agents in the field; McNab excels at
describing every last detail of the hunt, the chase, the kill.
ALSO BY ANDY MCNAB
Nonfiction
BRAVO TWO ZERO
IMMEDIATE ACTION
Fiction REMOTE CONTROL
‘mi Hem
BALLANTINE BOOKS
NEW YORK
A Ballantine Book The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright 1999 by Andy McNab
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc.” New York. Originally published in
Great Britain by Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers, in 1999.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www. random house. com/BB/ Library of Congress Card Number:
00-190285
ISBN 0-345-42807-2
Manufactured in the United States of America First American Edition: July 2000
10 987654321
IN MEMORY OF EDWARD C.S. HOOPER
OCTOBER 30, 1979-APRIL 15, 1999
CRISIS FOUR
TMOmV, OCTOBER 16. 1995
The Syrians don’t fuck around if they think you’re invading their air space.
Within minutes of crossing the border, your aircraft will be greeted by a three-
ship intercept, flying so close you can wave at the pilots. They won’t wave back;
they’ve come to get a visual ID on you, and if they don’t like what they see
they’ll hose you down with their air to-air missiles.
he same rule doesn’t apply, of course, when friendly commercial aircraft blip
onto their radar screens, and that was why our team of four had opted for this
particular method of infiltration. If Damascus had had the slightest clue about
what was about to happen aboard our British Airways flight from Delhi to
London, their fighters would have been scrambled the moment the Boeing 747
left Saudi Arabian territory.
I was twisting and turning, trying to get comfortable, feeling jealous of all the
people sitting upstairs behind the driver, probably on their fifth gin and tonic
since take off, watching their second movie and tucking into their third helping
ofboeufen croute.
Reg 1 was in front of me. Six feet two, and built like a brick shithouse, he was
probably having an even worse time in the cramped conditions.
His curly black hair, going a bit gray at the sides, was all over the place. Like
me, before I left in ‘93, he had been selected to do work for the intelligence and
security services, including the sort of job for the U.S.
that Congress would never sanction. I had done similar jobs myself while in the
Regiment, but this was the first I’d been on since becoming a K. Given who we
were going in against, none of us was giving odds on whether we’d get to do
another.
I glanced across at Sarah, to my right in the semidarkness. Her eyes were closed,
but even in the dim light I could see she wasn’t looking her happiest. Maybe she
but even in the dim light I could see she wasn’t looking her happiest. Maybe she
just didn’t like flying without complimentary champagne and slippers.
It had been a while since I’d last seen her, and the only thing about her that had
changed was her hair. It was still very straight, almost Southeast Asian, though
dark brown, not black. It had always been short, but she’d prepared for this
operation by having it cut into a bob with a fringe.
She had strong, well-defined features, with large brown eyes above high
cheekbones, a nose that was slightly too large, and a mouth that nearly always
looked too serious. Sarah would not be troubled in her old age by laughter lines.
When it was genuine, her smile was warm and friendly, but more often it
appeared to be only going through the motions. And yet, just when you were
thinking this, she’d find the oddest thing amusing and her nose would twitch,
and her whole face would crease into a radiant, almost childlike, grin. At times
like that she looked even more beautiful than usual maybe too beautiful. That
was sometimes a danger in our line of work, as men could never resist a second
glance, but at thirty-five years of age she had learned to use her looks to her
advantage within the service. It made her even more of a bitch than most people
thought she was.
It was no good, I couldn’t get comfortable. We’d been on the aircraft for nearly
fifteen hours and my body was starting to ache. I turned and tried the left side. I
couldn’t see Reg 2, but I knew he was to my left in the gloom somewhere. He
was easy to distinguish from Reg 1, being the best part of a foot shorter and with
hair that looked like a fistful of dark-blond wire wool. The only thing I knew
about them apart from their zap numbers was that, like me, they had both been
circumcised within the last three weeks and that, like mine, their underwear
came from Tel Aviv. And that was all I wanted to know about them, or about
Regs 3 to 6 who were already in-country, waiting for us even though one of
them, Glen, was an old friend.
I found myself facing Sarah again. She was rubbing her eyes with her fists, like a
sleepy child. I tried to doze off; thirty minutes later I was still kidding myself I
was asleep when I got a kick on the back of my legs. It was Sarah.
I sat up in my sleeping bag and peered into the semidarkness. Three
CRISIS FOUR 5
