: Firewall

SUMMARY: 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... All freelances have problems when work dries up, but Nick Stone, hero of Andy McNab's second adventure thriller Firewall has worse problems than most of us. Expensively trained by the SAS, he now works for British Intelligence as a deniable operative, and he needs a regular income to take care of his responsibilities, which include psychiatric care for a traumatised orphan. He takes a lucrative mercenary job kidnapping a leading Chechen Mafioso; when the job goes sour, his victim is impressed by his grace under pressure and hires him to baby-sit a computer espionage expert on a jaunt into Finland. Not all is as it seems--Nick was engaged in wishful thinking to believe it was--and he finds himself adrift with little money and no weapons in Estonia in the dead of winter with a friend to rescue, the interests of the West to retrieve and, if possible, money to earn... This is an effective thriller because of the clash between its hero's competence and his less than entire brightness--Nick gets himself into messes and then gets out of them because of skills in combat, disguise and survival. This is a book filled with adrenaline-pumping excitement and a sense of bitterly cold places. Nick Stone sets out on a dangerous mission to return a Russian mob boss to St. Petersburg and soon finds himself caught up in international espionage