Two hundred miles south of the Devon coastline, a fanatical group of Islamic Jihad fighters have captured a supertanker laden with oil - and have set it on a course with an English coastal town. Stratton, SBS operative with a ruthless reputation, is given the all but impossable mission - to stop the terrorists and reclaim the ship.

But the battle for the tanker is just the beginning. When Zhilev, a former Russian Spetsnaz agent , learns his brother was killed on board, he sets about wreaking his devastating revenge: to push the West and the Islamic world into conflict until the fundamentalists are destroyed and his brother avenged. It is a plan that involves a muclear suitcase bomb, and an explosion that will turn an ancient city into very modern ruins - a plan that for everyone's sake, Stratton must somehow try to avert...