Marine I SBS: Escape from Azerbaijan

In 1995, in the aftermath of the First Gulf War, a defector from Saddam Hussein's Iraq makes contact with the Western press. He claims to have startling new information about an Iraqi nuclear weapons programme, but suddenly he disappears without a trace. Unwilling to risk a new war in the Gulf, the West disregards him as a fraud, but a key scientific advisor to the British government has other ideas.

When news of a hush-hush project on a converted rig in the Caspian Sea breaks with reports of another disappearance – this time of a nuclear missile expert – the threads of an international plot are unravelled. It soon becomes clear that there is only one group with the necessary skills to investigate: Britain's legendary Special Boat Squadron.

Marine I SBS: Escape from Azerbaijan finds the Squadron's finest in a corner of the old Soviet Union riven by war and lawlessness, fighting for survival against the sadistic intelligence agents of Saddam's Mukhabarat and the heirs of the KGB.

This is classic military fiction at its best.