Aggressor
Page 36
Before Girling knew it, he was under the swirling downdraught of the helicopter’s rotors. The stretcher was on the ramp, the orderlies standing slightly back. Girling knelt and the Sword reached out and touched his arm.
‘So you get to go home after all,’ Girling said.
‘Yes. There is much to do.’ His watery eyes twinkled. ‘And you, Tom Girling?’
Girling wrapped his fingers around the gnarled hand. ‘Me too.’
As Girling walked back to the island, he heard the helicopter lift off and turn south.
He did not look back.
COPYRIGHT
PUBLISHED BY APOSTROPHE BOOKS LTD
www.apostrophebooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-908556-09-7
First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Macmillan London Limited
Digital edition 2012 by Apostrophe Books Ltd
Copyright © Nick Cook 1991 & 2012
The author has asserted his ownership of the electronic rights and his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologise for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Cook has enjoyed an eclectic and varied career as an author, journalist, broadcaster and entrepreneur, all of it underpinned by his passion for aviation, history and technology.
Starting out as a cub-reporter for the trade publication Interavia in the mid-1980s, where he learned about the business of the international aerospace industry from the ground up, Nick subsequently joined the world renowned Jane’s Defence Weekly, initially as a reporter, rising quickly to become Aviation Editor, a position he held until 2001.
It was during his first years at Jane’s that Nick started to write books, his first novel, Angel, Archangel, being published in the UK and the US in 1989 to critical acclaim. Angel, Archangel was the culmination of Nick’s lifelong interest in combat aviation, and especially the aerial history of World War 2, and allowed him to indulge something that he was never able to do in the dry analysis of his day-job – combining story-telling with history in the formulation of the ‘what-if’ thriller.
Angel, Archangel is a classic what-if, postulating what British Intelligence might have done had the Soviets decided to push on to the English Channel against the Western Allies, instead of halting the Red Army’s advance at Berlin in May 1945. It tells the story of a maverick pilot, drafted by Britain’s spymasters to take out the architect of the Soviet assault plan in a daring bombing raid using an advanced Nazi jet bomber, the Arado 234 – the only aircraft capable of penetrating the Soviet defences.
In 1991, Nick followed up with his second novel, Aggressor, which was set in the turbulent world of the contemporary Middle East. In this, US and Russian special forces secretly combine to hunt down and kill a rogue fundamentalist Islamic spiritual leader who is linked to a series of terrorists outrages – many years before anyone had ever heard of Osama Bin Laden. With the post-Cold War 1990s a period of high demand at Jane’s, Nick throttled back on his book-writing career, ghost-writing a number of Sunday Times bestsellers whilst simultaneously delivering a series of exclusives for Jane’s, several of which – a second, secret hostage rescue mission in Iran and first-ever pictures of the near-mythical Soviet ‘Caspian Sea Monster’ – made headline news around the world.
In 2001, Cook’s first non-fiction title, The Hunt For Zero Point, was published, reaching number 3 in the Amazon General List and Number 1 in Amazon’s Non-Fiction charts. THFZP was the culmination of a decade’s investigation into a heretical notion – the idea that anti-gravity technology could have been buried under decades of secret development work – and allowed Nick to give readers, via a mass-market publication, a behind-the-scenes tour of the world of classified military development – a world that he had got to know well via his research and writing for Jane’s. THFZP also introduced readers to the all-too-real and mercurial war criminal, Hans Kammler, an SS general, long forgotten by history, who developed the Nazis’ most secret weapons technology and who disappeared off the face of the earth at the end of the war.
After writing, hosting and producing two documentaries about the classified world of aerospace and defence – Billion Dollar Secret and An Alien History of Planet Earth, for the Discovery/C5 and History/C4 channels respectively – Nick continued to work for Jane’s as its Senior Aerospace Consultant and penned a number of other top-selling ghost-written works.
In 2008, he used his knowledge of the global aerospace and defence industry’s science and technology base to set up Dynamixx, a consultancy dedicated to the formulation and implementation of strategies that transition A&D industry technologies to global challenges ‘beyond defence’ – starting with clean energy and the environment, but extending into natural disaster prevention and response and humanitarian relief. He is currently working with A&D companies, governments, banks, clean-tech organisations and venture capitalists to roll out plans that see A&D industry technology transitioned to these markets, providing technical solutions to challenges that are urgent but currently insoluble.
He lives and works with his wife and two children in London.