ULTIMATE WEAPON

Two veterans of the British Special Air Service reluctantly join forces to rescue the beautiful young scientist at the center of their lives.

U.K. bestselling author and former SAS commander Ryan (Firefight, 2008, etc.) taps into his military experience to create riveting action sequences. Unfortunately, the plot can’t support the velocity of Ryan’s writing. His hero is Nick Scott, a disgraced Gulf War veteran broken under torture. After the death of his wife, this defeated soldier hires himself out to protect Algerian oil rigs, sending what money he can to his daughter Sarah, a gifted Cambridge University physicist. Just as he’s arrived home to London in early 2003, he finds that Sarah has disappeared, leaving an unlikely 100,000 pounds in her bank account. Scott’s search is paralleled by the experiences of SAS soldier Jed Bradley, Sarah’s off-again boyfriend. His first mission is to lead a bloody raid on a suspected weapons facility, trying to find WMDs to justify the invasion of Iraq. Following the money in Sarah’s account, Nick discovers an implausible scenario involving his daughter’s invention of a viable cold-fusion method and a sinister cabal of scientists and terrorists who have secreted her away to Baghdad. “You know my daughter’s been kidnapped by Saddam Hussein?” asks Nick in one of several dated references. Against all logic, Nick and Jed are chosen by their government’s intelligence service to lead a hell-for-leather raid on the Republican Palace to save Sarah. Ryan’s continental debut doesn’t match the substance of Andy McNab’s Nick Stone novels, but its breathless pace and frenetic firefights make for an engaging diversion.

An animated thriller, originally published in the United Kingdom in 2006, that promises ample entertainment for Military Channel junkies.