SKIRMISH

In the never-ending war where only a select band of professionals were allowed to skirmish, McAlister had been marked down for execution""--by the KGB that is. Major Richard McAlister, the Dept. of Subversive Warfare's top agent in the Middle East, is nearly given the axe by his own people when he fails to protect a visiting sheik in London. Thereafter assigned to guard an unsuspecting witness to the assassins' identities--a twelve-year-old spastic child who photographed the killers and then accidentally exposed the film--the British operative soon falls for the boy's widowed mother (whose late husband himself was a DSW casualty). Alas, McAlister has to be set up in the south of France before he discovers that his bedmate is actually a vacillating Soviet sleeper agent. And so it goes. . . . Surprisingly predictable and uninvolving despite its abundance of surveillance teams and execution squads.