Andy McNab's British intelligence agent, Nick Stone, is enough of a rebel to be denied a permanent place on the SAS roster, but he's dragooned into a freelance assignment with an ultimatum from his former employers. He's to find Sarah Greenwood, a missing agent who's thought to have defected from the service to aid Muslim militants intent on blowing up the world, or go to prison and also lose the only other female he's ever loved besides Sarah: a 9-year-old girl whose dead parents, Nick's closest friends, left her in his care. Nick manages to locate Sarah without much difficulty, but when he's ordered to kill her, he has a change of heart. The hunter turns into the hunted, as Nick and Sarah flee her hiding place in the North Carolina woods and try to outwit the police, the intelligence services, and a team of assassins directed by Osama bin Laden. As they make their way to Washington to preempt a plan to kill Yasser Arafat and Benjamin Netanyahu, Nick tries to sort out his conflicted feelings about Sarah. Is she part of bin Laden's team, a so-called runner who's a threat to the CIA and the SAS, or is she a loyal operative trying to outwit a highly placed traitor in the White House? Crisis Four is strong on its depiction of agents in the field; McNab excels at describing every last detail of the hunt, the chase, the kill. One can almost see this former SAS agent replaying scenes from his own past and struggling to get them right: I raise