What if terrorists had weapons of mass destruction and they were aiming them right at Australia? This chilling scenario is at the centre of Sword of Allah.

SAS soldier Sergeant Tom Wilkes is in Papua New Guinea on protective escort duty when he comes across a drug runner exchanging weapons for drugs with a Highland tribe. Intrigued, he trails the smuggler, knowing he is onto something big. Just how big, though, is beyond his expectations.

In Indonesia, a terrorist organisation called Babu Islam has a camp where its members prepare for their work. Their drug running enterprise is a revenue raiser, to fund their work in ridding the world of infidels. To do this they need time, expertise and the chemical weapons which have come their way and now wait to be utitlised.

Tom Wilkes, who we first met in Rollins' earlier offering Rogue Element, is on the trail of Babu Islam, but he cannot work alone. Only an international effort - involving Wilkes' SAS, other Australian bodies, the CIA, even the Indonesian Kopassus, who Wilkes' was up against in Rogue Element - can have any chance of tracking down the terrorists and averting a massive disaster.

From a slightly slow begining, Sword of Allah gathers momentum as it marches towards its climax. Australian readers will find it especially confronting, with the country's preparations for the likelihood of attack and the reality of its unpreparedness a thought-provoking aspect of the book. It is a scenario which will have readers squirming, even as they keep turning pages, unable to put the book down.

Frighteningly real.

Sword of Allah, by David A. Rollins
Macmillan, 2004

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