Survive to Fight

Matt Mason left the SAS under a cloud and is now working on a game reserve in Kenya, training locals to count the increasingly organised, vicious poachers who value elephants only for their ivory, butchering whole herds and setting traps for anyone who tries to prevent them escaping with the bloodstained tusks. After a devasting raid on the reserve, Mason sets off in pursuit but is caught in an ambush that badly injures one of his men, leaving Mason with no choice but to head for the nearest hospital, an inconvenient 300 miles away, but not before he is able to obtain a snippet of information that might lead him to those behind the killings.

Mason soon finds himself caught up in the conflict ravaging the area as groups of Somali-based jihadists from a fundamentalist group known as Al-Shabaab are attacking the local people in coastal towns, killing and looting indiscriminately. Matt Mason never feels more alive than when he’s in a fight for his life, but on this occasion, he might have bitten off a good deal more than even he can chew. He’s also not expecting to find out that his daughter Joanna, who’s just graduated from naval college in England, has been kidnapped by Somali pirates in a raid on a billionaire’s yacht she was crewing for the summer.

Billy Billingham’s ex-SAS tough guy immediately has something going for him that so many of his fictional counterparts seem to lack – he’s not off his head on booze or drugs all the time, and apart from a divorce and a slightly dodgy exit from Her Majesty’s armed forces, he’s not even lugging around too much emotional baggage. Frankly, Mason could probably manage to fit his issues into the overhead locker on a Ryanair flight rather than filling the cargo hold of an RAF Hercules. I liked his compassion for the animals he’s been employed to protect and his ability to make friends in unlikely places. His love for his daughter is fierce and he’s not prepared to let anyone or anything stand in his way when it comes to getting her back.

Survive to Fight has a satisfying blend of international politics, local issues with wider ramifications, action scenes and human stories. And I cheered when it became clear that Joanna Mason was more than just a damsel in distress, she remembers the lessons her father taught her growing up, and she knows how to put them into practice to stay alive. Billingham vividly describes the plight of those caught up in the piracy and equally hard-hitting is the depiction of the casual disregard for life shown by those who trade not only in butchered ivory but also in trafficked human misery.

Billingham does play to stereotypes in one area, though, with the depiction of one of Mason’s former officers, James Beeby, now running a private security company specialising in negotiating hostage releases in piracy situations. There’s a tendency in the current crop of military thrillers to depict all commissioned officers in the SAS as upper-class idiots with a cut-glass drawl, out for themselves only, although in Survive to Fight, there is one decent former officer in the mix, which made a nice change.

As ever, there’s plenty of hardware on display, with just enough detail – coupled with a handy glossary of terms at the end – to inform without bogging down the action. This will almost certainly satisfy anyone with a craving for a relatively straightforward willy-waving thriller (as my co-editor dubs them) with a flawed but eminently likeable main character.