Story based on my escape from an Italian POW camp while I was attached to the LRDG.
The story opens in the Western Desert a short while before the June 1942 advance by Rommel, which took the Axis to the outskirts of Alexandria.
Basil Holden, using a patrol truck from the Long range Desert Group as a taxi, is about to blow up a petrol dump deep in the desert and many miles behind enemy lines.
Although only 22 years of age, nearly three years of active service have endowed him with a maturity not often found in one so young. The special duties he undertook, invariably in enemy territory, had developed his natural self reliance into a sense of leadership which was to prove invaluable in the days to follow.