18 Hours

SAS signalman Jock Wallace was pumped. It was the start of Operation Anaconda, the US-led military offensive designed to flush out and destroy Al-Qaeda and the Taliban from their last stronghold in the notorious Shai Kot valley in Afghanistan. Jock was riding into battle alongside 80 troops of the US Army's 10th Mountain Division. If intelligence reports were correct, there were between 100 and 250 enemy fighters holed up in the extensive cave network buried in the mountain ridges around the valley. But reports can be wrong. Minutes after the combat-ready troops stormed down the rear ramps of the Chinook helicopters, Jock's company came under heavy fire from the high ground overlooking their position in a dry riverbed. Pinned down by nearly 1000 enemy fighters in what was later nicknamed Hell's Halfpipe, Jock and his American comrades stared eventual death in the face. Eighteen relentless hours of hell were just beginning. With machine-gun bullets kicking up the dust and rock around their feet, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades bursting among them, and with a quarter of the troops sustaining injuries, it seemed that the soldiers had been cut off and trapped. But there was no way Jock was going down without a fight. Nor were the men he was with. Holding off the enemy at close range, rescuing the injured, dodging the bullets, counterattacking alone, reporting to base, calling up air support - Jock gave all that he had, and more. And as dusk and the enemy began to close in, he was determined he was not going to die on foreign soil, not at the hands of al Qaeda...This is the gripping true story of how an elite SAS soldier fought the fight of his life against the world's deadliest terrorists in the most dangerous corner on earth and came out victorious, a saviour to his fellow troops and a decorated hero in his homeland. It is the clearest account yet of one of the fiercest engagements in the history of the special forces war on terror.