On the night of 22nd January 1991, at a remote airfield in Saudi Arabia, under cover of darkness and in conditions of the utmost secrecy, eight members of the SAS regiment boarded a helicopter that was to infiltrate them deep behind enemy lines.

Their call-sign was "Bravo Two-Zero", and their mission, under the command of Sergeant Andy McNab, was to sever the underground communication link between Baghdad and north-west Iraq, and to seek and destroy mobile Scud launchers before Israel was provoked into entering the war.

As a result of what followed, Bravo Two-Zero became what is believed to be the most highly decorated patrol since the Boer War.This is McNab's account of the mission - a chronicle of courage, endurance and dark humour in the face of extreme cold, enemy attack, capture, and torture of a savagery and relentlessness for which not even their intensive SAS training had prepared them.