First into action again

First Into Action Again is the second volume of Duncan Falconer's autobiography, following First Into Action. It starts where that book stopped, with Falconer leaving the Special Boat Service after many adventures. What followed was a new life that brought even more exploits than his SBS years, and he was often once again the first into action.

Within days of his departure he was recruited by a company that carried out specialised tasks, many of them passed down from Ministry of Defence sources. In one, he went alone into the hills of northern Spain for many months to train Basque police recruits as an anti-terrorist force against the terrorist organisation ETA. In another, from British military intelligence, he worked as a lone undercover operator aboard the QE2 during a terrorist threat on a crossing from Southampton to New York.

He also describes escorting well-known figures and film crews into dangerous places. He took Ted Turner, Kofi Annan and Tony Bourdain into Palestine and shook hands with Yasser Arafat. He led Anderson Cooper into the mountains of the Congo in search of a rebel general, took a CNN crew into the heart of battle in Liberia, and flew to Human Rights Watch in Moscow to help it handle a piece of information so dangerous it threatened everyone involved.

Falconer says he has survived five explosions, two of them narrowly, and has been shot at many times, chased by machete wielders and hunted by men and animals. He has survived a near drowning, a faulty parachute, an air crash and several vehicle crashes, and has blacked out from anaphylactic shock, walked through a minefield, and narrowly escaped capture by fanatical terrorists when others were caught and executed. He has spent the last 15 years working in some of the most dangerous places on earth, and during that time he has also written 10 novels, most of them drawn from real experiences.