Still Standing

Still Standing - Matt Standing Series 03 (2023) Leather, Stephen The SAS are used to deaths during combat - it goes with the turf. But when one of their own is said to have committed suicide in Thailand, red flags are raised. Pete Green wasn't the sort of soldier who would ever take his own life - and no one is more sure of that than his twin brother, Davie. Davie is determined to fly to the Land Of Smiles to find out what really happened to his twin brother. But if he is going to find out the truth he'll need help - the sort of help only SAS Sergeant Matt Standing can provide. But soon after they arrive they come under attack, leaving Standing to investigate on his own. There are clearly people who want to shut down all enquiries and Standing knows he will have to use all his SAS jungle skills to survive. This will be the toughest of assignments but nothing will come between him and the truth. Also by Stephen LeatherPay OffThe FiremanHungry GhostThe ChinamanThe VetsThe Long ShotThe Birthday GirlThe Double TapThe Solitary ManThe Tunnel RatsThe BombmakerThe StretchTango OneThe EyewitnessFirst ResponseTakedownThe ShoutLast Man StandingThe RunnerThe HuntingSpider Shepherd thrillersHard LandingSoft TargetCold KillHot BloodDead MenLive FireRough JusticeFair GameFalse FriendsTrue ColoursWhite LiesBlack OpsDark ForcesLight TouchTall OrderShort RangeSlow BurnFast TrackDirty WarJack Nightingale supernatural thrillersNightfallMidnightNightmareNightshadeLastnightIf you’d like to find out more about these and future titles, visit www.stephenleather.com STILL STANDINGStephen Leather www.hodder.co.uk First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Hodder & StoughtonAn Hachette UK companyCopyright © Stephen Leather 2023The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British LibraryeBook ISBN 978 1 529 36753 9Hodder & Stoughton LtdCarmelite House50 Victoria EmbankmentLondon EC4Y 0DZwww.hodder.co.uk ContentsAlso by Stephen LeatherTitle PageCopyrightChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 24Chapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 28Chapter 29Chapter 30Chapter 31Chapter 32Chapter 33Chapter 34Chapter 35Chapter 36Chapter 37Chapter 38Chapter 39 CHAPTER 1Pete Green peered out of the Chinook’s window at the Syrian desert just a hundred yards below. At least he assumed it was the Syrian desert, the Chinook had taken off in Turkey and there had been no indication that he had crossed any border. There was just sand and rock, a forbidding landscape as alien as the moon.Green was the only SAS trooper in the cabin. He was in his late twenties, his fair skin tanned from overexposure to the fierce Middle Eastern sun that had bleached his mousy-brown hair. His eyes were a piercing blue and he had a tendency to smile when he was nervous. He was smiling now. The other nine men were Navy SEALs, armed to the teeth and ready for action.The Navy SEAL on his right winked at him. ‘You okay, Pete?’ His name was Jessie Dean Cooper but everyone called him JD. JD was tall and thin with olive skin and high cheekbones. His father was American but his mother – who had died giving birth to him – had been Vietnamese.‘I’m good, JD. Locked and loaded.’JD grinned and flashed him a thumbs up. JD had been Green’s buddy since he had first been embedded with the Navy SEALs. He had shown him the ropes during training at the SEALs’ base at Virginia Beach and had bunked with him on missions in Iraq and Syria.Green was on a three-month attachment with the Navy SEALs as part of a programme to increase cooperation between the two units. In return, the SEALs had sent one of their people over to Stirling Lines to be shown the British way of doing things. Both Green and the Navy SEAL in the UK were combat medics and Green had a full battlefield medical kit in his backpack.Sitting across from them was the highest-ranking officer on the Chinook – Lieutenant Ricky ‘Tom’ Hanks. But the operation was being overseen by a captain seven thousand miles away in Creech Air Force base in Nevada. Thousands of feet above the Chinook, circling in the darkness, was an MQ-9 Reaper drone which had been launched from the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey hours earlier. The Reaper was a beast of a drone with a twenty-metre wingspan and a top speed of almost five hundred kilometres an hour. Once the drone was in the air, control had been handed over to the ground control station in Nevada where Captain Joe Haschka functioned as the Mission Intelligence Co-ordinator, assisted by a pilot and sensor operator.The Reaper was carrying a minimum weapons payload, so it could stay up for almost thirty hours at an altitude of up to fifteen thousand metres. Long-term loitering is what they called it, which always made Green think of unsavoury characters hanging out on street corners. This Reaper was carrying two Hellfire missiles but they weren’t going to be used – it was a capture mission and the drone was there for surveillance only. Captain Haschka would be making any operational decisions. That was one of the things that Green had learned from his attachment – the Navy SEALs were all about command structure, whereas in the SAS it was the troopers who tended to call the shots once a mission was underway.The Chinook had been specially fitted out for the SEALs. It was the MH-47G variant and it came