An attack by a British destroyer on a German U-boat in the Eastern Mediterranean in October 1942 altered the course of the entire war. The capture of secret German Enigma coding material from U-559, at the cost of the lives of two of HMS Petard’s crew, enabled Bletchley Park's codebreakers to crack a new Enigma system introduced to cover a maximum U-boat offensive. After ten critical months with no U-boat signals intelligence available, this was the crucial factor in defeating Hitler’s Atlantic U-boat wolf packs before they could starve Britain into defeat in the winter of 1942-3. Had it been possible to release the facts of her triumph at the time, the name of HMS Petard would surely have ranked alongside that of Nelson's Victory in the annals of British history.

First published 1999 by Sutton Publishing, ISBN 0 7509 2316 4

Paperback edition (194 pp) published 2002 by Sutton Publishing ISBN 0 7509 3050 0

This provides the theme for a brilliant, fast-moving account of a struggle for power in a European country dominated by a veteran general, El Supremo, whose subordinates are watching and waiting to seize the succession. As in all good stories, unexpected twists keep shifting the focus of tension till the final ironic denouement is suddenly seen to be inevitable - a necessary end.

Stephen Harper, whose first novel this is, is the Chief Foreign Correspondent of the Daily Express. He has lived in many capitals including Madrid and Rome, both of which provide background for his fictional country 'Rospania'.

He has served as Moscow correspondent, has witnessed scores of military coups from Lisbon to Seoul, and has reported war in Vietnam, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent, as well as terrorism in Aden, Cyprus and elsewhere. Like Frederick Forsyth he has brought the first-hand skills of the reporter to the writing of an explosively contemporary piece of fiction.

© Stephen Harper 1975

First published 1975 by William Collins Sons & Co

ISBN 0 00 222105 5

Veterans of the Vietnam war, Washington Barber and his friend Dan Ledger settled for the opulent life-style of Saigon when their time was up. A prosperous business cemented the comradeship of war. Ledger's enchanting children by his beautiful Vietnamese wife rooted him even more firmly than his friend.

Barber is on an idyllic holiday with the English girl he has fallen in love with when the all too familiar sounds of battle break in. Defeat and collapse burst on the country out of a blue sky. The milling crowd at the local airport makes escape all but impossible. And when Saigon is at last reached, the enemy are hot on their heels. Worst of all Ledger has vanished into thin air. Barber has to shoulder the unexpected responsibility of getting his wife and children to safety. Not since Nevil Shute's Pied Piper has there been a more gripping story of shepherding the weak and helpless through dissolution and disaster.

The nightmare of a society that no longer takes tomorrow for granted is vividly realized. How long will anything work? The water in the taps, the electricity, the whole range of essential set vices that modern urban man has come to take for granted? How long will the Seventh Fleet be able to fly its helicopters in through the thickening flak and where will it be safe to land? When will the increasingly menacing crowds of frightened, betrayed, exhausted people finally turn on the helpless fugitives and find an outlet for their own frustration and desire for revenge? Stephen Harper's first-hand knowledge of war in general and Vietnam in particular give these passages an absorbing intensity.

© Stephen Harper 1977

First published 1977 by William Collins Sons & Co

ISBN 0 00 222405-4

What has happened to Aden? Why did we go there? Why did we leave? Since November 1967 when the last helicopter took off from the golf-course carrying the Royal Marine rearguard that had been covering the evacuation the last battle-scarred bastion of British power in the east has vanished from the news.

Yet, as Stephen Harper shows in this vivid and exciting book, the departure of the Imperial power has by no means inaugurated an era of satisfied tranquillity where each man lives peaceably under his own vine and his own fig tree. On the contrary, Aden has become the lair of international terrorists. In the church where the Governor used to read the lesson on Sundays recruits to such organisations as the Japanese Red Army or the Palestine Liberation Front attend courses in urban guerrilla tactics and the techniques of murder and kidnapping. Figures like Carlos and the disciples of the Baader Meinhof group enjoy a hospitality extended to the most vicious enemies of the human race.

The wheel has come full circle. Aden in the 1970s is in modern terms what it was in the 1830s when the East India Company reluctantly allowed an enterprising officer to obtain a lease from a minor sheikh - a nest of pirates.

Stephen Harper was frequently in Aden during the last ten years of the British presence, covering for the Daily Express the series of local wars and subversive activities by which Britain's enemies tried to prise her hold loose. As he shows from brilliant first-hand reporting the courage and skill of our forces rose to the most desperate occasions. Indeed Colonel Mitchell and the Argylls showed the world that urban violence could be met and mastered. It was not military quality but political will that was lacking.

Besides giving a lively account of the 129 years of British occupation Stephen Harper surveys the scene in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa as it is today and points to some little noticed and not unhopeful developments. His assessment of the double threat presented by Soviet seapower and Arab diplomacy to the oil supplies on which the Western economy is so dangerously dependent gives food for thought. But it is the people that interest him and will interest his readers: Arab sheikhs, revolutionary leaders, colonial administrators and policemen, above all soldiers and airmen whom he knew as only those who shared their dangers and hardships could. As a first-hand account of the final scenes of the Empire this book could hardly be bettered.

Stephen Harper was an eye-witness of the major events of Britain's demise from paramount power in the Middle East. As a foreign correspondent he described events as they made the news headlines. In Cairo at the height of the Suez Crisis of 1956, he reported at first hand every major development leading to the British withdrawal from East of Suez in the early seventies. His despatches, subject to censorship, official obstruction and deviousness, frequent physical exhaustion and sometimes horrified shock, appeared within hours on millions of breakfast tables. Now he writes of the last years of our Imperial story in continuous, reflective narrative against the wider perspective of its effect on subsequent events.

© Stephen Harper 1978

First published 1978 by William Collins Sons & Co

ISBN 0 00 216458 2

Forty years have passed since the first atomic bomb took the lives of 90,000 in Hiroshima on 6 August1945. It was an act of destruction deliberately calculated to be of such unprecedented frightfulness that it would shock the fanatical military rulers of Japan, with their policies of fighting to the last man, into immediate surrender.

In fact, the Japanese powers dismissed the world's first atomic attack as being less effective than earlier fire bomb raids on Tokyo, and they continued, even after a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, to demand that national honour required the entire population to fight on to the death. Miracle of Deliverance tells what a close run thing Japan's surrender was, and how it fell to the Emperor Hirohito, regarded there as a near-deity, to take upon himself alone the decision ‘to accept the unacceptable,’ and surrender.

Whilst this drama was being agonisingly played out in Tokyo, the Allied Supreme Commander in South-east Asia, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, was mounting a huge British invasion of Malaya and assault on Singapore, which had been humiliatingly wrested from the British in 1941. When surrender came the fleet was already at sea, and Mountbatten's D-Day went ahead over beaches so disastrously ill-chosen that the landings were bogged down in chaos even without Japanese resistance. ‘Operation Zipper’ would have been a bloodbath on the scale of Gallipoli in the First World War, had it happened under fire.

The British beach-head was to be followed by a mainly American invasion of the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu two months later, and then by a massive Allied invasion of the main island of Honshu in March 1946. Based on the known Japanese resolve to fight to the death in every battle, estimates of Allied casualties in a seizure of Singapore and an invasion of Japan exceeded half a million dead.

The survival of the many Allied fighting men - and the Japanese who must otherwise have died in millions - provides the phrase, miracle of deliverance, taken from Winston Churchill's expression of relief when he heard that an atomic weapon had been successfully developed.

The author, Stephen Harper, is one of thousands of men now in their sixties who have reason to believe that they owe the past forty years of living to the atomic bombs. He was twenty when he took part in the final operations described in the book. He was a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express for over twenty years, working in many world capitals. His postwar travels as a correspondent have taken him to Japan and most other countries in the area under their wartime domination.

© Stephen Harper 1985

First published 1985 by Sidgwick and Jackson Limited

ISBN 0 283 99282 4

His forthcoming book entitled, A Fatal Obsession - Women of Cho Oyu, a reporting saga, tells the story of how the only all-woman Himalayan expedition ended in tragedy in 1959. The Himalayas had been regarded as a male preserve for 60 years until Madame Claude Kogan, an elfin figure became obsessed with scaling a peak called Cho Oyu, at 26,750 feet the sixth highest mountain in the world. With a Swiss expedition led by renowned climber Raymond Lambert she climbed to within 1,354 feet of the summit when a bizzard broke and Lambert decided to turn back, overriding Madam Kogan's protests. She wrote later "I felt myself boiling with impotent rage, ready to dare anything if we could continue with the struggle. Although my reason saw it was the only logical decision to take, my heart refused to accept it. I didn't wish bow my head before the wind and snow that would must eventually hurl us back. ‘Don't turn back yet’ I gasped."

Thwarted by this male decision Madame Kogan, a beachwear designer in Nice, determined on leading an exclusively female expedition to the same mountain. She told a gathering of 50 British climbers at the Women's Alpine Club in London that women should look higher than the Alps and explained her plans to lead an all women expedition to Cho Oyu. Three of her British listeners joined the expedition along with women from France, Belgium, Switzerland, the two teenage daughters and a niece of Sherpa Tenzing who with Sir Edmund Hilary had been first to reach the summit of Everest 6 years before.

Madame Kogan's impatience to reach the summit during a break of fine weather before the end of Monsoon storms lead to her death along with star Belgian Alpinist Claudine van der Stratten and two male Sherpas.

The story is based on bundles of letters and notes the women sent to the author when he was assigned to cover the expedition for the Daily Express, plus the women's account of the summit attempt told him when he reached their base camp. The notes and photographs were in store through the many years he roved the world on other stories. This book was written because he discovered that no record of this unique all-women expedition existed.