Daring David

Before a single copy of his first novel had been sold, David Mason was paid $1 million for the film rights by James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli. Shadow over Babylon, which will be published in the United States this month by Dutton, is in the tradition of Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, and comes with an appendix containing ballistics information for gun-culture enthusiasts. It tells the story of a Scottish deerstalker marksman recruited to a team of ex-military personnel for a freelance mission to assassinate Saddam Hussein in his hometown of Tikrit. Mason was inspired to write the book after pondering his then 10-year-old daughter's inquiry during the Gulf War: "Papa, why don't they just kill Saddam?''

"I quite enjoy the solitude of writing,'' says the Britisharmy veteran, comparing it to the isolation of certain military roles. "If you're a sniper or in an observation post and you're spending days not talking and barely moving, you have to live off your own resources." The 42year-old Old Etonian, landowner, trained sniper, and former Welsh Guards captain was decorated for bravery during his secondment to the Sultan of Oman's army in the 1970s. After leaving the British army in 1979, Mason joined Sir Ranulph Fiennes's Transglobe Expedition, and Fiennes, in his fact-based thriller, The Feather Men, named Mason as one member of a group whose unofficial role was to monitor possible revenge threats to ex-military personnel. "Killing someone who is a long way away is much more impersonal, though rather more deliberate, than killing someone who's charging at you with a Kalashnikov blazing," Mason observes, "and I have done both."

CHRISTOPHER SILVESTER