IN the face of an increasing threat from extremists, fuelled by escalating conflict in the Middle East, western countries come together to form an anti-terrorist alliance. Not just events unfolding in and around Afghanistan, but also the plot of thrillers by former Royal Navy officer Paul Henke.

"The things I have written about are suddenly coming true," he says. "But it is one thing to have fiction and excitement in a book, it is an entirely different thing to have it for real. I saw there was an inevitability in the way the world was going, and it would end up with the sort of force I have created in fiction."

The former Lieutenant Commander, a specialist in mine and bomb disposal, developed the idea of an anti-terrorist squad in his novels Debacle and the newly-published Mayhem. Training at the Rosyth dockyard in Scotland, the multi-national unit is part of the fightback against terrorism.

"One of the problems they have is putting together all the intelligence they have about what is going on, and that seems to have been a problem in the current situation," he says. "The CIA don't talk to the FBI, MI5 and MI6 are forever at loggerheads, so what chance is there of the CIA talking to MI5?

"What we need to have is a co-ordinated intelligence gathering body that can then disseminate the information to a force that then gets them before they get us."

But he rejects the route favoured by some, of seeking to bring the terrorists behind the atrocity against the US to justice. "To have to operate within the rule of law and going to court, you have lost before you start," he says. "The civil liberties of our children are greater than the terrorists' civil liberties, because our children are not going to go out and kill anybody.

"I think we should go into Afghanistan with vast armies of aid, but, at the same time, we should have teams of five taking out individual terrorists. Unless we start doing that we will lose."

* Paul Henke will be signing copies of his books at Ottakar's in Darlington today 9.30am to 5.30pm.