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The chronology:

Bunkeya: The main thrust of this story takes place in 1964 and sees Danny drawn into the brutal mercenary war in the Belgian Congo. There he experiences something that sets the tone for much of his future life. But Bunkeya is also the secret story of how Red China may have got 'The Bomb'...
Secret History, you see?

Pedro Miguel: Moving on to 1971. This book is a direct sequel to Bunkeya, and finds Danny trying to cast a veil over his past by taking a job as an officer in the Merchant Navy. It is also the forgotten history of how Lin Biao and his family plotted to remove Mao Tse Tung from power. (That's what we called China's leader at the time, but now that gentleman is better known as 'Mao Zedong').

Kola: We now jump forward to 1975. Danny is still at sea, but it seems there's nobody else who has precisely the right background and skills to undertake a particular mission. (Fifty years on, we forget that the mid-70s was rather a tense time between the Warsaw Pact and NATO.) Also at that time, Britain's smoky industries were getting the blame for killing off the forests in Scandinavia ('Acid Rain' - remember that?) so some of us were beginning to be quite concerned about pollution and all that stems from it. The trouble was that there were parts of the world where they didn't care a kopek for that all stuff - and possibly still don't - so maybe forest death wasn't entirely Britain's fault, after all...

Tabarin: There are two strands to this story - a 1944 strand, involving the hunt for a particular U-boat, and a 1982 strand which drags Danny in, on the edge of a secret mission in Patagonia. When the Falklands crisis blows up, Danny is working in a backwater at the U.K. Ministry of Defence. He insists he's had enough of secret missions, but (like many of us) he gets wheedled into doing something that he'd rather not be involved in.

Kantubek: The fifth book in the series brings us up to 1989. Danny is back at the MoD, but his lonely life is just about to change for the better - as long as he can survive, that is. Problems at work caused by promoting mini-Hitlers to managerial grades are laughably insignificant when weighed against what the real international dictators are up to. Germ warfare, genocide, unprovoked aggression... The psychopaths seem to be in charge. But what can Danny do?

Book 6: Life just gets busier and busier, doesn't it? (In other words, please be patient...)

A P Handley, May 2024