cover image The Sixteen: The Covert Assassination Squad That Went Beyond the SAS

The Sixteen: The Covert Assassination Squad That Went Beyond the SAS

John Urwin. Vision, $24.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-1-904132-14-1

According to this improbable memoir, The Sixteen were an""untraceable"" British military assassination team operating in the 1950s, so secretive that even the author, a member, knew little about them. The hallmarks of The Sixteen were a supposedly invincible martial arts system known as""the machine,"" an eccentric weapons kit, including""the sash,"" a belt-cum-weapon capable of""ripping three or four men to pieces in a few seconds,"" and""One Step Beyond,"" a""fear elimination process"" consisting of a protracted, disorienting existentialist lecture on the meaning of life. Urwin, now the proprietor of a""survival and unarmed combat club,"" says he went on several missions to the Middle East to murder various political, military and terrorist figures, whom he doesn't to name. He treats it all as a thrilling rite of passage out of a working-class youth and into the company of""real men,"" who recruit him by means of mysterious assignations and periodically spring him from the of his regular-army unit to go on glamorous overseas escapades. The book's tone of jaunty, school-holiday adventurism and its very British preoccupation with secret societies, tea drinking and sudden elevation from humble origins to elite status all bring to mind a possible Harry Potter and the Special Ops Commandos. Unfortunately, Urwin is no J. K. Rowling, and the narrative bogs down in slack pacing and interminable stretches of expository dialogue. Readers who accept Urwin's verbatim recall of lengthy conversations from 45 years ago may buy the rest of his wild tale.