Includes index

Face-to-face with terror -- Train to Pakistan -- Settling in Karachi -- Turkey : the formative years -- Home -- Leaving the nest -- The potter's wheel -- Into the fire -- Life in the fire -- Living through the dreadful decade -- From chief to chief executive -- The Kargil conflict -- Plan to Pakistan -- The conspiracy -- The countercoup -- Anatomy of suicide -- Pakistan first -- The quest for democracy -- Putting the system right -- Kick-starting the economy -- One day that changed the world -- Omar and Osama -- The war comes to Pakistan -- Manhunt -- Tightening the noose -- Al Qaeda in the mountains -- The symbiosis of terrorism and religion -- Nuclear proliferation -- International diplomacy -- The social sector -- The emancipation of women -- The soft image of Pakistan -- Leadership on trial : the earthquake -- Reflections

According to Time magazine, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf holds "the world's most dangerous job." He has twice come within inches of assassination. His forces have caught more than 670 members of al Qaeda in the mountains and cities, yet many others remain at large and active, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri. Long locked in a deadly embrace with its nuclear neighbor India, Pakistan has come close to full-scale war on two occasions since it first exploded a nuclear bomb in 1998. As President Musharraf struggles for the security and political future of his nation, the stakes could not be higher for the world at large. It is unprecedented for a sitting head of state to write a memoir as revelatory, detailed, and gripping as In the Line of Fire. Here, for the first time, readers can get a firsthand view of the war on terror in its central theater. President Musharraf details the manhunts for Osama and Zawahiri and their top lieutenants, complete with harrowing cat-and-mouse games, informants, interceptions, and bloody firefights. He tells the stories of the near-miss assassination attempts, not only against himself but against Shaukut Aziz (later elected prime minister) and one of his top army officers (later the vice chief of army staff), and of the abduction and beheading of Daniel Pearl -- as well as the forensic and shoe-leather investigations that uncovered the perpetrators. He details the army's mountain operations that have swept several valleys clean, and he talks about the areas of North Waziristan where al Qaeda is still operating

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