Red Adair is now a multimillionaire, but he has worked his way up from a poor childhood in Houston where he spent years on the railways and on bomb-disposal before becoming an expert on oil-well firefighting. This is an account of his heroic life fighting fires all over the world - the 800-foot Devil's Cigarette Lighter in Algeria, fires in the giant wells of the Awaz Field in Iran, the sabotaged wells of Sumatra and Libya, and most recently, the Piper Alpha explosion in the North Sea.