Jerry Mitchell, aboard an Ohio SSGN, goes on a mission to extract two
Iranians with knowledge of the nuclear weapons programme from that
country. Mild spoilers will follow.
Carlson continues to impress. I'm no longer in any doubt about
who's writing these books; I've read Bond when he tries to write Arabs
(in The Enemy Within and Day of Wrath), and they just come over as
cackling villains, sometimes under a deceptive mannered façade; this
is on a whole different level.
As in Cold Choices, things start out well and rapidly go horribly
wrong. Technical malfunctions and smart Iranian security forces turn a
simple extraction operation into a multi-day nightmare. Also as in
Cold Choices, the characters are at least two and a half
dimensional. The two Iranians have reasons for having turned traitor,
and aren't entirely happy about leaving their country and families
behind; the various other Iranians have motivations for doing what
they do, and some are more competent than others; but most remarkable
of all for a book published in the USA to appeal to military fans,
Israel is presented less as a good friend and more as a dangerous
ally, prone to fly off the handle and follow the path to war laid out
for it by the Iranians.
To be honest, there's less submarining than I'd like, though there's a
good battle scene near the end; the bulk of the book sees Mitchell
ashore with a SEAL squad, and while the writing is good and tension is
maintained I'd been expecting a bit more by way of naval warfare.
There is however an excellent sequence from the point of view of one
of the Iranians, in which he's bracing himself for a protracted
firefight… and it's then over in a few seconds. On the other hand,
several of the good guys come across as surprisingly defeatist and
even whiny.
On the political level it feels a bit more simplistic, with characters
who seem to exist mostly to explain viewpoints and basic international
politics. Similarly the flashback sequence that explains how Mitchell
now comes to be married feels rather like the author saying "oops,
forgot to put anything about this in the last book".
Plenty of tech porn, particularly the Cormorant UAV, and Carlson
remembers that he's not writing in the 1980s or 1990s; this is very
much a post-Cold-War book, where the speed with which information is
learned and passed around can be more important than the speed of a
boat.
For me, not quite as good as the first two, but certainly still
enjoyable.
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