Centrifuge

J. C. Pollock is a mysterious figure; he published seven special forces/spy thrillers between 1982 and 1993 that are well-regarded by fans of the genre, then disappeared from the scene without a trace. I read his 1985 book, Crossfire, a while back and thought it was very good (note to self: post a review). He brought an insider's technical knowledge of special ops and espionage that strongly suggests he worked in those fields himself then decided to write fiction about it, sort of like an American Andy McNab for the 1980s. As Pollock's goodreads profile puts it:

He is a topic of speculation on the Internet and many suspect that he was a CIA agent attached to the SOG during the Vietnam War, but this has had not been confirmed or denied. It appears that his life is like the novels he wrote.

I decided to try Pollock's 1984 offering, Centrifuge, to see if was of a similar quality. 

As the story opens, Mike Slater is flying his small amphibious plane to a wilderness lake in northern Maine. He has been summoned there by his former special forces commander in Vietnam, colonel Brooks, who Slater hasn't seen since the final days of that war eight years earlier. Slater quickly learns that he was not invited there for the fishing, but to help Brooks with a potentially very serious national security problem. Brooks, who now works as the chief of security for a top secret defense research facility, can't reveal any details to Slater; he simply wants to show him some photographs and ask him if he recognizes the man shown. But just as Slater is about to look at the photos, a hidden assassin shoots the colonel with a sound-suppressed firearm and Slater never gets a look at them. Brooks does warn Slater before he dies that someone will come after him too, along with the other two survivors of his special forces unit in 'Nam. Slater instantly goes into survival mode, using the skills he learned as a Green Beret to evade, track and kill the assassins armed only with his survival knife. He manages to eliminate three of them, but one gets away and takes the photos with him. He finds German passports on the dead men, and as he is flying back to civilization, wonders what kind of dark shadows from his past have come back to stalk him.

It's an exciting start to the novel, suggesting a larger conspiracy and containing a level of detail about special ops procedures that was rare in thrillers of that era. Unfortunately, this opening scene is probably the best part of the book. After that we are introduced to some key players at Chestnut Ridge Farm, the facility where Brooks worked, as they try to discover who killed Brooks and tried to kill Slater, and why. We learn that Slater has retired from special forces and now runs a kennel where he trains attack and guard dogs. We also meet the Soviet mole inside the Farm, learn about his background, his history with SOG ("studies and observations group", a highly classified spec ops unit in Vietnam), his motivations for defecting to the Soviets, and his connection to Slater's last mission in 'Nam.

When one of the two remaining survivors of that mission is killed, Slater has no doubt that the other man, named Perkins, will be targeted soon. So he travels to Mexico to try to persuade him to join forces and fight back. Perkins is very skeptical and doesn't want anything to do with his shadow warrior past, but after they come under attack right on Perkins's boat he agrees to join Slater and leave Mexico immediately. The two men decide to make their stand at a remote cabin Slater owns on a lake in the Quebec wilderness. They stock up on automatic rifles, grenades, claymore mines and survival gear and fly to the lake. This sets up the novel's climactic confrontation between the two Green Berets and whoever is trying to kill them—presumably KGB assassins but possibly hostile elements of their own side as well. We're given a detailed account of how they prep the battlefield by setting booby traps, scouting escape routes and planning ambushes around the lake. 

The action scenes are interspersed with intrigue at the Farm, where the investigators are closing in on the suspected mole, the mole is making emergency contact with his handlers, the mystery of the mole's connection to Slater is being solved, devious schemes are being hatched, and everything hinges on whether or not Slater and Perkins win their war with the assassins. We also meet the elite twelve man Soviet commando team that is assembled to end Slater and Perkins once and for all. The final showdown at the cabin is tense and believable special ops action, with a twist ending that highlights a running theme of the book: when duplicitous spooks get involved in the wars of honorable soldiers, the soldiers usually lose.

This novel was about half special forces action and half espionage tradecraft and intrigue, showcasing Pollock's technical knowledge of both domains. But that was also its main flaw: at times it felt like I was reading a special forces or spycraft manual that had been turned into a novel. It got a little too by-the-numbers, predictable and technical, and lacked drama, personality and surprises. Fans of realistic, technical 1980s-era spec ops, spycraft and survivalism should enjoy the book, as long as you're OK with its limitations.

Get a copy of Centrifuge here.

Dark Winter

Most shadow-fiction (my catch-all term for fiction that features spies, assassins, special forces, terrorists and criminals) is penned by professional writers whose real-life experience with the world of shadow warfare is limited or non-existent. Andy McNab (pen name of Billy Mitchell) is a different story; he actually lived the life of a covert operator as a member of the SAS (elite British Special Forces) in the 1980s and early 90s. His most famous operation is recounted in his book Bravo Two Zero, which tells the story of a daring mission behind enemy lines in Iraq during the first Gulf War to gather intel about Saddam's Scud missile launchers.

In 1998, McNab published the first novel in his popular series about everyman commando Nick Stone. Like McNab, Stone served in the SAS in the 1980s and 90s, before becoming a deniable operator for MI6, known as a "K". Stone's missions range from personal protection and kidnapping to black bag jobs, sabotage and assassination. The level of authentic covert ops knowledge incorporated into the stories and the realism of the action were something exciting and new in the shadow-fiction world, and made them immediate bestsellers. I read the first five books many years ago and remember enjoying them quite a bit; I recently decided to read the next installment and see if I still felt the same.

Dark Winter is the 6^th book in the series, published in 2003, during the early days of the "War on Terror". As the story opens, Stone is in Malaysia with his fellow K operative, Suzy, and they're on the trail of a suspected al Qaeda scientist. The Firm (British Intelligence) has learned of a plot to unleash a bio-terror attack in the West, and Nick and Suzy are tasked with taking out the terrorist. This was an exciting start to the story; in typical McNab style, the first-person narrative is almost real-time, photographically detailed, and puts you right in the shoes of the shadow operator. However, the hit doesn't end the plot, and we soon learn that some bottles of a bio-terror pathogen have arrived in London, and given the code name Dark Winter. Stone, who had recently been working for the CIA and is now a US citizen, is called back into emergency service in the UK by his old boss, a very nasty piece of work he calls "Yes-Man". Stone is given an al Qaeda informant to meet, then an address to investigate where the bottles may be located. These operations are described in excruciating detail, as Stone takes every precaution to prevent being followed, noticed, attacked or infected by the pathogen.

Between the set pieces of Stone and Suzy carefully infiltrating enemy hideouts and taking out members of the  opposition, there are chapters devoted to the ongoing saga of Kelly, a girl Stone adopted after her family was brutally killed in the first book of the series, Remote Control. It seems that Kelly has developed a prescription drug habit and may be bulemic, and she still hasn't gotten over the trauma of her family's deaths. She is further traumatized by Nick always having to leave unexpectantly to go on missions, and this causes Nick a great deal of guilt, especially now as he is called away just when she was making good progress with a new therapist. 

Anyway, just when it seems that Stone and Suzy have delivered a fatal blow to the terrorist cell, the story takes a dark twist and Nick is forced to go to Berlin to deal with another cell. The full extent of the terrorist plot is revealed, and events race to a dramatic climax, which I won't spoil, except to say that it is rather shocking and very gripping reading. While there were several sections in the first few hundred pages that were slow going, the last 100 pages or so were classic Nick Stone action, and the ending was up there with a notorious early scene of Remote Control for it's brutal, realistic violence. McNab, more than any other author I can think of, never sugar coats the nature of real shadow warfare or feels obligated to provide a happy outcome.

As I was reading this book, I had two main criticisms: 1) the excessive level of detail about things that didn't seem very interesting or relevant to the story, and 2) the excessive attention to the personal drama between Nick and Kelly, which seemed like a distraction from the main terrorism thriller story line. But now that I've finished the book, I'm not so critical.

On point 1), the attention to Stone's mundane experiences—buying fast food, the trash on the street, couples shouting at each other in the next flat, etc.—might be dull at times, but the brilliant thing about it is that when Stone does go into action—infiltrating a building, tracking down a terrorist, killing enemy operatives, or what have you—it is much more believable and hard-hitting than the exploits of someone like Mack Bolan, who goes from battle to battle with few real-life details in between. With Stone, you always feel like you're looking through the eyes of a real shadow operator at work, not reading a men's comic book. On point 2), the drama with Kelly gives Stone some personality and something besides himself to care about. Without that, he would be a rather cynical, emotionless, self-centered robot who would be hard to sympathize with. The relationship with Kelly also turns out to be critical to the way this story plays out.

I should also mention that Suzy was a great partner for Nick, and in some ways was the star of the book. She's a special ops veteran with a background similar to Nick's, and her fearless, ultra-confident, adrenaline-junky personality saves his bacon on more than one occasion.

All in all, despite some slow parts in the middle, this is an exciting and intense thriller, highly recommended for fans of realistic shadow-fiction. Get a copy of Dark Winter here.

The Interlopers

After reading the first 11 books of the Matt Helm series, I was starting to lose some of my enthusiasm for the series. It was getting a little too formulaic, too cute, too much of a spy soap opera and not enough of a hard-edged espionage-adventure series. Helm is at his best when he is playing the rugged American outdoorsman and stone-cold killer, not when he is going from hotel room to hotel room engaging in flirty banter with an endless series of attractive young ladies like a lower-class cowboy James Bond. Fortunately the series got back on track with the 12^th installment, The Interlopers, published in 1969.

As the story opens, Helm is making his way down to the Columbia river before dawn, the lights of the Hanford Nuclear Site glowing in the distance, dressed as a fisherman and accompanied by a black lab. He has adopted the identity of a recently deceased Communist courier named Nystrom and is en route to a rendezvous with someone who will be passing him microfilmed documents about a top secret technology called the "Northwest Coastal System". This opening really hooked me, because I've been in a similar spot across from the Hanford site on a stealth mission myself (in fact I've paddled across the river and infiltrated the restricted zone—but the less said about that the better). Anyway, Helm soon encounters a leggy blonde fisherwoman who doesn't quite get the recognition phrase right and doesn't have any documents for him, but she does lure him to a place where he becomes a target for a sniper. Apparently there is a third party, in addition to Helm's side and the Communist spies; unknown interlopers who are also trying to get the secret documents Helm is after.

It turns out the operation to receive the microfilm is actually a gambit; Helm's cover was intentionally made shoddy in order to let the opposition know that Helm is operating as Nystrom. The main mission is to lure a top enemy assassin named Holz onto his trail so Helm can take him out. Helm's agency has learned that Holz is in the states on a deadly mission: to assassinate the winner of the upcoming presidential election with a sniper rifle, thus sowing further chaos in the assassination-plagued USA of the 1960s (recall that in 1968 both presidential candidate Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were shot and killed).

Helm proceeds with his courier mission, travelling west to Seattle, where he has a violent encounter with some of the spies and meets another femme fatale whose motives are unclear (Hamilton has at least one or two of these in every novel). Helm then proceeds north into the interior of British Columbia to make his next pickup of microfilm, has another violent encounter, takes a ferry up the Alaskan coast, makes another pickup, has more violent encounters, meets more attractive women whose motives are unclear, and so on.  Instead of describing the rather complicated plot in detail, let's just say that there is a lot of confusion as to who is working for whom, what their motives are, and which woman is the deceiver and backstabber. There is also more violence and a higher body count than usual. As always, Helm deals with every threat as it comes, relying on his wits and skill with a knife and gun to dispatch them like the cold professional killer he is.

Eventually Holz is lured into Helm's orbit, and the menace and violence ramps up to a crescendo. The climax was especially good, as Helm and Holz hunt each other in the wild Alaskan mountains with rifles. A third party enemy agent from a previous novel even makes a brief appearance, giving this the feel of an episode of an ongoing story arc rather than just a stand-alone adventure.

The Interlopers is one of my favorite installments of the series so far.  I liked seeing Helm back in his truck, travelling across the wide open spaces of the west, hunting and being hunted by spies and assassins, never sure who is a friend and who is a foe. The black labrador "Hank", Helm's trusty companion on this adventure, was a nice addition to the story. Not only did his collar make a convenient hiding place for the microfilm, but he added some comic relief and even some critical assistance during the mission. 

Like most of the books in the series, the plot got a little too clever and convoluted with the schemes and deceptions of various characters, and there were an unrealistic number of attractive women popping up at regular intervals. But this is not meant to be ultra-realistic spy-fiction; it's somewhere between Bond and Quiller or Callan on the realism scale, with romance and style to go with the gritty espionage action. Helm has the personality of a classic hardboiled crime novel tough guy, and there's a strong Western flavor in this one, as Helm drives through small frontier towns in pursuit of a dangerous outlaw, sleeps in his camper, hikes and rides horses in the mountains, carries a high-powered rifle and kills men with his hunting knife. It's a mix of genres that makes Matt Helm unique, and made this a very entertaining read.

Get a copy of The Interlopers here.