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.

License Renewed

I first became interested in "shadow-fiction" as a teenager, when I read a few of the original James Bond novels from the 1950s and 1960s. These were very different from the movies: more hard-edged, less cartoonish, featuring more real espionage and adult themes and fewer outrageous chase scenes and goofy gadgets. Ian Fleming's Bond may have been a ladies man who lived in high style, but he was also a very tough, shrewd operative who could hold his own with the Quillers, Callans and Helms of the fictional spy world. I was hooked. I went on to devour all twelve of the original novels, and developed a love for the spy-fi genre that has never gone away.

After Fleming's death in 1964, the Fleming estate commissioned the first Bond "continuation novel", Colonel Sun, authored by Kingsley Amis and published in 1968. Then the literary Bond laid dormant until the series was revived in 1981, when veteran spy novelist John Gardner published the first of his 14 continuation novels, License Renewed. I'd never read any of these books; they get rather mixed reviews, and I knew they could never match the magic of the original Fleming novels. But I'd always been curious to see how the literary Bond might evolve in the 1980s and beyond, so I finally acquired a lot of them and decided to find out.

As License Renewed begins, Bond's romantic weekend is interrupted by an urgent call from his boss M summoning him to the office. Something big is afoot, and Bond's special talents are required. We quickly learn that times have changed at the Service: the double-O section has been abolished and Bond is now an investigator for something called "Special Services". Though Bond's "license to kill" has been revoked, M makes it clear that he still considers Bond his go-to man for wet-work and will look the other way if someone needs to be offed in the line of duty. Also, gadget-master Q has been replaced by a nerdy but attractive woman nicknamed "Q'ute"; Bond has traded his Bentley for a Saab, his Walther PPK 7.65mm for a Browning 9mm, cut back his smoking and drinking habits, taken up jogging and martial arts, and generally seems to be a more well-behaved, health-conscious, politically correct man of the eighties. While this would seem to negate much of Bond's appeal, Gardner also gives Bond more up-to-date knowledge of spycraft, better command of modern technology and stronger physical health. On the whole, I think it's a positive evolution of the character.

M informs bond that Anton Murik, a disgraced but brilliant Scottish nuclear physicist and wealthy lord of a castle, has been seen meeting with an arch-terrorist named Franco—a master of mayhem and disguise surely modelled on the most notorious terrorist of that era, Carlos the Jackal. With reason to believe the two are up to something big and bad, M orders Bond to infiltrate Murik's operations and find out what he can. Using a clever ruse at a racetrack and a well-prepared cover identity as a mercenary, Bond soon gains Murik's confidence, offers his services and gets invited to the lord's castle. There he discovers that Murik wants him to kill Franco for undisclosed reasons, and Bond plays along. He also gets acquainted with Murik's vivacious young ward, Lavender Peacock, his collection of antique weapons and his brutal gang of Highland henchman—most notably the giant Caber. 

Many typical Bond shenanigans follow, as he pokes around the castle, learning things he's not supposed to know, seduces Miss Peacock to his cause, earns the lethal wrath of Caber, makes use of Q'ute's clever gadgets, and attempts a daring escape. In classic Bond villain fashion, Murik eventually informs Bond of his foolproof scheme, which involves terrorist attacks on multiple nuclear plants and extortion that puts SPECTRE to shame. But it's all for a good cause. He also keeps Bond alive far longer than necessary, and as you can probably guess, this doesn't work in his favor. 

There are some exciting action scenes—especially when Bond goes into Jason Bourne-mode to evade pursuers through a crowded European town, and has a climactic fight with Caber aboard a plane. The plot was well thought-out, timely and even prophetic; at one point Murik essentially predicts the Chernobyl disaster that was five years in the future, and his use of multiple suicide terrorist squads to inflict mass destruction foreshadowed 9-11 two decades early. On the negative side, Murik wasn't the most compelling villain, there wasn't much chemistry between Bond and Peacock, and Gardner's writing lacked Fleming's sinister flair.

All in all though, I thought this was a worthy and entertaining successor to Fleming's Bond novels. Gardner sticks to the Fleming formula, making just enough changes and updates to keep it interesting. While it doesn't match the genius and class of Fleming's novels, with less "sex, sadism and snobbery" (the three keys to Bond stories, according to some critics), License was a fun first adventure for the new Bond. I look forward to seeing where the author takes the series from here.

Get a copy of License Renewed here.

Dark Deeds

Dark Deeds is an obscure 1982 thriller that I picked up on a whim because it ticked three of my favorite shadow-fiction boxes. It: 1) was published in the early 1980s; 2) features an assassin main character; 3) has mind control as a key plot element. The author, Ken Welsh, doesn't appear to have published much else so the book must not have been too successful--which is unfortunate, because it's a rather interesting and entertaining read.

The story's initial protagonist is a mysterious young man with flowing blonde hair known only as Hailey. He's an assassin who travels around the globe doing wet-work for an even more mysterious and sinister individual known as Zeller. We're introduced to Hailey as he arrives in Malaga to arrange an arms deal for his boss. After arranging the delivery, he calmly disposes of the go-between--in the process making it clear that he is: 1) an emotionless, psychopathic killer; 2) a schizophrenic who struggles to suppress a second personality; and 3) slavishly dedicated to obeying Zeller's orders.

Hailey's next task is to find a fast boat which he and a fellow Zeller operative can hijack in international waters and use to complete the arms transaction. They find a nice yacht in possession of a rich kid name Quinn, who is sailing the Mediterranean with his girlfriend and a tough captain named Teal. The subsequent hijacking results in the death of Quinn's girlfriend, but he and Teal miraculously survive. Having lost their beloved woman and ship, and realizing that no government is particularly interested in solving a crime committed in international waters, both men vow to track down the pirates themselves and administer rough justice.

As the story unfolds, we learn more about Zeller: he's a very rich arms dealer who lives aboard a black yacht called Shadow so he is perpetually in international waters and out of reach of normal law enforcement. We also learn more about Hailey, how he receives periodic hypnotic brainwashing aboard Zeller's ship to keep his other personality at bay and his assassin personality focused and effective.

The drama gets much more epic when Quinn is put in contact with a man named Sanderson--mercenary extraordinaire and veteran of a dozen wars in the world's worst conflict zones. It seems that Sanderson has an old score to settle with Zeller and a detailed plan to do so, but it will require a paramilitary force and lots of money, which Quinn is able rustle up. Sanderson also has a beautiful young daughter named Lena who soon becomes Quinn's new love interest. What follows is an exciting build-up to the climactic confrontation at sea between Sanderson's army and Zeller's well-guarded little armada of yachts. Things are complicated by Hailey's unravelling psyche, Quinn and Lena's relationship, the increasing senility of Zeller, and the mad ambition of Zeller's right-hand man, Tristan.

The action was very good, but the most interesting aspect of this story for me was the mind control angle. Tristan, a genius psychiatrist who survived a concentration camp with Zeller, has developed a technique that combines sensory deprivation tanks with hypnosis to create reliable programmed assassins and terrorists. And he has a big vision, worthy of any supervillain, to use these programmed "psychotrons" to spread chaos in order to grow the Zeller arms business and expand its power. He plans to start in Italy:

Initially I shall build a group of twenty. After psychotronization they will be the deadliest force of urban guerrillas in the world. I shall set them loose in Italian cities to recruit and control terrorist cells. The most susceptible recruit in each cell will, in turn, be reconstructed and he will be sent forth to create his own cell. Within a year I estimate I can have one hundred cells operating throughout six or eight major Italian cities ... When each group is fully armed and correctly motivated by its psychotronized leader--half of the groups motivated toward the far left, the other half toward the far right--I shall launch them against each other. ... Now, also, I shall be seeking to enlist military men, civil servants, extremist politicians, et cetera. They will be programmed to cause further trouble within the rank and file of their fellows ... No matter whether left or right gains control I should have representatives among them, albeit on the first rungs of the ladder of power. This could come to pass within five years. I should have my first psychotrons at cabinet level in government and at board level in defence within ten years. I shall, in effect, be a controlling member of the Italian government. The business possibilities in the arms trade at this point are staggering.

Dark Deeds was a surprisingly enjoyable read, given its total obscurity. It combines the action and fast pace of a Jack Higgins novel with the intriguing ideas of a Len Deighton novel (e.g. The Ipcress File). Highly recommended.

Get a copy of Dark Deeds here. It can be read for free here.

The Ninja

If there's one book I should absolutely love, it's The Ninja by Eric van Lustbader, published in 1980. It was written during my favorite era for thrillers (late 1970s to early 1980s), and features many of my favorite story elements: ninjas, assassins, eastern mysticism, old vendettas and international intrigue. A New York Times bestseller, the novel was one of the early catalysts (along with the films The Octagon and Enter the Ninja) for the "ninja boom" of the 1980s. Though inexplicably never made into a movie (as discussed in this excellent post), it was the first popular portrayal of ninjas in Western literature (with the exception of Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice, which featured them briefly).

The story concerns the trials and tribulations of Nicholas Linnear, son of an American diplomat and a Chinese mother who grew up in post-war Japan. Linnear was trained in martial arts from a young age, his excellence culminating in him becoming the first non-Japanese allowed to train in the most deadly and secret martial art of all: ninjutsu. But after his parents are killed, the mystically-inclined young warrior moves to the alien world of the USA and has to learn the mysterious ways of the West.

As the story opens, Linnear has quit his job as a successful graphic designer living in New York City, feeling burned out and longing to return to the land of his youth. He meets a beautiful rich girl named Justine who arouses his passion and gives him a new focus, but her relationship to her ruthless billionaire industrialist father, Raphael Tomkin, will soon draw him into a deadly web of intrigue. When a co-worker is found murdered in a mysterious manner, poisoned by a weapon that Linnear is able to identify as a ninja shuriken, Linnear's inner shadow warrior begins to awaken. As more people close to Linnear and Tomkin are killed in exotic and brutal fashion, and it becomes clear that both are at the center of a deadly vendetta, Linnear must call upon all his ninja training to survive.

The plot gets increasingly complex from here, as more characters are introduced  and a backstory involving World War II-era Japanese industrialists, corrupt American officials and a grand conspiracy of industrial espionage and revenge plays out on the streets of New York and the corridors of power in the USA and Japan. We meet the evil ninja Saigo responsible for the killings, and the NYC detective Lew Croaker tasked with investigating them--a tough, cynical bastard who isn't afraid to bend the law to do what's right.

This novel features one of the earliest examples of a trope that would become a cliche: Linnear's boyhood rival in the ninja dojo, Saigo, resentful of the half-breed gaijin, grows up to be a sinister "black ninja" and Linnear's deadly arch-enemy. For me Saigo was the clear star of the story. Though an extremely twisted individual, whose vices include pedophilia, sadism, murder, drug use and hypnotic mind control, he has that relentless, amoral, unstoppable quality that makes characters like Parker or the Terminator so compelling. The climactic finale sets the tone for many classic 1980s ninja films, as Saigo hunts his prey up a skyscraper and the two ninjas meet high above the city to settle their score once and for all.

As awesome as all this sounds, I have to admit that the book's execution was somewhat lacking. The main problem is that van Lustbader's writing is excessive: there's too much descriptive detail, too much literary pretension, too many unlikable characters, too many subplots, too much gratuitous sex, too much soap opera melodrama and too much unconvincing mysticism. What should have been a riveting thriller was too often a pretentious slog. If he had stripped out the excess, cutting off at least 100 pages and making this a much tighter story, he might have produced a classic.

If you want to read a thriller with similar elements by a much better writer that doesn't take itself too seriously, try Shibumi by Trevanian. Or, for a stripped-down, pulpier version of the same basic story, try Ninja Master #5: Black Magician, by Wade Barker.

As it is, I still enjoyed The Ninja for the ninja violence, mysticism, intrigue, and dark, Nietzschean sensibility, but I can't give it my highest rating. Recommended for fans of the genre.

Get a copy of The Ninja here.

Renegade Agent

Renegade Agent, published in 1982, was the 47^th installment of the legendary Executioner men's adventure series, featuring the ultimate commando-vigilante tough guy, Mack Bolan. It's the 9^th installment of Bolan's "New War" against international terrorism and espionage that began in issue #39. Before that, Bolan had been fighting a one-man vigilante holy war against the mafia, who were responsible for killing his family. Now, with the covert backing of the U.S. government and the Stony Man black agency, he is bringing his brutal skills to bear on even more dangerous and depraved enemies around the world.

As the story opens, Bolan, clad in his trademark "blacksuit", is breaking into the offices of a technology company with his tech wizard assistant, "Gadgets" Schwarz. They have come to gather intel from the personal computers of the company's boss, a dude named Charon who is suspected of selling classified info to the Kremlin. With the data they collect, they learn that Charon is also selling state-of-the-art technology to a renegade CIA agent named Edwards, who is running an organization Bolan sums up this way:

An international underground intelligence network ... a "black" CIA, run by men trained by the top legit agencies in the world, serving the needs of the terrorist network. With state-of-the-art technology provided by traitors like Charon.

What a fascinating concept!

After raiding Edwards's Swiss chalet and taking out the whole place in classic Bolan fashion, Mack learns that Edwards has fled to his headquarters in Tripoli, Libya, where his black agency has the backing of Muammar Gaddafi--the leading sponsor of international terrorism in those days. He also learns that an old flame and assistant from his mafia-fighting days is working undercover to infiltrate Edwards' organization, and her cover may be blown. This means Mack has to use disguise and deception rather than brute force to take down Edwards, and his task is made more difficult by a gunshot wound he suffers in the shoulder that limits his use of one arm. There follows more set-piece commando raids on the black CIA's "hardsites" that meet the quota of gory killings and explosions for an Executioner novel.

This was a pretty typical Executioner novel, which means it had some great commando action, black ops intrigue, enemy infiltrations, forgettable characters and internal monologues to justify his vigilante war on evil-doers. Mack is more James Bond than John Rambo in this one, which was a nice change of pace.

I really liked author Steven Krauzer's concept of a "black" CIA or mercenary spy agency, which was no doubt inspired by the real case of Edwin Wilson. Wilson was a rogue CIA agent who sold arms to Libya used by terrorist groups (including 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosive!), recruited retired Green Berets to train Libyan special forces, and was in it strictly for the money. This realistic detail, along with some interesting rants from Bolan, made this a worthwhile read and more than just a mindless men's adventure novel.

Get a copy of Renegade Agent here.

The Domino Vendetta

The Domino Vendetta, published in 1984 by Adam Kennedy, is the sequel to his excellent 1975 novel The Domino Principle, which I previously reviewed here. It continues the saga of everyman Roy Tucker, a working class murder convict who was sprung from prison by a shadowy cabal of powerful men in return for carrying out a high-level assassination.

Vendetta continues where Principle left off,  as Tucker, following the grim ending of the last novel, is still in Costa Rica and under attack by agents of the cabal. Tucker survives the assault, then proceeds to burn down his villa, dump his attackers' car in the ocean and take off on foot, their identity cards and cash in hand. Using those, Tucker flies to Brazil to hide out and figure out what to do next. But the cabal soon finds him and tries to frame him for a murder, which Tucker narrowly escapes.

Meanwhile, everyone involved in the assassination plot is being killed off, including Tucker himself, according to a newspaper report. Tucker decides that he's through running and returns stateside to take the fight to the cabal. The problem is he has no idea where to find them or how to take them on. He turns to the last person alive who can help him, his long-time lawyer and close friend from his Vietnam War days, Robert Applegate. Applegate has gone into hiding, but Tucker manages to track him down and get him to talk.  It turns out that Applegate has some inside information about the conspirators who enlisted Roy for his hit on the American ex-president. The description he provides of the cabal and their agenda sound all-too plausible, even more so today than in 1984:

The group, which calls itself Interworld Alliance, admits that it aspires to a position of high-level international influence, something apolitical, extra-political, a kind of world government outside government that speaks the language of business. Profit and loss, expansion and growth, acquisition, manipulation, and planned obsolescence. Brave New World, Man and Superman, business is business, money talks.

We learn that Interworld's chief military advisor, an American general named Reser, has a devious scheme to get permanent control of Middle Eastern oil. We also learn why Interworld targeted an ex-president for assassination and enlisted Tucker for the hit.

Roy Tucker, being a common man motivated by common emotions, doesn't much care about this larger conspiracy. He simply wants  violent revenge for the wrongs the conspirators have done to him and his loved ones, and in particular, revenge against Reser. Ever the cunning redneck, Tucker prepares a trap to bring the Interworld men to him so that he can get to them. The novel moves quickly toward a dramatic climax, as Tucker makes his way to New York, where Reser is scheduled to address the United Nations and announce his "peace initiative" in the Middle East. Tucker uses his natural ninja cunning to get close to his target, and like the first novel, this one ends with a violent, dark twist.

Vendetta was a worthy sequel to The Domino Principle; though not quite as riveting and a little slow at times, it was a well-written, tightly plotted continuation of the Roy Tucker saga. It fleshes out the events of the first novel, not only with regard to the assassination conspiracy, but Tucker's early life, the events that landed him in prison, his time in Vietnam, and the love of his life, his late wife Thelma. The tough, resourceful, poor country boy convict from West Virginia is a sympathetic character, like a more human and likeable Jason Bourne, on the run from sinister power players but determined to survive and get revenge. This series is definitely worth your time if you enjoy classic assassin/conspiracy thrillers along these lines.

Get a copy of The Domino Vendetta here. 

Mack Bolan #53: Invisible Assassins

As I said in a previous review, Mack Bolan vs. ninjas is a matchup I can’t resist, so when I learned that Mack has tangled with the legendary shadow warriors on several other occasions I decided to track them down. The Executioner #53: The Invisible Assassins was Bolan’s first run-in with ninjas, published in 1983 just as the “ninja boom” was exploding.

The first thing I noticed about the book is the striking cover art by iconic Bolan artist Gil Cohen—click here for the full painting. Take a moment to savor the scene: Bolan in his trademark “blacksuit”, with throwing stars on his belt, his silenced pistol raised to blow someone away, in an elegant Japanese bathhouse with a dead ninja sprawled by the pool in the background. If that doesn’t make you want to read this book, you obviously aren’t my kind of shadow warrior!

The story opens with Bolan witnessing the murder of a Japanese-American computer wizard named Shinoda on the streets of L.A. during some kind of transaction. The killing is carried out almost instantaneously, by a shadowy figure who leaves the body without a mark on it and disappears into the night. When Bolan’s partner is then run over and killed by a cold-eyed Asian driver, Bolan vows to bring this “invisible assassin” to justice. Bolan is soon assaulted by the same figure and barely survives—shaken by the assailant’s ability to get to him without triggering his near-infallible danger instincts. But the attack does trigger Bolan’s eidetic memory, and he recognizes the attacker as Zeko Tanaga, a notorious Red Army Faction terrorist who was thought to have been killed in a terrorist training camp in Yemen. Clearly Shinoda was involved in something very big and bad if he was meeting with Tanaga, and Bolan needs to find out what it was.

Bolan follows his only leads to Tokyo, hoping to identify some faces in photos found in Shinoda’s apartment and track down Tanaga. Posing as an American security consultant, he is soon attacked by thugs with shortened little fingers—yakuza. Soon after that, Bolan notices a blonde woman following two of the yakuza goons on the streets, whom he promptly saves by smashing the gangsters’ faces. The blonde turns out to be a graduate student named Sandra who is researching the secret power structures of Japan that led to their involvement in World War II. She has uncovered evidence of a conspiracy of the “Eight Jonin”—a cabal of eight powerful warlords who have run Japan from the shadows for centuries and lead a fanatical organization called the “Circle of the Red Sun.”

Bolan’s own research suggests that Shinoda was involved in the development of a revolutionary bio-computing technology, which is somehow connected to notorious war-time Japanese biowarfare research and the Eight Jonin. All signs point to Red Sun Chemicals corporation, which owns a castle overlooking the sea, as the nexus of the conspiracy that killed Shinoda and involves Tanaga, the Circle and the Eighth Jonin. As he is uncovering this information, Bolan is also killing yakuza thugs, narrowly escaping underwater death, being rescued by naked pearl divers and fighting ninjas on top of a bullet train. This guy is a men’s adventure machine!

The story races to a classic Bond-style climax, as Mack and Sandra infiltrate the Big Bad’s castle grounds, which have been maintained as a kind of medieval Japanese theme park, complete with authentically garbed samurai and ninja guards ready to put real arrows, swords and lances into intruders’ vital body parts. There they encounter both the terrorist Tanaga and the Eighth Jonin himself—who, unsurprisingly, is quite mad, bent on revenge for crimes against his ancestors, and determined to use Mack and Sandra as test subjects for his latest weapons of mass destruction. You can probably guess the rest.

This wasn’t a great read, but I found it entertaining. As a student of ninjas in popular culture, I liked how it’s like a mash-up of many popular ninja books and movies: the title and depiction of ninjutsu were clearly influenced by the first book on the subject in the West, Ninja: The Invisible Assassins by Andrew Adams; the dramatic opening murder using a mysterious killing technique and the conspiracy of powerful Japanese industrialists brings to mind Eric Van Lustbader’s seminal 1980 novel The Ninja; the pursuit of ninjas on the bullet train foreshadowed a scene in the excellent 1995 film The Hunted; the castle by the sea, the pearl divers and the mad Samurai overlord brought to mind the classic 1964 James Bond novel You Only Live Twice (and 1967 film) that introduced ninjas to the Western world. Add Mack “The Executioner” Bolan into the mix, and how can it be bad?

Get a copy of The Invisible Assassins here.

The Peking Target

After the over-the-top novel Chant, I was in the mood for something more realistic and better written, but with many of the same elements: 1980s action, a sinister Eastern mystic, martial arts assassins, and an ultra-skilled Western shadow warrior who takes them on. The Peking Target, published in 1982, fit the bill nicely; it's the tenth installment in the brilliant Quiller series by Elleston Trevor (writing as Adam Hall).

As the story opens, "shadow executive" Quiller is watching a body being fished out of the Thames river, which we learn is that of a fellow Bureau operative who had just arrived from Peking with a most urgent and sensitive message for his superiors. Unfortunately, the agent was murdered on his way from the airport and his secret message died with him. Quiller himself is nearly killed when a car rams him as he's leaving the murder scene. It's apparent that something very sinister is going on in Peking, which someone is willing to kill British agents on their home soil to protect. So the Bureau sends Quiller, still banged up from the hit attempt, to China to investigate.

The assassinations escalate dramatically after Quiller arrives in Peking under cover as a security man for the British delegation. The British Secretary of State is blown sky high right next to Quiller during the funeral of the Chinese premiere, his body absorbing the blast and saving the agent from serious injury. Then the American ambassador is taken out, and Quiller evades another murder attempt on the street—only his superior martial arts skill saving him from death at the hands of his skilled assailant. Two more agents are killed just before Quiller can get the information they had about the assassins, one found dead in the coils of his own pet boa constrictor. While all this is going on, Quiller learns that a mysterious figure named Tung Kuo-feng is involved—a Triad leader who commands a team of elite assassins but whose whereabouts is unknown. After the beautiful Li-fei is sent to kill Quiller, thinking that he killed her brother, a Triad assassin, Quiller learns that Tung is holed up in a former monastery on a mountain in a remote part of South Korea.

The novel shifts into overdrive for the final third as Quiller begins his set piece mission: to air-drop near the mountain before dawn, make his way stealthily to the monastery, infiltrate the grounds, take out Kuo-feng and get out without getting killed by his retinue of assassins. It's a tall order, but Quiller is the late 20th century British equivalent of a ninja, so if anyone can do it he can! The mission is further complicated by the assignment of a female guide who is a skydiving expert, mountaineer and fluent Korean speaker, as Quiller normally works alone. As usual with Quiller missions, things go sideways almost immediately and the executive is forced to improvise. Without providing too many spoilers, Quiller faces some brutal adversity but manages to get to the monastery, where he discovers that other world powers are involved who are using the assassinations to spread chaos for a nefarious geopolitical purpose.

This was probably the most fast-paced, action-packed Quiller installment I've read. Quiller is a real ninja in this one, who showcases his impressive range of skills: he kills men with his bare hands (he never carries a gun), evades pursuers by floating under debris on a river, air-drops into enemy territory by night, evades and ambushes a sniper, sends cleverly coded messages to deceive his captors, escapes a cell, sneaks around a well-guarded enemy compound, creates a diversionary explosion, flies a helicopter, and gets into an incredible mental battle with Kuo-fong in which the Triad leader showcases his impressive "ki" powers to try to control Quiller. Though never cartoonish, this one is slightly over the top by Trevor's standards. I suspect he was influenced by the success of Eric van Lustbader's blockbuster 1980 novel The Ninja and similar works of that era, and decided to turn up the ninja elements in this one. There was something in the zeitgeist of the early 1980s that produced a lot of great spy/assassin/ninja thrillers, and this is another one to add to the list. Great read.

Get a copy of The Peking Target here.

Chant

In the 1980s, Asian martial arts and mysticism were a very popular motif in men's adventure books and movies. I have entire shelves of novels from that era about lethal ninja assassins, sinister Eastern mystics and Western martial arts masters trained in the East, often combined with a larger geopolitical narrative involving payback from World War II, the Vietnam War, or the ambitions of  modern-day Japan or China. I am a big fan of this sub-genre, so when I learned about an obscure three-book series about a Western martial arts master and shadow warrior called Chant, I decided to give the first book a read.

"Chant" is the alias of John Sinclair, an almost superhuman character who is like an ultimate 1980s action hero cross between Jason Bourne, Joe Armstrong (American Ninja) and Rambo. His backstory is a familiar one in ninja fiction: a Westerner raised in post-World War II Japan, trained in the most lethal martial arts by Japan's greatest masters, a man so gifted that he is taken as an apprentice by Master Bai, the sinister Sensei of a sect of ninjas who harness the power of the Black Flame—the inner darkness and passion that breaks the bonds of traditional martial arts honor to produce the ultimate human killing machines. Later, Sinclair enlists in the U.S. military, where he becomes an elite commando who puts his skills to work killing Communists behind enemy lines in Southeast Asia. In the process he becomes a revered hero of the Hmong people of Laos, who are fiercely resisting the brutal Pathet Lao guerrillas. For reasons that are unclear, Sinclair is betrayed by his own commanders and attacked by CIA assassins, but he manages to kill them and escape. From that point on, Sinclair is a Jason Bourne-like fugitive from shadowy elements of the US government—a master assassin who has become expendable.

A decade and a half later, Sinclair learns that some of his beloved Hmong have immigrated to the USA, where they are being enslaved and terribly abused by a very nasty family of rich industrialists called the Baldaufs. With his strong sense of honor and loyalty to the Hmong, who saved his life during the war, Sinclair goes on the warpath to destroy the Baldaufs and free the Hmong from their tyranny. Sinclair begins hunting down and killing off the industrialists and their henchmen using his superhuman martial arts skills. He employs the clever stratagem of approaching the head of the Baldauf family in the guise of an operative of a secret US agency that wants Sinclair dead, and is willing to help Baldauf for a fee. Sinclair essentially hunts himself with Baldauf's cooperation, while in the process gaining inside knowledge of the industrialists' operations so he can more effectively sabotage them.

As all this is going on, Master Bai arrives on the scene, having also been hired by Baldauf to find and eliminate John Sinclair. Bai brings with him three gigantic henchmen and his beautiful granddaughter Soussan, who is as lethal as she is seductive. Chant finds himself irresistibly attracted to Soussan, despite knowing that she is probably Bai's ultimate weapon to destroy him. Because Bai is not simply out to kill Sinclair for rejecting the Black Flame cult, but to prove its superiority by defeating Chant in an elaborate mental and martial arts contest. The whole thing gets a little ridiculous at this point, as Chant is challenged to defeat Bai's henchmen, Soussan, and Bai himself, on the threat of his Hmong friends being killed. What follows is a series of staged combats with each henchman, interspersed with Chant's inner confusion about whether Soussan is a sinister seductress or a sincerely changed woman who wants only to be with Chant and leave the Black Flame behind. The twist ending is violent, melodramatic, ridiculous and mystical, much like this book.

Chant is well-written pulp fiction that reminds me of an Eric van Lustbader novel of that era, at a fraction of the length and with the unnecessary subplots and pretentious writing stripped out. Which should make for a good read. And Chant is a pretty good read, if you don't mind characters who are too over the top, too skilled, too good and too evil to take seriously. Sinclair is very impressive, but he lacks charisma and never really makes you care about him—he's like a colder, more brutal and inhuman Mack Bolan. I mean, Mack has no compunctions about blowing away bad guys Dirty Harry-style, but Sinclair takes it to another level, gruesomely murdering people (even puppies!) in a manner usually reserved for villains. He may have a sense of honor, but he also has a streak of Master Bai's Black Flame still burning in his soul that allows him to kill without mercy. Anyway, if you're a sucker for this genre like me you'll probably enjoy this book despite its flaws.

Get a copy of Chant here.

Pay Any Price

Ted Allbeury was a prolific British spy novelist who, before becoming a writer, actually lived the life of a Shadow Operative as a secret agent behind enemy lines in World War II. I'd never read his work before, but when I saw the description of his 1983 novel Pay Any Price I was immediately intrigued. It deals with a fascinating front of the Shadow War that is arguably the most important of all: the war for the mind.

The novel's premise is that Lee Harvey Oswald and other notorious assassins were actually under the hypnotic control of rogue psychiatrists working for the CIA. That might sound outlandish, but when one studies some of the historical assassins and mass shooters up to the present day, many of them do seem rather disconnected from their acts, as if they were committed by alter egos not under their control. Having read a few things about the history of CIA mind control (The Search for the Manchurian Candidate is a classic) and MKUltra, I find the premise of this novel chillingly plausible.

The book begins in the early 1960s, as we meet the psychiatrists, intelligence officers, criminals and dupes who will carry out the Kennedy assassination. Mafia leaders, incensed by the Kennedy brothers' aggressive prosecution of their activities, and CIA men, equally incensed by JFK's failure to back the overthrow of Castro, conspire to have the president whacked. They find the perfect patsy in Lee Harvey Oswald, an early subject of a secret CIA mind control program. Two psychiatrists have discovered how to hypnotically create multiple personalities in their subjects and program them to obey commands when code phrases are spoken (readers of classic spy thrillers will be reminded of Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate and Walter Wager's Telefon). Meanwhile, a sexy British nightclub singer named Debbie Rawlins is recruited and programmed--her gig as a travelling entertainer for military personnel providing a convenient cover for her programmed personality's more lethal vocation.

The narrative jumps ahead several years as the two psychiatrists, wanting to get away from the heat of Congressional investigations, media attention and public suspicion that the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, relocate to a house in the northern English countryside to lay low and continue their research. But when two suspicious British MI6 agents break into the house of their CIA handler they discover incriminating papers connecting the doctors to the assassination program. Being shady operators, the MI6 men take full advantage of the situation by blackmailing the American psychiatrists into employing their hypnotic assassins to take out some troublesome IRA leaders in nearby Northern Ireland. So a corporal named Walker is recruited and programmed for the hits, and Debbie Rawlins is reactivated.

The story finally gets a clear protagonist when an MI6 agent named James Boyd is asked to investigate a psychiatrist's report of a patient who is having dreams about political murders that he should have no way of knowing about.  It seems that the patient (Walker) is experiencing a mental breakdown, as memories of the hits performed under his alter ego begin to leak into his daily life via disturbing dreams. Boyd's sleuthing uncovers some disturbing facts about both Walker and Rawlins, the psychiatrists who programmed them, their connections to the MKUltra assassination program and the IRA hits. What are CIA assassin programmers doing in the UK, and why are they having people offed for MI6?

Boyd is faced with a moral dilemma: does he go along with his superiors' desire to bury the scandal in the interest of transatlantic spook relations, or does he seek justice for the pawns of the hypno-assassin program whose lives they ruined? The story has the sort of cynical ending that you find in a lot of British spy fiction, which you'll never get in more popular spy fiction novels but no doubt has more resemblance to the realities of shadow warfare. Anyone imagining that shadow warfare is some kind of morality play, where there are clear good guys and bad guys and the former always win, is surely living in a fantasy world!

While the set up of this story is excellent, the execution was a bit off. The narrative is very disjointed in the first half; it jumps from location to location, introducing characters and plot threads that don't seem connected. It's hard to maintain any narrative tension when you're not sure who the protagonist is and you're bouncing around every page or two, though this gets better in the second half as Boyd's investigation becomes the focus. My other complaint is that the story lacks action and intensity; it's a bit too political and cerebral, more John le Carré than Jack Higgins, which is not how I prefer my spy thrillers. There were a few short, intense scenes of violence and a bit of shadow operating, but not enough for my liking.

I don't know if this is typical of Allbeury, but for now I'll put him in the category of interesting authors who are worth reading further when I'm in the mood for less pulpy spy fiction.

Get a copy of Pay Any Price here.

Thai Horse

After enjoying Chameleon, I decided to try another thriller by William Diehl: Thai Horse, published in 1987.

The novel concerns the trials and tribulations of Christian Hatcher, an ultra-lethal shadow operative who has been doing dirty deeds for a deep black military outfit called the "Shadow Brigade" since the Vietnam War. Hatcher's Brigade director is a devious man named Sloan, who was responsible for Hatcher getting locked up in a brutal Central American prison for the past three years. Sloan has evidence that an old Annapolis buddy of Hatcher's named Cody—who was allegedly killed when his plane was shot down in 'Nam back in '73—is still alive and may be involved in organized crime in Southeast Asia. Cody is the son of a revered four-star general with terminal cancer who wishes to see his son one last time. To avoid any embarrassing publicity, the job is given to the Shadow Brigade, and Sloan promptly gets Hatcher released from prison and offers him the mission.

(As a side note, I liked Hatcher's description of Sloan:

A hundred years ago, thought Hatcher, Sloan would have been hawking elixirs from the back of a wagon or selling shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. Now he sold dirty tricks with fictions of adventure and patriotism, seducing wide-eyed young men and women into the shadow wars, to become assassins, saboteurs, gunrunners, second-story men, safe crackers, even mercenaries, all for the glory of flag and country. Hatcher had met Sloan in the time of his innocence and had bought the lie.

Let's face it, it's shady recruiters like Sloan who make the shadow-fiction world go round!)

Hatcher gets on the case, and soon lands in Hong Kong, an old haunt where he once infiltrated the criminal underworld as a Shadow Brigade operative. He makes contact with an old American friend named "China" Cohen, a likeable scoundrel who is now the "white Tsu Fi"—the legendary boss of a Hong Kong triad. It turns out that the leaders of the most powerful triad have good personal reasons to want Hatcher dead, and he soon finds himself the target of a big-time hit. This leads to a scene reminiscent of the assault on Tony Montana's estate in the classic 1983 film Scarface, as black-turtlenecked, submachine gun-toting hitmen storm Cohen's walled compound.

Following a lead that a Dutch smugger may have information about Cody, Hatcher, Cohen and an old Asian flame named Daphne head upriver into outlaw territory ruled by the notoriously brutal gangster Sam-Sam Sam. Here the movie that came to mind was Apocalypse Now!, as the crew encounters colorful, violent characters of various races and nationalities on the river, Hatcher finds his target and things go sideways in an explosively bloody way.

The intrigue gets ever more complex as people near Hatcher are knocked off, Sloan continues to be devious, drug lords prepare a massive shipment, a terrorist attack hits Paris, the rival triad leader hunts Hatcher, Hatcher hunts Cody, a group of colorful expatriate Vietnam vets gets involved, and it all somehow revolves around the meaning of the mysterious term "Thai Horse". Is it Cody? Someone else? An organization? An operation? A drug? Or just an old Thai legend? All is revealed in the last 60 or 70 pages, as Hatcher solves the mysteries of Cody and the Thai Horse, his beef with the triad comes to an ultra-violent climax, and various personal scores are settled in brutal ways.

Like Chameleon, Thai Horse is reminiscent of  Eric Van Lustbader's work from that era, and both authors were clearly influenced by thriller mega-seller Robert Ludlum. Like them, Diehl gets a little melodramatic, wordy and implausible at times, but he knows how to keep the pages turning and construct a complex but entertaining yarn. If you like shadow warfare with an Asian flavor, deadly assassins, international conspiracies, war-time backstories, strong characters, brutal violence, stylish romance, a dash of explicit sex and just enough realism to make the story plausible without becoming dull, you should enjoy this novel.

Get a copy of Thai Horse here.

Maxwell's Train

One of the fascinating things about reading espionage and crime thrillers from several decades ago is how prescient they can be about real-world shadow war. The recently reviewed Black Heart and Quiller Solitaire are cases in point, in the way they uncannily foreshadowed aspects of the 9/11 attacks. This was the idea behind the Department 17 project—to study shadow-fiction for its intelligence insights—and it remains a work in progress. It's easy to forget that before the 1990s there had never been a major terrorist attack on North American soil, and Americans were still rather innocent to the threat. The 1984 thriller Maxwell's Train, by Christopher Hyde, is another older novel that anticipates this possibility and serves up a scary scenario that could yet prove prophetic.

The narrative begins as a heist story. Harry Maxwell, once a bright, idealistic young man with big dreams from a good family, fell in with the wrong crowd and spent 7 years trafficking drugs, only getting out when he and his partner in crime Daniel were nearly killed in a rip-off. At age 35, he finds himself working as a lowly Amtrak car cleaner, with no prospects and not much to live for. Then one day he notices a strange car attached to a train and learns that it transports freshly printed bills from the Federal Reserve—some thirty-five million dollars worth, to be exact. This is enough to get Harry excited about life again, so he assembles a crew with his buddy Daniel and two other under-achievers with nothing to lose, and they begin planning the heist of the century.

The planning stage of the heist seemed rather rushed for a job of this magnitude, but there is enough descriptive detail to keep things plausible. The plan is rather ingenious, as it entails using a coffin to bring one of the men and supplies onto the train and to offload the loot, and the gassing of the security guards in the money car through a ventilation shaft. I don't want to spoil things for you, but let's just say the thieves get quite a shock when they force open the car door and see what's inside.

At this point the novel transitions to the main plot: a hijacking by seven of the nastiest international terrorists in the business—veterans of the European Baader-Meinhof group, Libyan special forces and the Japanese Red Army Faction, among others. The leader of the crew, and the most lethal of them all, is the beautiful blonde German, Annalise Shenker. In addition to the huge cash haul, the train is carrying five international VIPs and is rigged with enough weapons of mass destruction to ensure that no one does anything rash.

About halfway through the story shifts gears again, as we are introduced to several new characters, including an elderly German World War II veteran visiting the country where he was kept as a POW, an old heiress who spends her time travelling North America by rail, and a spunky 15 year old runaway, all of whom are boarding an ill-fated train for Montreal. This is where I started to roll my eyes a bit, as it started to feel like one of those corny old "Poseidon Adventure"  disaster movies where we are introduced to a variety of quirky characters before catastrophe brings them together. But it actually turned out to be very entertaining, as the heist team and a motley crew of clever amateurs devise tactics, improvise weapons and muster up the courage to fight the terrorists. The last 50 or 60 pages were particularly riveting, as the protagonists make their move against the terrorists, the terrorists make their move against the passengers and threaten to unleash mass terror, government forces make their move against both, and the train rolls toward a hellish climax in the remote northern Canadian wilderness.

I was very impressed by Christopher Hyde's smooth story-telling and technical knowledge; he knows the layouts of trains, the workings of the rail system and Canadian geography in intricate detail, and makes them integral to the story. By novel's end I felt like I'd ridden along with the passengers on their terrifying adventure and was totally absorbed. I also liked how the heroes of this story weren't some all-powerful government agents, but ordinary people who realized that no one was going to save them and decided to take matters into their own hands—a good reminder in this age of learned helplessness and creeping totalitarianism. All in all, an outstanding thriller, up there with the best in the genre. This was my first book by Mr. Hyde, but it definitely won't be the last.

Get a copy of Maxwell's Train here.

Flight of the Falcon

The Flight of the Falcon, published in 1983 by Robert Lindsey, is the true story of the continuing adventures of Christopher Boyce, a real man of adventure and one my personal inspirations. Boyce was previously the subject of a 1979 best-seller by Lindsey, The Falcon and the Snowman, which recounted Boyce's exploits with his friend Daulton Lee selling top secret information to the Soviets in the mid-1970s.

Boyce, a former Catholic altar-boy whose patriotic father was McDonnell-Douglas Corporation's Director of Security, had gotten a job in a classified communications center called the "Black Vault" in 1974. This gave him access to all sorts of sensitive information, including CIA cables that spoke about various nefarious Agency activities such as the overthrow of an Australian Prime Minister. Incensed by what he learned, the idealistic Boyce, encouraged by the degenerate, drug-dealing rich kid Lee (played by Sean Penn in the 1985 film adaptation), decided to strike back by selling classified documents to  the Soviets for hard cash. This doesn't end well for them, though; in 1977, Lee was arrested in front of the Soviet embassy in Mexico City with incriminating microfilm. He soon confesses and implicates Boyce, who was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

The narrative of Flight begins on January 21, 1980, as Boyce has just broken out of Lompoc prison in California, a tough federal facility he'd been transferred to the previous July. This opening section of the book was riveting. We learn about Boyce's desperate desire to escape Lompoc, where the upper-middle class white kid felt less than safe, having already witnessed a gang killing in a nearby cell. We also learn about Boyce's preparations, running miles every day around the prison yard to prepare himself for his escape, and arranging to have wire cutters, a mattress and a makeshift ladder hidden in a hole that would get him over and through the yard's razor-wire fences. His first days on the run in the desolate central California wilderness read like a thriller, as he has to evade teams of pursuers, dogs, helicopters, and survive on whatever food he can scavenge from the countryside or steal from houses. We learn that Boyce, nicknamed "The Falcon" for his love of falconry, was an accomplished outdoorsman from an early age, and he calls upon some of those skills to survive on the run.

After nearly dying from poisoned food left out for him by an angry resident whose outdoor refrigerator the fugitive had previously burglarized, Boyce manages to connect to an old friend, who helps him get a new identity and transportation to a remote area of northern Idaho. There he takes refuge with a sort of outlaw commune led by an eccentric, gold-toothed mountain woman named Gloria White. Boyce, America's most-wanted fugitive, has slipped out of law enforcement's net and dropped off their radar completely.

At this point the book takes a deep dive into the efforts by law enforcement to track Boyce down; we meet some of the people leading the search and learn far too much detail about the various leads, suspects and dead-ends they pursue. This part of the book, which makes up a good third of its length, was much less interesting than the rest, and should have been edited down. People read a book about a fugitive for the fugitive's adventures on the run, not for the dull procedural work of law enforcement officers pursuing him!

Things get much more exciting as we learn about Boyce's new method of funding himself on the lam: robbing banks. He gets the idea from some of the outlaw Idaho kids he finds himself hanging out with, and soon he is carrying out a string of armed bank robberies across Idaho and Washington. His method is simple: go into a bank with a handgun, demand the loose cash from the teller, and get to his getaway car fast. He would get maybe $5000 per job this way, and robbed some 17 banks during his crime spree. Later Boyce would admit that this was the one aspect of his exploits that he regrets; he considered himself a political dissident, not a violent criminal, so threatening people with guns and stealing cash didn't really fit with this self-image.

In any case, after more than a year as a most-wanted fugitive, Boyce decides that his best course of action is to get out of the USA and into Russia, and he comes up with a scheme to do that. He makes his way to the Olympic Peninsula (my neck of the woods), where he purchases a boat with the intention of sailing to Alaska, across the Bering Strait and defecting to the Soviet Union. Changing his plans, Boyce begins taking flying lessons, intending to fly out of the country to safety (Boyce later claimed in his autobiography that he actually intended to fly back to Lompoc and break Daulton Lee out of prison). Boyce was two weeks away from obtaining his pilot's license when U.S. marshals apprehended him on August, 1981 at a burger drive-in in Port Angeles, bringing his incredible adventures to an abrupt end. Convicted and sentenced to 68 years, Boyce got some rough treatment in prison, including solitary confinement and a beating by fellow inmates he suspects was orchestrated by higher-ups. He was released in 2002 after serving 25 years, and is now married, living a quiet life and pursuing his favorite hobby, falconry.

All in all, The Flight of the Falcon is an incredible true story, which despite the slow sections I mentioned, I consider required reading. Long before Snowden or Assange, Boyce dared to defy the U.S. intelligence community, operate according to his own code, have adventures worthy of a Jack Higgins novel and live to tell the tale. Get a copy here.

Black Heart

Eric Van Lustbader stormed onto the bestseller charts in 1980 with the publication of The Ninja, a dark, sophisticated, pulpy thriller that perfectly anticipated the obsession with ninjas and all things Japanese in the 1980s. With that novel, Van Lustbader established the elements of a formula that he would cash in on for many years: a Western protagonist schooled in Eastern martial arts, a sinister super-assassin from the East, a global conspiracy rooted in historical events spanning East and West, Eastern mysticism and mythology, martial arts violence, explicit sex, dark psychology, intense romance, and a melodramatic writing style that tries to elevate all of this to high literature. I have to admit, I'm a sucker for this formula.

Van Lustbader's second novel in this vein, Black Heart, published in 1983, is perhaps his  most ambitious. It's a very long (700 pages), complex narrative with numerous threads and characters that span Cambodia in the early 1960s to the USA in the early 1980s, by way of the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. It begins with the assassination of the governor of New York during the throes of sexual passion by a mystic assassin named Khieu. It so happens that the close friend and political advisor of the victim is a man named Tracy Richter, an ex-Special Forces soldier and ex-member of a clandestine outfit called "the foundation". When Richter is informed that the foundation suspects the governor didn't die of a heart attack but was in fact assassinated, he takes it upon himself to solve the mystery and track down the culprit.

As the story unfolds, we learn that there's a sinister network call the "angka" originating with U.S. Special Forces in the Cambodian jungle that by the early 1980s has infiltrated the highest corridors of power in D.C. Among the angka's leaders are the head of  a corporation that develops advanced weapons systems, a senator who is a leading presidential candidate and hardline anti-terrorist, and the director of the CIA. These men are involved in an all-too-plausible conspiracy: secretly sponsoring terrorist attacks around the world in an effort to come to power on an aggressive anti-terrorist platform. They also have connections to Richter, the foundation, and various other players in a way that makes everything very personal.

The main character of this tale is really the assassin Khieu; in addition to his lethal present-day operations as an assassin for the angka, we get many flashbacks to his experiences in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge's brutal rise to power. Van Lustbader explores how a man who began as a humble Buddhist with humanitarian ideals could turn into a murderous revolutionary and finally an almost inhuman mystical assassin. It's an intriguing look into the "black heart" of his antagonist—one of Van Lustbader's main strengths as a writer.

By the last quarter of the book there are so many plot threads running that you almost need a spreadsheet to keep track of them—old vendettas, political agendas, terrorist plots, criminal enterprises, police investigations, romantic dramas, spiritual traumas, family honor—but they all converge toward the end in a suitably dark, violent and mystical climax.

One of the most interesting aspects of this novel for the student of shadow warfare is how Van Lustbader anticipates the "War on Terror" 20 years in advance. The senator's plan to attack terrorists worldwide, invade Islamic countries, take their oil and ensure America's global dominance sounds eerily similar to the program that "neoconservatives" would roll out after 9/11/2001. Black Heart offers a neocon conspiracy that will make "9/11 was an inside job" conspiracy theorists nod in understanding. As the senator muses:

His smile widened now as he thought of 31 August and Macomber's plan. Because of that, there would be no opposition to him at all. By then America would have had its first taste of a terrorist assault on its home soil and it would mobilize.

Gottschalk rejoiced, not only for himself but for the entire country. It was just like the days before America entered World War II: it took great hardship and some loss of life for the sleeping giant to be awakened. But once aroused, Gottschalk knew, no nation on earth could stand before her. Let the terrorists beware. As of this night, their days are numbered. Attacked on its own soil, America could then send out its strike forces into the Middle East, the oil-rich nations of the Gulf, the obliteration of the known terrorist camps, the destruction of already shaky Islamic governments. Oil for the cities of America and, with it, an end to the Soviet Union's stranglehold on much of the world.

In many ways this novel is a re-telling of The Ninja, with a Cambodia/Vietnam War backstory instead of a Japan/World War II one, the dramatic opening assassination of a VIP, the discovery by the shadow operator protagonist of foul play involving an Eastern killing technique, the detective work with a gruff New York cop to identify the assassin, the uncovering of a vast conspiracy by Western industrialists and politicians, the love interest who gets caught up in the plot, the twisted mysticism, horrific violence and extreme sexuality of the villains. Like I said, this was Van Lustbader's formula in the 1980s—it's ambitious, intense stuff, though at times over-written, implausible, melodramatic and pornographic. He easily could have trimmed a couple hundred pages off this novel and made it a tighter read, but in an era when Stephen King, Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy were at the top of the bestseller charts, these fat, complex thrillers were all the rage. And once in a while, if they're well done, they're fun to read. Black Heart is well done; it's 1980s Van Lustbader at his most epic. If the style is to your taste, you should enjoy this novel.

Get a copy of Black Heart here.

Blood Oath

Canadian author David Morrell stormed onto the adventure thriller scene in 1972 with his debut novel First Blood, which was made into a blockbuster 1982 film starring Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo. I first encountered Morrell's work through his 1984 effort The Brotherhood of the Rose--a riveting, action-packed Ludlumesque espionage adventure about twin assassins who are hunted by their former bosses in classic Jason Bourne fashion. I've read a few later novels by Morrell over the years, and while they were good, they never reached the heights of Brotherhood. I decided to try his 1982 offering, Blood Oath, to see if his earlier work was similar.

Blood Oath was the first example of what would become almost a formula for Morrell: an innocent couple find themselves caught up in a sinister conspiracy, hunted by assassins while travelling across countries trying to unmask their enemy and defeat them. His style owes much to mega-selling author Robert Ludlum: he loves the surprise attack (assassins burst through a window, a building blows up, etc.), melodramatic dialogue, outlandish twists and the "man on the run from an all-powerful, unknown enemy" plot device. Morrell's writing is very cinematic; I suspect that he was heavily influenced by Hitchcock and always had movie deals in mind.

The novel starts slowly, as writer Peter Houston and his wife are visiting a military cemetery in France, trying to locate the grave of his father, a soldier who was killed in action in 1944. Finding no grave and no record of his father, he inquires in the local village and discovers that the man who volunteered to tend his father's grave was a notorious traitor who assisted the Germans then disappeared at war's end. The present-day intrigue begins soon after, as Houston's car is run off the road by unknown assailants and his wife drowns in a river. Swearing to avenge his wife and determined to find out who is after him and why, Houston continues his investigation with a French translator named Simone, who also has a personal connection to the mystery. They quickly find themselves caught up in more intrigue and targeted by unknown assassins. Further investigation uncovers more American soldiers whose graves mysteriously disappeared, all connected to the same French traitor and mysterious entities known only as "Verlaine" and "Charon". More people are killed, mysterious characters give ominous warnings with their dying words, and the plot twists and thickens.

The first two-thirds of this novel were pretty engaging; a 37 year-old wartime mystery, an increasingly ominous conspiracy, and two innocents trying to survive on the run while discovering the true nature of their adversary and taking revenge kept the pages turning. But things get increasingly implausible as the story goes on, and novelist Houston transforms into a full-on ninja, killing men with his bare hands, rappelling down cliffs and scaling castle walls with a monomaniacal determination to defeat the evil organization that killed his wife. The action is non-stop for the last fifty or sixty pages, as Houston and Simone infiltrate the enemy compound and learn the sinister secrets of the entity code-named "Charon". The bad guys prove to be as cartoonish as James Bond villains, but with less charm or style, and the whole thing becomes a little absurd.

If this was a James Bond or Mack Bolan novel this would all be par for the course. But when the story starts out as a Hitchcockian mystery-thriller, then a protagonist whose knowledge of commando skills come from researching his novels suddenly starts applying it in a manner that would make Mack proud, it all becomes too much to swallow. Which is too bad, because this was an entertaining page-turner for most of the way. 

One interesting detail about this novel is how it was inspired by the author's own life. Apparently Morrell's father was a pilot shot down over France during the war, and his body was never recovered. So this book is a kind of "what if?" story and a tribute to the father he never knew.

Overall, this was about on par with other Morrell's other novels I've read, but definitely not as good as The Brotherhood of the Rose. If you like his work or the thrillers of Robert Ludlum and Jack Higgins, you'll probably enjoy this one.

Get a copy of Blood Oath here.

The Scorpion Signal

The Scorpion Signal, published in 1980, is the ninth entry in the brilliant Quiller spy fiction series by Trevor Elleston (writing as Adam Hall).

In this installment, "shadow executive" Quiller is called back to London after only two weeks of recovery time from his previous mission, due to an international emergency that calls for his special skills. Apparently a fellow Bureau operative named Shapiro was captured in Russia and taken to the notorious Lubyanka KGB headquarters in Moscow, but somehow escaped only to be abducted again in Germany, presumably by the KGB. Shapiro has intimate knowledge of various top secret Western projects, including a highly successful Russian spy network code-named "Leningrad". Quiller's mission is to find Shapiro, rescue him if possible, and if not, make sure he stays silent for good before he is forced to spill the beans.

Quiller at first declines the mission, but as someone who is not motivated by money, power, glory or duty so much as by personal excellence and the challenge of life on the edge, he soon relents. He is infiltrated into Moscow, and quickly finds himself playing tense cat-and-mouse games with enemy forces. Elleston excels at describing the mental side of spycraft; we get a running commentary of Quiller's mental calculations as he tries to avoid being captured or killed by border guards, police, KGB and rogue agents. There are long stretches of very detailed descriptions of Quiller's driving tactics, evasion maneuvers, martial arts strikes, physical condition and thought processes as he tries to stay alive. These stretches are my only real criticism of the series: they sometimes get a bit tedious and you start wishing the super-spy would stop his autistic streams of thought and move the narrative forward.

Elleston also does a great job evoking the paranoia of late Brezhnev-era Moscow, where dissident groups are protesting, police are stopping people randomly, and the KGB are always threatening to break into your flat or safe house and haul you away to Lubyanka. In fact, Quiller finds himself there at one point, facing brutal interrogation. But he manages to get free, then gets to work tracking down the people who turned him in and taking them out of action.

As is usually case in these novels, Quiller is kept partially in the dark by his London controllers, which creates misunderstandings and failures that become lethal dangers in the field. After a lot of intrigue where it's not entirely clear where things are going, the narrative kicks into overdrive when Quiller finds Shapiro, now half-deranged from his stay in hotel KGB, and discovers what's really going on. The story then becomes a classic race against time to stop a deadly mission before it sparks a superpower conflagration.

This was another exciting installment in the superior Quiller series. It's basically a series of tense chases, evasions, interrogations, investigations and killings, all with big geopolitical implications--which is what a great spy novel should be. Highly recommended for fans of thinking-man's spy fiction.

Get a copy of The Scorpion Signal here.

Chameleon

For my money, the late 1970s to early 80s were the heyday of popular assassin-fiction. That era gave us classics like Shibumi by Trevanian, The Matarese Circle and The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum, The Ninja by Eric Van Lustbader and The Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morrell. I recently discovered another author who wrote popular thrillers in that era who is less well-known today, but still worth reading: William Diehl. His novel from 1981, Chameleon, is right in the sweet spot of fast-paced, sprawling thrillers of the period, featuring stylish assassins, international terrorism, political intrigue, vast conspiracies and intense shadow warfare.

The novel's plot revolves around an intriguing concept: an anonymous, shadowy black ops bureau that employs freelance operatives from around the world, communicates via coded phone calls, and pays agents via cash deposits in bank accounts of their choosing. The agency, known as "the Service", takes contracts from corporate interests who have problems they need solved quickly, professionally and without a paper trail. The leader of the Service is a mysterious figure called "Chameleon" that no intelligence agency can identify; figuring out who Chameleon is and what his organization is up to is what this story is about in a nutshell.

The book's protagonist is ex-CIA agent turned journalist Frank O'Hara, who lives in hiding in Japan after exposing his CIA boss's corruption. Now O'Hara, along with a very spunky and sexy reporter named Eliza, are on the scent of a huge scoop implicating his ex-boss, involving a mysterious mastermind called Chameleon, an oil consortium, wartime Japanese intrigue, international assassins and a secret order of martial arts mystics call higaru-dashi. All of this turns into a somewhat convoluted story that takes detours into Venezuela, Jamaica, Haiti and elsewhere before climaxing in Japan. Along the way we encounter several rather improbable characters, including a wise-cracking hacker-slacker called the Magician who, using an ultra cutting-edge device called a "personal computer", has managed to gain access to most of the Western world's intelligence databases; a paranoid, obsessive oil expert who keeps priceless industry secrets in a coded personal journal; a mad Bulgarian assassin now living in a Haitian asylum run by Catholic monks; a bear who drinks beer at a bar; and a tattooed cross-dresser with almost superhuman skill at martial arts.

Overall, I found this an entertaining but not stellar read. The opening chapters were very promising, with their detailed accounts of several Service black operations; the coded phone calls and other machinations of the agents were well done. But as the story developed, Diehl started to lose the plot and spend too much time on threads and characters I didn't find very believable or compelling. The story did finish on a high note, with an assault on the Big Bad's mountain lair and a final plot twist that would have been right at home in an Ian Fleming or Jack Higgins novel.

It really seems like Diehl was trying to capitalize on the success of Van Lustbader's best-seller The Ninja from the previous year. This novel has many similar plot elements: the Japanese post-War intrigue and corruption, the American-Japanese cultural hybrid protagonist who belongs to an order of mystic super-martial artists, the old family feud, the wise Sensei, the terrifying Eastern assassin, the violence and the explicit sex. If you liked Van Lustbader's novel, or the novels of Ludlum and Trevanian from that era, you will probably enjoy Chameleon. It's not a classic or a particularly believable example of assassin-fiction, but it's a fun read for fans of the genre.

Get a copy of Chameleon here.

Welcome to the Shadow War

Greetings. My nom de guerre is Shadow, I am a student of shadow war, and this is my journal. My interests include: spy/crime/men's adventure fiction, heistology, black ops, assassins, ninjas, prison breaks, survivalism, secret societies, parapolitics, occultism, mind control and dark side philosophy. In this blog I will be reviewing books of interest, reporting on some of my projects and operations, and reflecting on the world from a shadow warrior's perspective. To kick things off, here is my review of a recent read entitled, appropriately enough, "Shadow Warrior #1". Enjoy.

The Hong Kong Massacre (Shadow Warrior #1), by Joseph Rosenberger

At the tail-end of the ninja craze in the late 1980s, the late, great Joseph Rosenberger, author of the incomparable “Death Merchant” series, created the “Shadow Warrior” series, starring 'Shadow Warrior' Scott McKenna. McKenna is essentially Richard Camellion (the Death Merchant) with ninja training: killing machine, master of weapons, stealth and disguise, and mystic warrior with his own code of honor.

Like the Death Merchant novels, Rosenberger loads up the book with technical details. In this case, that means loads of Japanese terminology, ninjutsu techniques and descriptions of ninja weapons. It also means detailed and often amusing descriptions of each kill, complete with the full names of each victim and the particular anatomical deformations they suffer at the hands of the killer-protagonist. It also means references to ninjutsu hokum like kata dan-te, “Dance of the Deadly Hands”, and saimin-jutsu, “Way of the Mind Gate”, that were lifted directly from the writings of ninja LARPer and known lunatic Ashida Kim. But it's all good fun.

Book #1 in the series, The Hong Kong Massacre, concerns the Shadow Warrior's brutal revenge on a a Hong Kong triad gang who killed a close friend. It also recounts the origins of the Shadow Warrior, going back to the fateful day when McKenna, the trust-fund brat son of a diplomat stationed in Japan, calmly informed his parents that he was foregoing college and the Ivy League track to train as a ninja (it was the 1980s, people did things like that).

But the details of the plot are secondary. What matters is they provide a good set-up for maximum ninja mayhem and ultra-violence, sprinkled with Rosenberger's trademark technical details, morbid mysticism, philosophy and humor. The action consists of several set pieces that showcase McKenna's ninja skills of infiltration, disguise, gadgetry and outrageously bold attacks (who but a ninja master could infiltrate buildings full of armed men, kill dozens without firearms and come out unscathed?). If you like ninjas and Death Merchant novels (and what cultured person doesn't?), you're going to love the Shadow Warrior. Recommended for fans of the genre.

Buy a copy of The Hong Kong Massacre here.