- Jenne, Mike.
Blue Darker than Black.
New York: Yucca Publishing, 2016.
ISBN 978-1-63158-066-6.
-
This is the second novel in the series which began with
Blue Gemini (April 2016).
It continues the story of a covert U.S. Air Force manned
space program in the late 1960s and early 1970s, using
modified versions of NASA's two-man Gemini spacecraft
and Titan II booster to secretly launch missions to
rendezvous with, inspect, and, if necessary, destroy
Soviet reconnaissance satellites and rumoured nuclear-armed
orbital battle stations.
As the story begins in 1969, the crew who flew the first
successful missions in the previous novel, Drew Carson
and Scott Ourecky, are still the backbone of the program.
Another crew was in training, but having difficulty coming
up to the standard set by the proven flight crew. A
time-critical mission puts Carson and Ourecky back into the
capsule again, and they execute another flawless mission
despite inter-service conflict between its Navy sponsor and
the Air Force who executed it.
Meanwhile, the intrigue of the previous novel is playing out in
the background. The Soviets know that something odd is going
on at the innocuously named “Aerospace Support Project”
at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and are cultivating sources
to penetrate the project, while counter-intelligence is running
down leads to try to thwart them. Soviet plans for the orbital
battle station progress from fantastic conceptions to bending
metal.
Another mission sends the crew back into space just as
Ourecky's wife is expecting their firstborn. When it's
time to come home, a malfunction puts at risk their chances of
returning to Earth alive. A clever trick allows them to work
around the difficulty and fire their retrorockets, but the
delay diverts their landing point from the intended field in
the U.S. to a secret contingency site in Haiti. Now the
emergency landing team we met in Blue Gemini
comes to the fore. With one of the most secret of U.S.
programs dropping its spacecraft and crew, who are privy to
all of its secrets, into one of the most primitive,
corrupt, and authoritarian countries in the Western Hemisphere,
the stakes could not be higher. It all falls on the shoulders
of Matthew Henson, who has to coordinate resources to get the
spacecraft and injured crew out, evading voodoo priests, the
Tonton Macoutes, and the Haitian military. Henson is nothing
if not resourceful, and Carson and Ourecky, the latter barely
alive, make it back to their home base.
Meanwhile, work on the Soviet battle station progresses.
High-stakes spycraft inside the USSR provides a clouded window
on the program. Carson and Ourecky, once he recovers
sufficiently, are sent on a “dog and pony show” to
pitch their program at the top secret level to Air Force
base commanders around the country. Finally, they return to
flight status and continue to fly missions against Soviet
assets.
But Blue Gemini is not the only above top secret manned
space program in the U.S. The Navy is in the game too, and
when a solar flare erupts, their program, crew, and potentially
anybody living under the ground track of the orbiting nuclear
reactor is at risk. Once more, Blue Gemini must launch, this
time with a tropical storm closing in on the launch site. It's all
about improvisation, and Ourecky, once the multiple-time reject
for Air Force flight school, proves himself a master of it.
He returns to Earth a hero (in secret), only to find himself
confronted with an even greater challenge.
This novel, as the second in what is expected to be a trilogy,
suffers from the problem of developing numerous characters
and subplots without ever resolving them which afflicts
so many novels in the middle. Notwithstanding that, it works
as a thriller, and it's interesting to see characters we met
before in isolation begin to encounter one another. Blue
Gemini was almost flawless in its technical detail. There
are more goofs here, some pretty basic (for example, the latitude
of Dallas, Texas is given incorrectly), and one which substantially
affects the plot (the effect of solar flares on the radiation flux
in low Earth orbit). Still, by the standard of techno-thrillers,
the author did an excellent job in making it authentic.
The third novel in the series,
Pale Blue,
is scheduled to be published at the end of August 2016.
I'm looking forward to reading it.
August 2016 