- Walsh, Michael.
Hostile Intent.
New York: Pinnacle Books, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-7860-2042-3.
-
Michael Walsh is a versatile and successful writer who
has been a Moscow correspondent and music critic for
Time magazine, written a novel which is a
sequel to Casablanca, four books about
classical music, and a screenplay for the Disney Channel
which was the highest rated original movie on the channel
at the time. Two of his books have been New York Times
bestsellers, and his gangster novel
And All the Saints
won an American Book Award in 2004. This novel is the
first of a projected series of five. The second,
Early Warning,
was released in September 2010.
In the present novel, the author turns to the genre of the
contemporary thriller, adopting the template created by
Tom Clancy,
and used with such success by authors such as
Vince Flynn
and
Brad Thor:
a loner, conflicted agent working for a shadowy organisation, sent to
do the dirty work on behalf of the highest levels of the government
of the United States. In this case, the protagonist is known only as
“Devlin” (although he assumes a new alias and persona
every few chapters), whose parents were killed in a terrorist attack
at the Rome airport in 1985 and has been raised as a covert instrument
of national policy by a military man who has risen to become the head
of the
National
Security Agency (NSA).
Devlin works for the
Central Security
Service, a branch of the NSA which, in the novel, retains its original
intent of being “Branch 4” of the armed forces, able to exploit
information resources and execute covert operations outside the scope
of conventional military actions.
The book begins with a gripping description of a
Beslan-like
school hostage attack in the United States in which Devlin is activated
to take down the perpetrators. After achieving a mostly successful
resolution, he begins to suspect that the entire event was simply a
ruse to draw him into the open so that he could be taken down by his
enemies. This supposition is confirmed, at least in his own justifiably
paranoid mind, by further terrorist strikes in Los Angeles and London,
which raise the stakes and further expose his identity and connections.
This is a story which starts strong but then sputters out as it
unfolds. The original taut narrative of the school hostage crisis
turns into a mush with a shadowy supervillain who is kind of an
evil George Soros (well, I mean an even more evil George Soros),
a feckless and inexperienced U.S. president (well, at least that
could never happen!), and Devlin, the über paranoid loner suddenly
betting everything on a chick he last met in a shoot-out in Paris.
Thrillers are supposed to thrill, but if set in the contemporary world
or the near future (as is this book—the fall of Mugabe in Zimbabwe
is mentioned, but everything is pretty much the same as the present), they're
expected to be plausible as regards the technology used and
the behaviour of the characters. It just doesn't do to have the hero, in
a moment of crisis, when attacked by ten thousand AK-47 wielding fanatics
from all directions, pull out his ATOMIC SPACE GUN and mow them down
with a single burst.
But that's pretty much what happens here. I'll have to go behind the
spoiler curtain to get into the details, so I'll either see you there
or on the other side if you've decided to approach this novel
freshly without my nattering over details.
- We are asked to believe that a sitting U.S. president
would order two members of his Secret Service detail
to commit a cold blooded murder in order to frame a
senator and manipulate his reelection campaign, and
that the agents would carry out the murder.
This is simply absurd.
- As the story develops we learn that the shadowy
“Branch 4” for which Devlin believes he
is working does not, in fact, exist, and that Devlin
is its sole agent, run by the director of NSA. Now
Devlin has back-door access to all U.S. intelligence
assets and databases and uses them throughout. How
plausible is it that he wouldn't have figured this out
himself?
- Some people have cell phones: Devlin has a Hell phone.
In chapter 7 we're treated to a description of Devlin's
Black Telephone, which is equipped with “advanced
voice-recognition software”, a fingerprint scanner
in the receiver, and a retinal scanner in the handset.
“If any of these elements were not sequenced within
five seconds, the phone would self-destruct in a fireball
of shrapnel, killing any unauthorized person unlucky
enough to have picked it up.” Would you
trust a government-supplied telephone bomb to work
with 100% reliability? What if your stack of dossiers
topples over and knocks off the receiver?
- In several places “logarithm” is used where
“algorithm” is intended. Gadgetry is rife
with urban legends such as the computer virus which
causes a hard drive to melt.
- In chapter 12 the phone rings and Devlin “spoke
into a Blu-Ray mouthpiece as he answered”.
Blu-ray
is an optical disc storage format;
Bluetooth
is the wireless peripheral technology. Besides, would an
operative obsessed with security to the level of paranoia
use a wireless headset with dubious anti-eavesdropping
measures?
- The coup de grace of the
series of terrorist attacks is supposed to be an
electromagnetic
pulse (EMP) attack against the United States, planned
to knock out all electronics, communications, and electrical
power in the eastern part of the country. The attack
consists of detonating an ex-Soviet nuclear weapon raised
to the upper atmosphere by a weather balloon launched from
a ship off the East Coast. Where to begin? Well, first of all,
at the maximum altitude reachable by a weather balloon, the
mean free path of the gamma rays from the detonation through
the atmosphere would be limited, as opposed to the unlimited
propagation distance from an explosion in space well above the
atmosphere. This would mean that any ionisation of atoms in
the atmosphere would be a local phenomenon, which would reduce
the intensity and scope of the generated pulse. Further,
the electromagnetic pulse cannot propagate past the horizon,
so even if a powerful pulse were generated at the altitude of
a balloon, it wouldn't propagate far enough to cause a disaster
all along the East Coast.
- In the assault on Clairvaux Prison, is it conceivable that
an experienced special forces operator would take the
mother of a hostage and her young son along aboard the
helicopter gunship leading the strike?
- After the fight in the prison, archvillain Skorenzy
drops through a trap door and escapes to a bolt-hole,
and at the end of the novel is still at large and presumed
to be continuing his evil schemes. But his lair is inside
a French maximum security prison! How does he get away?
Say what you like about the French military, when it comes
to terrorists they're deadly serious, right up there with
the Mossad. Would a prison that housed Carlos the Jackal
have a tunnel which would allow Skorenzy to saunter out?
Would French officials allow the man who blew up a part of
Los Angeles and brought down the
London Eye
with a cruise missile free passage?
It's a tangled, muddled mess. It has its moments, but there isn't
the building toward a climax and then the resolution one expects
from a thriller. None of the characters are really admirable, and
the author's policy preferences (with which I largely agree) are
exhibited far too blatantly, as opposed to being woven into the
plot. The author, accomplished in other genres, may eventually
master the thriller, but I doubt I'll read any of the sequels to find
out for myself.
September 2010 