- Thor, Brad.
Blowback.
New York: Pocket Books, 2005.
ISBN 978-1-4516-0828-1.
-
This is the fourth in the author's
Scot
Harvath series, which began with
The Lions of Lucerne (October 2010).
In this novel, Harvath is involved in a botched takedown
attempt against an al-Qaeda operative which, repeated endlessly
on cable news channels, brings him and his superiors into
the crosshairs of ambitious former first lady and carpetbagging
Senator Helen Remington Carmichael, who views exposing
Harvath and those who ordered the operation as her ticket
to second place on the next Democratic presidential ticket.
As wise people do when faced with the flounderings of a wounded
yet still dangerous superpower, Harvath gets out of Dodge and
soon finds himself on the trail of a plot, grounded in the
arcane science of paleopathology and dating from Hannibal's
crossing of the Alps, which threatens a genocide of non-believers
in the Dar al-Harb and unification of the Ummah under a new caliphate.
Scientists have been disappearing, and as Harvath follows the
trail of the assassin, he discovers the sinister thread that
ties their work, performed in isolation, together into a
diabolical scheme.
Harvath teams up with a plucky lady paleopathologist (Harvath's
female companions seem to adapt to commando missions as readily
as
Doctor Who's
to multiverse displacement) and together they
begin to follow the threads which lead to an horrific plot
based on a weapon of mass destruction conceived in antiquity
which has slumbered for millennia in an ice cavern.
What more could you ask for? Politics, diseases in antiquity,
ice mummies, evil geniuses in Swiss mountain redoubts (heh!),
glider assaults, mass murder with the chosen protected by
mass marketing, and a helicopter assault on a terrorist
icon in a Muslim country—works for me!
This is a thriller, and it delivers the thrills in abundance.
But this is Fourmilab, and you expect the quibbles, don't
you? So here we go, and without spoilers! The
Super Vivat
motor-gliders used to assault the mountaintop are said in
chapter 72 to be capable of retracting the propeller into the nose
of the fuselage and retracting and extending their landing gear.
Neither is correct—the propeller can be feathered but not retracted,
and the landing gear is fixed.
This is a page-turner, and it succeeds at its mission and will
send you off to read the next in the series. The solution to
the chaos in the Islamic world advanced here by the bad guys is,
in fact, one I've been thinking about as less worse than most of
the alternatives for more than decade. Could the “Arab Spring”
give way to an “Ottoman Fall”? Let's talk Turkey.
May 2011 