- Boykin, William G. and Tom Morrisey.
Kiloton Threat.
Nashville: B&H Books, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-8054-4954-9.
-
William G. Boykin retired from the U.S. Army in 2007 with the rank
of Lieutenant General, having been a founding member of Delta
Force and served with that special operations unit from 1978
through 1993, then as Commanding General of the U.S. Army Special
Forces Command. He also served as Deputy Director of Special
Activities in the CIA and Deputy Undersecretary of Defense
for Intelligence. When it comes to special operations, this is
somebody who knows what he's talking about.
Something distinctly odd is going on in Iran—their
nuclear weapons-related and missile development sites seem
be blowing up on a regular basis for no apparent reason, and
there are suspicions that shadowy forces may be in play to
try to block Iran's becoming a nuclear armed power with
the ability to deliver weapons with ballistic missiles. Had
the U.S. decided to pursue such a campaign during the Bush
administration, General Boykin would have been one of the people
around the table planning the operations, so in this tale of
operations in an Iran at the nuclear threshold he brings an
encyclopedic knowledge not just of the special
operations community but of the contending powers in Iran and
the military capability at their disposal. The result is a
thriller which may not have the kind of rock-em sock-em action
of a
Vince Flynn or
Brad Thor
novel, but exudes an authenticity comparable to a police procedural
written by a thirty year veteran of the force.
In this novel, Iran has completed its long-sought goal to acquire
nuclear weapons and intelligence indicates its intention to launch
a preemptive strike against Israel, with the potential to
provoke a regional if not global nuclear conflict. A senior figure
in Iran's nuclear program has communicated his intent to defect and
deliver the details necessary to avert the attack before it is
launched, and CIA agent Blake Kershaw is paired with an Iranian
émigré who can guide him through the country and
provide access to the community in which the official resides.
The mission goes horribly wrong (something with which author Boykin has
direct personal experience, having been operations officer for the
botched
Iranian hostage rescue operation
in 1980), and while Kershaw
manages to get the defector out of the country, he leaves behind a person
he solemnly promised to get out and is forced, from a sense of honour,
to return to an Iran buzzing like a beehive whacked with a baseball
bat, without official sanction, to rescue that person, then act
independently to put an end to the threat.
There are a few copy editing goofs, but nothing that detracts from the
story. The only factual errors I noted were the assertion
that Ahmadinejad used the Quds Force “in much the same
way as Hitler used the Waffen-SS” (the
Waffen-SS was a
multinational military force; the
Allgemeine SS
is the closest parallel to the Quds Force) and that a
Cessna Caravan's
“turboprop spun up to starting speed and caught with a ragged
roar” (like all turboprops, there's only a smooth rising whine as
the engine spools up; I've
flown on these planes,
and there's no “ragged roar”). Boykin and co-author Morrisey are committed
Christians and express their faith on several occasions in the novel; radical
secularists may find this irritating, but I didn't find it intrusive.
I have no idea whether the recent apparent kinetic energy transients at
strategic sites in Iran are the work of special operators infiltrated into
that country and, if so, who they're working for. But if they are, this
book by the fellow all of the U.S. Army black ops people reported to just
a few years ago provides excellent insights on how it might be done.
December 2011 