- Thor, Brad.
The Athena Project.
New York: Pocket Books, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-4391-9297-9.
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This is the tenth in the author's
Scot
Harvath series, which began with
The Lions of Lucerne (October 2010).
In this novel Harvath has only a walk-on rôle, while
centre stage is occupied by the all-woman Athena Team of
special operators we first encountered in the previous novel
in the series,
Foreign Influence (July 2010).
These women, recruited from top competitors in extreme sports,
are not only formidable at shooting, fighting, parachuting, underwater
operations, and the rest of the panoply of skills of their male
counterparts, they are able to blend in more easily in many contexts
than their burly, buzz-cut colleagues and, when necessary, use their
feminine wiles to disarm (sometimes literally) the adversary.
Deployed on a mission to seize and exfiltrate an arms merchant
involved in a terrorist attack on U.S. civilians in Europe, the
team ends up in a James Bond style shoot-out and chase through
the canals of Venice. Meanwhile, grisly evidence in the
Paraguayan jungle indicates that persons unknown may have come
into possession of a Nazi wonder weapon from the last days of
World War II and are bent on using it with potentially
disastrous consequences.
The Athena Team must insinuate themselves into an underground
redoubt in Eastern Europe, discover its mysteries, and figure out
the connections to the actors plotting mass destruction,
then neutralise them.
I've enjoyed all the Brad Thor novels I've read so far, but this one,
in my opinion, doesn't measure up to the standard of those earlier
in the series. First of all, the fundamental premise of the
super-weapon at the centre of the plot is physically absurd, and
all the arm-waving in the world can't make it plausible. Also,
as Larry Niven observed, any society which develops such a
technology will quickly self-destruct (which doesn't mean it's
impossible, but may explain why we do not observe intelligent
aliens in the universe). I found the banter among the team
members and with their male colleagues contrived and tedious:
I don't think such consummate professionals would behave in such a
manner, especially while on the clock. Attention to detail on
the little things is excellent, although that Air Force base
in the Florida panhandle is
“Eglin”,
not “Elgin” (p. 202).
This is a well-crafted thriller and enjoyable
“airplane book”. Once you get past the implausibility
of the super-weapon (as many readers who have only heard of
such concepts in the popular press will), the story
moves right along. It's substantially harder to tell a
story involving a team of four equals (albeit with different
talents) than one with a central character such as Scot Harvath, and
I don't think the author completely pulls it off: the
women are not sufficiently distinguished from one another
and tend to blend together as team members rather than be
identified with their individual characteristics.
December 2013 