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Summary
Summary
As Fidel Castro lies dying in Cuba, the U.S. awaits the unavoidable power struggle, but unbeknownst to everyone, the President of the United States has hidden secret weapons on Cuba's Guantanemo Bay, and when those weapons are discovered by Cuban factions, only Admiral Grafton can save America from
Author Notes
Stephen Coonts was born on July 19, 1946 and grew up in Buckhannon, West Virginia. He received an A.B. degree in political science from West Virginia University in 1968. He entered the U.S. Navy and received his Navy wings in August of 1969. He made two combat cruises aboard the USS Enterprise. After the Vietnam War, he served as a flight instructor aboard the USS Nimitz. He left active duty in 1977 and received a law degree from the University of Colorado School of Law in 1979. He went to West Virginia to practice and later, to Colorado to work as a staff attorney for an oil company.
Coonts published his first novel, Flight of the Intruder, in 1986, which was adapted as into a film in 1991. Since then he has written more than 20 books including ones in the Jake Grafton Novel series, Saucer series, Deep Black series, and Tommy Carmellini series. He also published a work of nonfiction in 1992 called The Cannibal Queen and edited an anthology of true flying stories, War in the Air, in 1996. The U.S. Naval Institute honored him with its Author of the Year Award in 1986 for his novel, Flight of the Intruder.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The future of Cuba is up for grabs in this crackerjack speculative thriller by the author of Flight of the Intruder and Fortunes of War. Coonts regulars Rear Admiral Jake Grafton and staff operations officer Toad Tarkington are providing military cover for a shipment of American chemical and biological weaponsÄweapons that should have been destroyed long agoÄout of Guant namo Bay, where they have been in storage. When the shipment goes missing, it's Grafton's job to find it and get those weapons back. But that's the least of his worries, because Cuba is developing its own biological weapons; as soon as they are ready, they will be loaded onto missiles already aimed at American cities. Meanwhile, an aged Castro is dying of cancer, and even if he lives long enough to name a successor, Alejo Vargas, head of the Cuban secret police, has his own plans for the future of the country. While there's little doubt that Grafton will save the day, Coonts's sharply drawn charactersÄincluding dapper CIA operative and biological weapons expert William Henry Chance and his safe-cracking sidekick, Tommy CarmelliniÄand a plethora of intersecting plot lines take what one character calls "another Cuban missile crisis" to a rousing action finale. But the surprise pleasure here is how clearly Coonts paints a picture of Cuba by focusing on the three Soldano brothersÄHector, a Jesuit priest who may be Castro's chosen successor; Ocho, the handsome ballplayer who has the chance to sail to Florida with the woman he got pregnant; and Maximo, the finance minister who is more interested in money than the revolution. This gripping and intelligent thriller is a standout for Coonts, taking the death of Castro as a starting point for an all-too-possible scenario of political turmoil and military brinkmanship. $325,000 ad/promo; author tour. (Aug.) FYI: In one of this season's more interesting coincidences, Coonts chooses for his epigraph the same poem by Jos Mart¡ as does Amy Ephron in her book White Rose, reviewed above. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Coonts, military-combat thrillermeister, pits his series character, lake Grafton, against a power-mad Cuban bureaucrat armed with Soviet ICBMs aimed at the US. As Fidel Castro lies dying of cancer in Havana, returning Cuban ‚migr‚s, government sleazies, radicals, former revolutionaries, CIA smoothies, and even a local baseball hero all find themselves ensnared in power plays. Just offshore, former Navy flyboy lake Grafton, now a rear admiral with an aicraft carrier to call his own, and his sidekick, Toad Tarkington, supervise a routine transfer of empty chemical-bacteriological warheads from the American base at Guantnamo Bay. Alas, scheming Cuban State Security head Alejo Vargas and his sadistic sidekick Colonel Santana have cut deals with the notorious gangster El Gato as well as with some North Koreans, so that enough of those warheads will end up in a secret laboratory where mad American scientist Olaf Swenson is cooking up a lethal, quick-killing version of the polio virus. Meanwhile, the Sedano family, with relatives at almost every strata of Cuban society, have their hands full: greedy finance minister Maximo Sedano wants to pocket Castro's $54 million Swiss bank account and dig up 47 tons of gold that Castro and Che Guevara supposedly hid when they overthrew Batista; his wife Mercedes, Castro's mistress, fears that Vargas is up to no good; brother Hector, a somewhat fallen Jesuit priest, wants to preserve Cuba from those who would exploit it; and youngest brother Ocho, the baseball star, joins a group of boat people when he finds out his girlfriend Dom is pregnant. But wait--there's more: ancient, but still operational Soviet ICBMs, a crack Cuban MIG pilot and the Mission Impossible high jinks of CIA operatives. Grafton himself is less action hero here than cool, seasoned commander who stoically accepts the President's impossible order to invade Cuba and stop the next missile crisis without antagonizing the native population. An overplotted slog of snarling Latinos and everything-you-never-needed-to-know about Cuban social history--until the shooting starts and Coonts delivers some of his best gung-ho suspense writing yet. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The popular Coonts mines the original Cuban missile crisis for source material in his latest military-techno thriller. Without preamble, he introduces the threat: a half-dozen ballistic missiles Castro and the Russians secretly stashed in silos after the crisis. Forty years on, Castro is at death's door, his associates jockeying for the succession. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy is covering the extraction from Guantanamo Bay of a chemical/biological weapons stockpile, a task that facilitates Coonts folding in the specs on high-tech military iron (he was a navy pilot before taking up scrivening). He gets to operate the equipment through a snafu: the navy loses track of the toxic warfare weapons. While it searches, a pistol-packing, safe-cracking CIA duo in Havana discover what the Cubans have been developing in their lab (creating a polio warhead for their missiles), and, with gunslinging panache, the CIA guys slickly egress hostile territory, carrying critical targeting information. The winner of the succession struggle knows the Americans have found him out, thus setting the table for novel-ending battles around the missile sites, featuring appearances by seemingly every weapon in the U.S. armory short of the Bomb. Inevitably, the details about the V-22 Osprey and its kindred overshadow the characters flying the planes, but readers gun for Coonts' books because of their dramatic, diverting action. Setting the genre's conventions in a post-Castro context, Coonts delivers the anticipated excitement. --Gilbert Taylor
Library Journal Review
With Fidel near death, the U.S. President secretly moves strategic weapons to the U.S. base on Guantanamo Baynever mind that an Arms Control Conference is in full swing in Paris. The consequences could be ugly, but, fortunately, Admiral Graftonhero of previous Coonts best sellersis here to save the day. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.