Last week started off with a shocker as I swore in front of my two year old daughter and she spent the next hour saying “fawk…fawk…fawk..” and then our house sale fell through, I get criticised by a Quiller-snob in the Quiller yahoo group for not doing a complete listing of all the agents of The Bureau in relation to last weeks post and two gum trees fell down, but these were a bonus as it was chainsaw time.

However, I take comfort in the fact that it wasn’t as bad as Slater’s from this novel by J.C. Polllock. Slater’s background is your typical heroic stereotype of the late 1970s early 1980s – Green Beret in Vietnam, later CIA Covert Ops, left the Agency after becoming disgruntled with it and is now enjoying life as an attack dog trainer.
His dog training days are shattered when his ex-boss from Vietnam contacts him as he believes there is a mole in the CIA and it relates to a mission that Slater and his team did during the War. They meet in the middle of nowhere and as they are conversing a sniper shoots and kills the ex-boss leaving Slater none the wiser of who the traitor is, yet leaving Slater as a marked man as the KGB will do anything to protect their mole. This killing of the boss starts the CIA investigating their officers at their top secret training base, and the man leading the investigation, as you would expect, doesn’t like Slater and the feelings reciprocated as Slater has trust issues with this man and the CIA.
The KGB hires local mercenaries to take out Slater and his old team, however Slater deals with them, and the reader is introduced to the rest of Green Beret team from Vietnam. One of his old team, Mulvahill, detests Slater as Slater heroically saved him, however it left Mulvahill as a quadriplegic instead of dying a heroic death in battle with the smell of cordite in his nostrils. The rest of the team is wiped out apart from Slater and one other and they finally decide to hideout in Slaters cabin in the Canadian wilderness. By this time the KGB has had enough with the failures of the local hired help and decide to send in the Vysotniki, a Russian unconventional warfare unit trained in special operations. As you would expect this Vysotniki team has something to prove and will do everything to complete their objective.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: I think this could be an American win as the CIA always gets their man

Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : Vietnam memories, wilderness deaths, dog kennel deaths, scuba diving deaths, wheelchair death followed by more wilderness deaths.

Believability of the goodies and baddies. Who cares as this book was heavy on the action, with a strong enough plot to have the action scenes. I’m not saying the characters were cardboard cut-outs, but rather they just explained enough in order for the fighting to happen and for you to understand their fighting skills.

Three thoughts floated about in my head as I read this book.

1) The CIA in fiction is evil. Sacrifice everyone and everything to get it done. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in a book or in a blockbuster movie, the CIA is always the guys on our side, but with questionable morals. I’m glad that we fight dirty to win sometimes as in war winning is everything.

2) Defectors during the Vietnam War – I have to think about this longer and when I’ve gathered my thoughts on Garwood, Operation Tailwind etc.. I might include it during the Vietnam War month (looking like April at the moment, but lot of work to do). However, you do feel that a soldiers defection during combat is purely self preservation and then later they justify it as ideology. Like the four American soldiers who defected to the North Koreans and became movie stars there, they were just glad they weren’t shot in the head, and the price was a kidnapped Japanese bride and a daily small bowl of rice.

3) In Bill Bryson’s book, Down Under, he says that a Japanese terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb in the remote wilderness of Australia, and in this book the fighting happens in the wilderness of Canada and as we know hippies are idiots as world peace will never happen – man loves to fight, I think I can provide an alternative to wars fought in populated civilian areas to minimise civilian deaths.

If I become Prime Minister of Australia I will provide the Northern Territory and the middle of Australia, after I’ve made sure its minerals are dug out and make this the worlds fighting zone i.e a massive boxing ring. Lets say the USA wants to invade Iran, then as PM I allocate an area the size of Iran, both send their armies over and who destroys the other or reach certain objectives within a certain time frame wins the real country for 5 years. Iran can build villages in the fighting zone, but the USA has to know that in those places the chances of roadside bombings are very high. However, some ‘armies’ are now made up of foreign volunteers and I will allow flights and boats carrying these combatants into Australian airspace and territorial waters, however the US has the right to identify these flights/boats and intercept them. (For my Australian reader -David F, Today Tonight/A Current Affair would love this as the Indonesian people smugglers and illegal fishing boats would stop overnight knowing they were entering a war zone and the Indian problem we have in Melbourne would disappear as they wouldn’t be sending their students here to study. And without sounding like a racist, but it’s hard nowadays to criticise anyone without being branded a racist, the Indians have a damn cheek complaining about Melbourne, where if they put their house in order you wouldn’t need to send students here, you would have your own dodgy/fake universities, as we do here. It’s always a good political distraction to blame others whilst you don’t provide your own infrastructure).

As an incentive to get my idea off the ground, I’ll throw in Adelaide as an urban fighting zone, but the wine region remains neutral territory. A big fence would be needed and policed to make sure the fighting stays in its area, and soldiers R and R areas would have to be fully thought through,but it’s an idea.

Sometimes with Cold War books, you feel that a great spy book is like poached quail, delicate and aromatic and you expect so much from it as there is a mythology about spy writing but very often you end up with a small tasteless overpriced dead bird on your plate, where this book is comparable to the burger or kebab you buy from a van as you stagger home from a drunken night out as you don’t expect much, but it hits the spot so well. (Best burger van – 10 years ago on the top of Blackheath Common in London – did the monster burger – perfect after walking through the Greenwich foot tunnel and up the hill to Blackheath). It’s easy to dismiss this book as just Vietnam Veterans killing machine against KGB killing machines, but it’s a very good read, constant action and the story is simple and straightforward allowing you to get stuck into the action.