Honestly, a lot of Bond movies are a bit rubbish, no matter how good their soundtracks are. Moonraker, the Bond movie where they go off to space to gas the whole world and Jaws meets the girl with the pigtails was rather dire, and it was just a camp-ish, badly acted unsophisticated parody of the ideals of the Third Reich as the evil master-plan was for his world to be populated by these beautiful humans and yet their leader was the ugly kid. Seriously, I never understood how the Nazis mad a big deal of having a blond, blue-eyed super-fit master race when they were led by Hitler, Himmler and Göring. Was there no understanding of irony in Germany?
The book Moonraker, (review following soon-ish) has Nazis at the core but with a better plot than the awful Bond film.
I’m a big fan of submarines, and space shuttles are just submarines in space, so when I re-found this book I was happy as a leper who has won the lottery – very happy but no one to share my joy with.

This book is set in 1989, in a world where Gorbachev was killed and thus glasnost, perestroika and demokratizatsiya never happened and the Cold War lives on. The Russians are having problems with their space programme, the KGB has a young evil-chessmaster genius in charge and the General Secretary needs a huge stroke of luck to keep his seat of power.
In the USA, they have two captains of industry as President and Vice-President which have sorted out their country and are just about to complete their Star Wars project which will give them an unassailable advantage in the Cold War.
The shuttle Intrepid takes off with Americas number two pilot (number one fell mysteriously ill just before launch) at the controls and a payload that will complete the Star Wars platform and contains the most advanced military secret the US holds, which if it falls into the Russians hands will swing the Cold War to the Russians.

Iceberg, the pilot, is actually a Russian (long story short – parents pretended to be Polish refugees from the Second World War and made their way to the USA and there they raised a son which became a deep cover mole – sort of a Russian Lebensborn programme, which instead of racial purity created ideological purity). Iceberg kills the other two members of the crew, but in doing so damaged the shuttle so that he can’t land and it is now a race between the Soviets to fly up and fix the shuttle and the Americans who want to destroy it. There is also the sub plot of internal Russian politics and who will lead the Party and the country after this bold move by the Russians.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: Draw, with all Americas technological might, controlling space, economy working and with Russia where they can’t feed themselves and can’t afford their absurd levels of military spending, yet the Russians will fight dirty and successfully to stay the same.

Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : Some cockpit killings, bad health and safety inspections, stealth bomber/ secret space-fighter jet/ MIG fighting, some political aeroplane tyre problems and sacrifices, yellow jersey getting wiped out by a truck, a satellite killer and two best friends dying alone above the Earth.

Believability of the goodies and baddies: In fairness to the author Harrison, the characters all had a backstory, you knew who they were, the writing throughout the book was well done, but the characters missed a spark of life. It’s like watching a movie that’s very good but you know that they are famous actors and that just stops you believing in them completely .

I enjoyed how this book had the backdrop of late 80s technology. The big NASA centres with all those screens, the Cheyenne Mountain complex (home of Stargate) , the fantastic newness of the Stealth Bombers, how people had to fly across country for meetings and things were done over the land-line rather than emails or mobiles or video conferencing. There was also a sense of the American 80s innocence, where a man in a forged laminated id can stroll into a shuttle launch site and plant bombs, where nowadays you get strip searched and shoes smelt just to get on a late-running or more probably cancelled cheap airline. Even though the book mentions The Walker Spy Ring, you feel that the US mainland and its sense of isolationism still prevails even though they are locked in a major conflict with the Russians.

Stealth bombers are cool, and with Russia now developing stealth fighters, it reinforces my own personal belief that the Cold War is still alive and kicking and the West has forgotten about it as they are distracted by the Chinese and terrorists. It also makes you wonder on whether we need to start thinking outside the square on radar technology as soon there will be no role for radars in an air war if everybody is stealthed.

Robert McNamara is also mentioned in this book and how he ordered the destroying of the tools of the SR-71 Blackbird in order to support the building of his preferred plane, and the more I read of McNamara (currently reading a lot of Vietnam books), and his bean-counter-ish attitude the more I dislike him. Yes, it was important to control spending, but it seemed that he didn’t care about lives or getting the job done when it was unusual circumstances, rather he seemed to have a price on everything and the wars had to fought in certain prescribed manner.

Space, Russian politics, defectors, the ghost of Stalin, the threat of nuclear war, even a small mention of a submarine, what more do you want in a Cold War book? Well written, proper airport cold war fiction.