WARLORDS

Langley (Death Stalk, Traverse of the Gods) continues to lavish his considerable storytelling skills on outlandish plots unworthy of his talent. This one--picking up a recent trend in futuristic spy fiction--has the CIA seeking the military overthrow of the British government; Britain is in total collapse, you see, and vulnerable to Soviet expansion. So Joseph Spengler, Deputy Director of our Foreign Operations Co-ordination Board (specialist in infiltration, subversion, and dirty tricks) comes up with just the plan for diverting the decline of the West: the US will secretly back Colonel Richard Savage, maniacal organizer of Britain's fascistic ""300 Brigade""--who plans to take over the U.K. by launching an attack from his home in the Cheviot Hills near the Scottish border, separating Scotland from the rest of the isles, and sweeping downward toward the sitting ducks of the cities (he expects the army to join him in sympathy). This is patently ludicrous, but Spengler's FOCB is training (in the Adirondacks) an uninformed mercenary force of British ex-soldiers for this revolution. And among them is Myriam Coldman, an English-raised CIA officer who begins to figure out what's going on, passing on the info to her boyfriend Dillon, a CIA nonentity. So, while Dillon attempts to get to the US President and tell him about this unofficial operation, Myriam begins falling in love with a British trainee, Jack Farran. But nothing can stop the Savage revolution: Myriam and Jack are subjected to brainwashing; Dillon dies as he approaches the President. And, finally, the attempted coup is a fiasco: it's revealed that this was all a ploy to shock the population into action--an act done with the PM and the President in connivance. Idiotic plot, attractive atmosphere and characters (Myriam is a sympathetic charmer)--another very mixed bag of action and nonsense from an agreeable suspense man.