PACIFIC THREAT

U.S. Air Force Maj. Jake Kelly is on a mission to prevent a coup in the Soviet Union in Cobb’s fourth Falcon Series spy thriller.

It’s 1988, and Kelly, also known as “Falcon,”is getting married in San Francisco. He’s a crack pilot and a member of an elite special forces team. His bride, Galina Toporova, is a Soviet woman who saved his life during one of his missions in her home country. Guests include Kelly’s friend and mentor, CIA bigwig Bill Jensen, and Galina’s surrogate father, Anatoly Romanovich Geredin, the aging head of the KGB. It’s an odd mix, for sure, but perhaps one that speaks to an approaching thaw in the Cold War. The reformist policies of the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, aren’t being met with universal enthusiasm in his own country, however. A cadre of hard-liners within the Soviet military, led by Adm. Konstantin Grigoriyevich Shukshin, are plotting a coup, hoping to restore the Soviet Union to what they see as the glorious days of Stalinist rule. When Geredin gets word of the plot—which involves forcing a military skirmish between Soviet and American forces—he reaches across the Cold War battle lines to seek help from Jensen. As tensions escalate, Jensen receives permission to insert an American agent into the Soviet’s Red Banner Pacific Fleet. “I’d like to send Major Kelly back in,” Jensen explains to Vice President George H.W. Bush. “I believe he can pull off the Soviet citizen act with no difficulty.” Kelly has just lost his flight clearance after having a seizure,but he’s itching to get back into the field. Will he be able to complete the mission? The future of U.S–Soviet relations may hang in the balance.

Cobb’s novel dramatizes events leading up to a real-life attempted coup against Gorbachev, which gives it a feeling of realism that’s often missing from espionage novels. It’s clear that the author knows the ins and outs of submarine warfare, and the scenes depicting these chess matches are consistently tense and believable. That sense of verisimilitude does not extend to the characters, though, who are reliably flat and easily sorted into hero and villain categories. Even for a flyboy, Kelly is a petulant protagonist, and he comes off as too shallow and impulsive to win readers’ admiration. In addition, a Christian element runs through the story but isn’t integrated very convincingly; Jake’s superiors are regularly recruiting him to accept Christ into his life, for example, and his formerly atheistic wife, Galina, is depicted as very taken with “the words of Jesus.” The pacing is also hampered by superfluous scenes reiterating information already given or unnecessarily establishing relationships between characters, as if readers would be unable to make such connections on their own. Indeed, Cobb spends far too long setting things up in this novel, and by the time Jake is back in the U.S.S.R., many readers will likely have lost interest.

An espionage novel with a sound premise that gets bogged down in minutiae.