FLAMEOUT

A twiddling Hollywood-glossy spy thriller that--where have we heard this before?--matches British Intelligence against the CIA against Mossad (Israeli Intelligence) against the Arabs and the PLO. . . . Israel has lost the plans for a new homing missile, and these have surfaced in Las Vegas. Or one set of something has surfaced. British Steven Marsh, who now has the plans (he got them when a mixed bag of agents shot and machinegunned each other to death on the Nevada desert, after which Marsh descended in a rented helicopter to pluck the plans from the dead), has had them duplicated--but with false information added. So now there are two sets of plans. Young Sharmila Talmai, an Israeli agent, is willing to go to bed with Marsh in Vegas for the real plans. But both are abducted violently by American agents, who torture Marsh by putting him into a sunbaked steel pit with a six-foot rattler. The Americans want to leak the plans to the Arabs so that the Arabs will take the Xerox and Rockefeller corporations, among others, off their blacklist. The story leaps from Vegas to the Canadian Northwest to an israeli raid on Beirut--as the reader gropes for the switch on his or her bedlamp.