BLACK SITE

Fury (Kill Bin Laden, 2011), one of the first soldiers sent in pursuit of bin Laden, pens frontline-action fiction.

Former Major Kolt Raynor, call-sign Racer, cashiered from Delta Force, is a drunk, fired from a last-resort job as security officer aboard pirate-targeted cargo vessels off Africa’s coast. Avoiding psychiatric counseling, Racer is drowning self-condemnation and PTSD in Old Grand-Dad. Always too impetuous for superiors, Racer’s gut-wrenching guilt arises from a mistake in judgment, a hard-charging decision that killed three members of his recon team deep in Pakistan’s anarchic Federally Administrated Tribal Areas. Worse, Raynor’s best friend, Lt. Col. Josh Timble, three more Delta ops and two CIA pilots were shot down attempting to rescue Racer’s group and are presumed dead. Three years since the snafu, word has come from not-always-reliable operatives that Timble and the others are alive and imprisoned in a forbidding Khyber region compound. The current Delta Force commander and a retired Ranger colonel, who is head of the private security company Radiance, have planned a recon mission to confirm proof-of-life. With that, Racer is yanked out of the bottle, put through merciless re-training by Delta ops who’d rather not be nursing a disgraced drunk, and then dropped into FATA to suss out the rumor’s validity. Fury is retired Delta Force, giving the action a rapid-fire, realistic air as it moves from Peshawar to Dara Adam Khel’s infamous weapon’s bazaar with chaotic intensity. Racer confirms Timble’s POW status. He also uncovers a conspiracy by al-Qaeda, the Taliban, rogue Pakistanis and Turks and a traitorous German to destroy a CIA black site. With sufficient back story and from-the-headlines references, Fury delivers a credible action adventure story. There’s minimal character development, and the bad guys are stereotypical, including Daoud al-Amriki, an American jihadist.     More action hero than cerebral spy reluctantly wielding an HK416 carbine, Racer is locked and loaded for a series of adventures.