BY DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT

Having spent perhaps a week novelizing at mach-speed the script of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, former Air Force cryptographer Hagberg abandons his long-running Kirk McGarvey series (The Kill Zone, 2002, etc.) and rests momentarily for a fresh attack on international technothrills while hatching plots for McGarvey’s new role as director of the CIA. This outing features Lieutenant Scott Hanson, younger brother of US President Gerald and an ex-Navy SEAL, who now works special ops for the CIA and is checking up on bombs being developed by Pakistan, a country set on becoming a major world power. The story kicks off when a US spy drone is shot down by a Pakistani laser beam and a Pakistani submarine sinks a civilian research ship out studying sharks in the filth-ridden Bay of Bengal. Survivors of the sunken ship have knowledge vital to the US. The McGuffin is an easily transported small nuke that—for starters—threatens India with wide carnage.

Certainly up-do-date and action-driven, but one very much for the men, especially those hungry for Hagberg’s tons of techno-fact.