BLACK STORM

Men (and a valorous woman) at war: the reliable Poyer spins another of his patented grace-under-pressure tales.

It’s 1991, Desert Shield. As the Allies prepare to invade Iraq, General Schwarzkopf gets an unsettling message from “the demon” himself. Send but one Allied tank across his border, Saddam Hussein blusters, and Tel Aviv will be made “a crematorium.” How? With what? A bluff? Probably, but Saddam has earned a nasty kind of credibility, and the high command feels certain he’s ruthless enough to do anything. Does he actually have a nuclear whatnot tucked away in his arsenal? Or—the greater likelihood—something biological? Hastily, a task force (code-named Signal Mirror) is assembled and given top priority plus a clear-cut mission: find out. Spear-heading Signal Mirror is a contingent of specially trained Marines with two “attachments”: Lieutenant Commander Dan Lenson, the stalwart Navy missiles expert who makes his seventh Poyer appearance (China Seas, 2000, etc.), and tough-minded Major Maureen Maddox, an Army doctor, who’s as smart as they come about microbes. If, in fact, Saddam’s weapon of mass destruction exists, it’s bound to be secreted somewhere in Baghdad, allied intelligence decides, and in the dead of night the Signal Mirror team is helicoptered into Iraq as close to the capital as possible. They are to link up with a certain friendly Iraqi in the hope that he’ll serve as guide as well as a source of further information. The link-up takes place, but the guide proves less friendly and considerably less informed than billed. Firefights, counterproductive internal strife, obstacles of one debilitating sort or another ensue, and when Signal Mirror’s remnants finally arrive at Saddam’s underground hidey-hole, it’s to discover—well, what they really always knew they would, except infinitely worse.

Familiar stuff, but handled well enough so that few who begin will want to stray.