DEAD HAND

Remember the Russian Doomsday Machine in Dr. Strangelove? The one meant to go off should all other retaliatory systems fail during a first strike against the USSR? Well, Coyle (God’s Children, 2000) remembers it.

Coyle has downloaded encyclopedic detail about the whole world’s military forces and speeds fearlessly into any country to which his hypothetical war tales take him. Dead Hand opens in eastern Russia while rebels take over bomb silos, hops to the Special Air Services in overcast Scotland, where elite troops train for violent missions, then to Corsica, where the elite of the elite of France’s Légion Étrangère train parachute commandos, and then to Arlington, Virginia, where the DOD’s Crisis Action Team gears up for no-notice, high-speed war games. Have the ICBMs sought by the rebellious rocket regiment in Russia been stood down? Yes, all but one—but that’s one too many. Then the Near-Earth Object Discovery team’s observatory in Berlin fails to see a chunk of space rock collide with another and set in motion a catastrophe unseen since a seven-mile-long asteroid wiped out two thirds of all species 65 million years ago. The new rock hits western Siberia like a thousand Hiroshimas, suddenly it’s hell on earth, with forest fires everywhere, vaporized ice thrown up with dirt into jet streams, and flying fragments so superheated they burst atomically midair, brighter than the sun. Will the still fully primed Perimeter system—called Dead Hand and devised to go off automatically should Russia’s arsenal be disabled—read all this commotion as time to go off? After roaring winds over Siberia that blow its planes about subside, what can a polyglot force of NATO commandos do to stop the hand of superpatriot General Likatchev, now rattling Perimeter bombs at Moscow and meaning to oust the current post-Putin president and bring Mother Russia back as a world power?

All-male armament and action, and one deadly female Russian. And, by heaven, with writers like Coyle standing watch over us, who needs Bruce Willis?