MACARTHUR MUST DIE

A plodding, what-if potboiler from the Aussie-born Slater (Air Glow Red, 1981, etc.). With General MacArthur's forces breaking through Japan's defensive perimeter in WW II's Pacific theater during the fall of 1942, Tokyo's militarists conclude that assassination is the only way to halt the island-hopping campaign that threatens their homeland. How one of Dai Nihon's more fanatical sons tries and fails to dispatch the American Caesar in his down-under base of operations provides the main action here. Imperial headquarters recruits Tomokazu Somura, an erstwhile student at Toowoomba's technical college, for what he soon realizes could prove a one-way mission. In April 1943, the designated killer flies an ordnance- laden Wildcat (captured intact in the Philippines) from the deck of a submarine to Brisbane, where by the dawn's early light he bombs and strafes, without result, the hotel in which MacArthur lives with his family. Though shot down, the determined Somura survives a bailout over bush country from whence he makes his murderous way to the home of Elizabeth Lawson, a former classmate who still pines for him despite the fact their two nations are at war. Somura cons his lost love into driving him to Queensland's capital, where, unbeknownst to her, he intends not to surrender but to complete his homicidal mission. The adoring Elizabeth eventually wises up, albeit not in time to prevent a high-noon shootout in downtown Brisbane, which produces a denouement straight out of Higgins's The Eagle Has Landed. As a native of his narrative's Australian setting, Slater is able to offer some flashes of local color, but he never quite manages to get or keep his fanciful plot off the ground. (First printing of 50,000)