ON WINGS OF WRATH

The U.S. military fights Russia in a war “with all odds stacked against it.”

Isaacs’ debut novel starts off with a bang: a terrorist attack that shatters “the signing of a landmark peace accord” between Syria’s ruling regime and its opponents. Syrian President Saad Hafez al-Abid miraculously escapes harm, but the Russian foreign minister is among the dead. Blaming Turkey and its ally, the U.S., the Russian president vows to retaliate. Excerpts from newspaper accounts chart the ramping tensions—suicide bombings, an attack on a mosque—as the Russian military is put on its highest alert, culminating in threats that a U.S.-Russia war “is only days away.” From the Air Command and Control Centre in Italy to the Mediterranean Sea, from the Turkey-Armenia border to the Persian Gulf, and from an aircraft carrier to the war-torn skies over Syria, the conflict unfolds from myriad perspectives, including the top brass and the warriors on the ground, at sea, and in the air. Cecil Perdue Jr., “a full-bird colonel” and distinguished fighter pilot now riding a desk as one of the directors of a NATO facility in Italy, guides the operations. Pilot Tracey “Turbo” Foster, “stunningly beautiful” with “a resolve of steel,” lives up to her nickname. Other major players include Maj. Samuel McFarlane, fighter pilot Maj. Edward “Ripper” Ripland, and Navy SEAL Brett Mason, heroes all. Outside of physical descriptions, these characters are defined solely by their actions in battle (a downed enemy fighter pilot “would surely get a heart attack too if he came to know somehow that a woman had stitched his ass, Tracey thought in amusement”). In his rousing story, Isaacs more than satisfies the need for speed, but he also writes authentically about the punishing physical tolls of flying (“She was jarred to the bones.…The excruciating G-forces slammed her hard against the seat back and nearly knocked the wind out of her”). But the author seems much more at home deftly crafting the book’s prodigious battle sequences (“The sidelobes were being suppressed and blanked, leading at one stage, he noticed, to an increase in the main beam width”) than he is with producing a bracing sex scene between Tracey and her lover, another pilot (“He descended on her womanhood”).  

A fast-paced tale that should appeal to war buffs, military enthusiasts, and armchair patriots.