To the memory of the seventeen sailors who
lost their lives on the USS Cole
The milieu of armed conflict has been a fertile setting for storytellers since the dawn of the written word, and probably before. The Iliad by Homer was a thousand years old before someone finally wrote down that oral epic of the Trojan War, freezing its form forever.
Since then war stories have been one of the main themes of fiction in Western cultures: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoi was set during the Napoleonic Wars, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was set during the American Civil War, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque was perhaps the great classic of World War I. Arguably the premier war novel of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, was set in the Spanish Civil War.
World War II caused an explosion of great war novels. Some of my favorites are The Naked and the Dead, The Thin Red Line, War and Remembrance, From Here to Eternity, The War Lover, and Das Boot.
The Korean conflict also produced a bunch, including my favorite, The Bridges at Toko-Ri by James Michener, but Vietnam changed the literary landscape. According to conventional wisdom in the publishing industry, after that war the reading public lost interest in war stories. Without a doubt the publishers did.
In 1984 the world changed. The U.S. Naval Institute Press, the Naval Academy’s academic publisher, broke with its ninety-plus years of tradition and published a novel, The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy.
This book by an independent insurance agent who had never served in the armed forces sold slowly at first, then became a huge best-seller when the reading public found it and began selling it to each other by word of mouth. It didn’t hurt that President Ronald Reagan was photographed with a copy.
As it happened, in 1985 I was looking for a publisher for a Vietnam flying story I had written. After the novel was rejected by every publisher in New York, I saw Hunt in a bookstore, so I sent my novel to the Naval Institute Press. To my delight the house accepted it and published it in 1986 as Flight of the Intruder. Like Hunt, it too became a big best-seller.
Success ruined the Naval Institute. Wracked by internal politics, the staff refused to publish Clancy’s and my subsequent novels. (We had no trouble selling these books in New York, thank you!) The house did not publish another novel for years, and when they did, best-seller sales eluded them.
Literary critics had an explanation for the interest of the post-Vietnam public in war stories. These novels, they said, were something new. I don’t know who coined the term “techno-thriller” (back then newspapers always used quotes and hyphenated it) but the term stuck.
Trying to define the new term, the critics concluded that these war stories used modern technology in ways that no one ever had. How wrong they were.
Clancy’s inspiration for The Hunt for Red October was an attempted defection of a crew of a Soviet surface warship in the Baltic. The crew mutinied and attempted to sail their ship to Finland. The attempt went awry and the ringleaders were summarily executed by the communists, who always took offense when anyone tried to leave the workers’ paradises.
What if, Clancy asked himself, the crew of a nuclear-powered submarine tried to defect? The game would be more interesting then. Clancy’s model for the type of story he wanted to write was Edward L. Beach’s Run Silent, Run Deep, a World War II submarine story salted with authentic technical detail that was critical to the development of the characters and plot of the story.
With that scenario in mind, Clancy set out to write a submarine adventure that would be accurate in every detail. Never mind that he had never set foot on a nuclear submarine or spent a day in uniform — his inquiring mind and thirst for knowledge made him an extraordinary researcher. His fascination with war games and active, fertile imagination made him a first-class storyteller.
Unlike Clancy, I did no research whatsoever when writing Flight of the Intruder. I had flown A-6 Intruder bombers in Vietnam from the deck of the USS Enterprise and wrote from memory. I had been trying to write a flying novel since 1973 and had worn out two typewriters in the process. By 1984 I had figured out a plot for my flying tale, so after a divorce I got serious about writing and completed a first draft of the novel in five months.
My inspiration for the type of story I wanted to write was two books by Ernest K. Gann. Fate Is the Hunter was a true collection of flying stories from the late 1930s and 1940s, and was, I thought, extraordinary in its inclusion of a wealth of detail about the craft of flying an airplane. Gann also used this device for his novels, the best of which is probably The High and the Mighty, a story about a piston-engined airliner that has an emergency while flying between Hawaii and San Francisco.
Gann used technical details to create the setting and as plot devices that moved the stories along. By educating the reader about what it is a pilot does, he gave his stories an emotional impact that conventional storytellers could not achieve. In essence, he put you in the cockpit and took you flying. That, I thought, was an extraordinary achievement and one I wanted to emulate.
Fortunately, the technology that Clancy and I were writing about was state-of-the-art-nuclear-powered submarines and precision all-weather attack jets — and this played to the reading public’s long-standing love affair with scientific discoveries and new technology. In the nineteenth century Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and H. G. Wells gave birth to science fiction. The technology at the heart of their stories played on the public’s fascination with the man-made wonders of that age — the submarine, the flying machines that were the object of intense research and experimentation, though they had yet to get off the ground, and the myriad of uses that inventors were finding for electricity, to name just a few.
Today’s public is still enchanted by the promise of scientific research and technology. Computers, rockets, missiles, precision munitions, lasers, fiber optics, wireless networks, reconnaissance satellites, winged airplanes that take off and land vertically, network-centric warfare — advances in every technical field are constantly re-creating the world in which we live.
The marriage of high tech and war stories is a natural.
The line between the modern military action-adventure and science fiction is blurry, indistinct, and becoming more so with every passing day. Storytellers often set technothrillers in the near future and dress up the technology accordingly, toss in little inventions of their own here and there, and in general, try subtly to wow their readers by use of a little of that science fiction “what might be” magic. When it’s properly done, only a technically expert reader will be able to tell when the writer has crossed the line from the real to the unreal; and that’s the fun of it. On the other hand, stories set in space or on other planets or thousands of years in the future are clearly science fiction, even though armed conflict is involved.
In this collection you will find ten never-before-published techno-thriller novellas by accomplished writers, a category in which I immodestly include myself. I hope you like them.
STEPHEN COONTS
Julie Giraud was crazy as hell. I knew that for an absolute fact, so I was contemplating what a real damned fool I was to get mixed up in her crazy scheme when I drove the Humvee and trailer into the belly of the V-22 Osprey and tied them down.
I quickly checked the stuff in the Humvee’s trailer, made sure it was secure, then walked out of the Osprey and across the dark concrete ramp. Lights shining down from the peak of the hangar reflected in puddles of rainwater. The rain had stopped just at dusk, an hour or so ago.
I was the only human in sight amid the tiltrotor Ospreys parked on that vast mat. They looked like medium-sized transports except that they had an engine on each wingtip, and the engines were pointed straight up. Atop each engine was a thirty-eight-foot, three-bladed rotor. The engines were mounted on swivels that allowed them to be tilted from the vertical to the horizontal, giving the Ospreys the ability to take off and land like helicopters and then fly along in winged flight like the turboprop transports they really were.
I stopped by the door into the hangar and looked around again, just to make sure, then I opened the door and went inside.
The corridor was lit, but empty. My footsteps made a dull noise on the tile floor. I took the second right, into a ready room.
The duty officer was standing by the desk strapping a belt and holster to her waist. She was wearing a flight suit and black flying boots. Her dark hair was pulled back into a bun. She glanced at me. “Ready?”
“Where are all the security guards?”
“Watching a training film. They thought it was unusual to send everyone, but I insisted.”
“I sure as hell hope they don’t get suspicious.”
She picked up her flight bag, took a last look around, and glanced at her watch. Then she grinned at me. “Let’s go get ’em.”
That was Julie Giraud, and as I have said, she was crazy as hell.
Me, I was just greedy. Three million dollars was a lot of kale, enough to keep me in beer and pretzels for the next hundred and ninety years. I followed this ding-a-ling bloodthirsty female along the hallway and through the puddles on the ramp to the waiting Osprey. Julie didn’t run — she strode purposefully. If she was nervous or having second thoughts about committing the four dozen felonies we had planned for the next ten minutes, she sure didn’t show it.
The worst thing I had ever done up to that point in my years on this planet was cheat a little on my income tax — no more than average, though — and here I was about to become a co-conspirator in enough crimes to keep a grand jury busy for a year. I felt like a condemned man on his way to the gallows, but the thought of all those smackers kept me marching along behind ol’ crazy Julie.
We boarded the plane through the cargo door, and I closed it behind us.
Julie took three or four minutes to check our cargo, leaving nothing to chance. I watched her with grudging respect — crazy or not, she looked like a pro to me, and at my age I damn well didn’t want to go tilting at windmills with an amateur.
When she finished her inspection, she led the way forward to the cockpit. She got into the left seat, her hands flew over the buttons and levers, arranging everything to her satisfaction. As I strapped myself into the right seat, she cranked the left engine. The RPMs came up nicely. The right engine was next.
As the radios warmed up, she quickly ran through the checklist, scanned gauges, and set up computer displays. I wasn’t a pilot; everything I knew about the V-22 tiltrotor Osprey came from Julie, who wasn’t given to long-winded explanations. If was almost as if every word she said cost her money.
While she did her pilot thing, I sat there looking out the windows, nervous as a cat on crack, trying to spot the platoon of FBI agents who were probably closing in to arrest us right that very minute. I didn’t see anyone, of course: The parking mat of the air force base was as deserted as a nudist colony in January.
About that time Julie snapped on the aircraft’s exterior lights, which made weird reflections on the other aircraft parked nearby, and the landing lights, powerful spotlights that shone on the concrete in front of us.
She called Ground Control on the radio. They gave her a clearance to a base in southern Germany, which she copied and read back flawlessly.
We weren’t going to southern Germany, I knew, even if the air traffic controllers didn’t. Julie released the brakes, and almost as if by magic, the Osprey began moving, taxiing along the concrete. She turned to pick up a taxiway, moving slowly, sedately, while she set up the computer displays on the instrument panel in front of her. There were two multifunction displays in front of me too, and she leaned across to punch up the displays she wanted. I just watched. All this time we were rolling slowly along the endless taxiways lined with blue lights, across at least one runway, taxiing, taxiing … A rabbit ran across in front of us, through the beam of the taxi light.
Finally Julie stopped and spoke to the tower, which cleared us for takeoff.
“Are you ready?” she asked me curtly.
“For prison, hell or what?”
She ignored that comment, which just slipped out. I was sitting there wondering how well I was going to adjust to institutional life.
She taxied onto the runway, lined up the plane, then advanced the power lever with her left hand. I could hear the engines winding up, feel the power of the giant rotors tearing at the air, trying to lift this twenty-eight-ton beast from the earth’s grasp.
The Osprey rolled forward on the runway, slowly at first, and when it was going a little faster than a man could run, lifted majestically into the air.
The crime was consummated.
We had just stolen a forty-million-dollar V-22 Osprey, snatched it right out of Uncle Sugar’s rather loose grasp, not to mention a half-million dollars’ worth of other miscellaneous military equipment that was carefully stowed in the back of the plane.
Now for the getaway.
In seconds Julie began tilting the engines down to transition to forward flight. The concrete runway slid under us, faster and faster as the Osprey accelerated. She snapped up the wheels, used the stick to raise the nose of the plane. The airspeed indicator read over 140 knots as the end of the runway disappeared into the darkness below and the night swallowed us.
Two weeks before that evening, Julie Giraud drove into my filling station in Van Nuys. I didn’t know her then, of course. I was sitting in the office reading the morning paper. I glanced out, saw her pull up to the pump in a new white sedan. She got out of the car and used a credit card at the pump, so I went back to the paper.
I had only owned that gasoline station for about a week, but I had already figured out why the previous owner sold it so cheap: The mechanic was a doper and the guy running the register was a thief. I was contemplating various ways of solving those two problems when the woman with the white sedan finished pumping her gas and came walking toward the office.
She was a bit over medium height, maybe thirty years old, a hard-body wearing a nice outfit that must have set her back a few bills. She looked vaguely familiar, but this close to Hollywood, you often see people you think you ought to know.
She came straight over to where I had the little chair tilted back against the wall and asked, “Charlie Dean?”