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Overview
April 1998: A tanker hauling a deadly new explosive vanishes without a trace in a raging storm....That explosive falls into the hands of Jack Tyrell, known as Jackie Terror twenty-five years ago when he led a radical underground group that spread its message with bombs and blood. Now he's back in the world he left, more determined than ever to realize his deadly vision. Enter Blaine McCracken. Badly wounded in a terrorist attack, McCracken seeks out his mentor, Sergeant Major Buck Torrey, to get his edge back. But Torrey disappears before he can finish his work, and McCracken joins forces with Torrey's daughter, Liz Halprin, to find his kidnapper. Their hunt takes them on a perilous journey where secrets can be as deadly as bullets. But not as deadly as the experimental explosive Jackie Terror uses to destroy every bridge and tunnel leading into Manhattan, holding the entire city of seven million people hostage for a $15 billion ransom.Editorials
Hartford Courant
Better than anything by Tom Clancy.Kirkus Reviews
A former Weather Underground bomber ransoms Manhattan after demolishing its bridges and tunnels: a formulaic shoot-'em-up featuring former CIA counterterrorist Blaine McCracken (The Fires of Midnight, 1995, etc.). In Pennsylvania, an unguarded tanker truck filled with Devil's Brew, the world's deadliest explosive, disappears without a trace. About the same time, a mysterious bald-headed terrorist, annoyed that his plan to blow up the Washington Monument has been canceled by the fearless McCracken, gets in a few good shots before escaping. Written off as a cripple by medical science, McCracken limps to the Florida Keys, where his Sergeant-Major Buck Torrey, once commander of McCracken's "Dead Simple" Special Forces group, teaches him to swim with the alligators and hold his breath for more than two minutes underwater. Just as McCracken is flexing his rejuvenated muscles, Buck heads to Virginia to help his daughter, Liz Halprin, an ex-FBI agent who lost her job when one of the shots she fired at a pistol-packing maniac happened to kill her son's schoolteacher. It seems now that Liz's nasty neighbors want her to sell the family farm to sleazeball developer Maxwell Rentz. Alas, Buck is disappeared by Rentz, giving McCracken an excuse to team up with the beautiful Liz to rescue his substitute father-figure. Meanwhile, psychotic hippie radical Jack Tyrell (a.k.a "Jackie Terror" in the '60s) has the truck of Devil's Brew and is making anti-Manhattan plans with his old pals, among them the twisted psychic Queen Mary and the delightfully demented Yost twins, Earl and Weeb. McCracken, with Liz in tow, has no choice but to round up the old Dead Simple gang, including seven-foot-tall NativeAmerican Johnny Wareagle, to save the bridge and tunnel crowd from a fate worse than rush hour. Ten pounds of plot in a two-pound bag, filled with gruesomely cartoonish violence, macho posturing, and glib, gun-toting crazies who occasionally shoot straight.Book Details
Published
June 17, 1999
Publisher
Saint Martin's Press Inc.
Pages
404
Format
Paperbound
ISBN
9780812540017