Hostile Contact

Hostile Contact

When Alan Craik and NCIS agent Mike Dukas spearheaded a hunt for a traitor inside the CIA, they landed in the middle of a firefight--and made some very powerful enemies. Inside Washington, some still worship the arch spy Craik and Dukas took down--and now these men are plotting their revenge. With their expertise in counterespionage, Craik and Dukas have been lured into an operation that will put them in contact with the Chinese, an operation with only one real purpose: to destroy them both. But while they know better than to take anything at face value, Craik and Dukas cannot guess how another player will shape the game. Their contact in Jakarta is a Chinese double agent walking a high wire between his handlers, as the Chinese search for a mother lode of money lost on the covert battlefield.

Craik is also holding down his day job, flying a sub hunter S-3B crammed with high-tech gear off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Along with his astronaut-to-be wife, Rose, Craik and his team are acting on intercepts of a “ghost” radio whose purpose they can only guess. Craik's expertise in intelligence tells him to start searching for an unseen, unknown submarine that may be lurking off Whidbey Island--with the ability to strike a death blow against the Navy's most important missile-loaded subs.

Suddenly Craik is thrust into a secret war raging from the heart of Beijing to the depths of the Pacific, as espionage and sub hunting come together in a chase to rescue a Chinese defector and his family, while a U.S. Navy carrier group is threatened by hostile suicide boats acting on targeting information from a submarine.

From the Hardcover edition.

With twists as harrowing as a high-g-force turn, Hostile Contact is vintage Gordon Kent: an electrifying blend of military suspense and espionage thriller.

Publishers Weekly

Kent's clever and complex thriller, his fourth featuring navy intelligence officer Alan Craik (Top Hook, etc.), has one foot in the techno-thriller genre and the other in traditional espionage. Craik and his pal and frequent partner, Special Agent Mike Dukas, are fresh from a shoot-out with CIA traitor George Shreed, during which Craik lost two fingers and took a bullet in the collarbone while trying to arrest the turncoat. Brooding over his injuries, Craik is reduced to snapping at his wife, Rose (herself a hotshot navy pilot). Before he completely loses it, he manages to get back into action with a trip to Jakarta to test a plan for dealing with Chinese agents. Unfortunately, the plan is a setup; fellow agent Jerry Piat is on Craik's trail, determined to avenge his mentor, Shreed, who Piat believes was innocent. So are some Chinese agents in search of another of Craik's victims, Colonel Chen. The intricate thriller weaves together three major plots: Craik must reveal and stop the CIA coverup of Shreed's treason, break up a Chinese espionage ring that is communicating with submarines off the U.S. Pacific Northwest Coast and prevent Colonel Lao from using that intelligence to launch a terrorist attack against an American aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. As superbly drawn as the characters are (even secondary ones like Dukas's fastidious backup, Dick Triffler, and his deceptively ditsy secretary, Leslie), they are also multitudinous, with subplots and shifts in viewpoint to match; sometimes the plot is simply too busy. This is a relatively minor flaw, however-Kent's thriller is still top-notch. (July 8) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Gordon Kent is the pseudonym of a father-and-son writing team, who both have extensive personal experience in the U.S. Navy and are former intelligence officers. The son earned his Observer Wings in S-3 Vikings and left active duty in 1999. They share interests in history, fishing, and Africa, where they have spent considerable time, in and out of military service. Both live in the United States.