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Overview
For decades, the West has been fighting the cocaine cartels-and losing- until the president decides enough is enough and asks one man to take charge. His task: to destroy the cocaine industry. His name: Cobra. It is the ultimate secret war. But only one side can win...
Synopsis
An extraordinary cutting-edge thriller from the New York Times-bestselling grandmaster of international suspense.
Meticulous research, crisp narratives, plots as current as today's headlines-Frederick Forsyth has helped define the international thriller as we know it. And now he does it again.
What if you had carte blanche to fight evil? Nothing held back, nothing off the table. What would you do? For decades, the world has been fighting the drug cartels, and losing, their billions of dollars making them the most powerful and destructive organizations on earth. Until one man is asked to take charge. Paul Devereaux used to run Special Operations for the CIA before they retired him for being too ruthless. Now he can have anything he requires, do anything he thinks necessary. No boundaries, no rules, no questions asked.
The war is on-though who the ultimate winner will be, no one can tell...
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Paul Devereaux isn't going to take it anymore. For years, he ran the CIA Special Operations, until he was rudely terminated for mistreating bad guys. Now retired, Devereaux has decided to become a one-man destruction team to the drug cartels that are plaguing America. Tossing away the criminal code, he is launching his own very personal war, no holds barred. An archetypal Frederick Forsyth.Kirkus Reviews
The master of the political thriller strikes again.
Strike is a good operative word for the cops and crooks who populate the pages of Forsyth's latest (The Afghan, 2006, etc.), none of whom is afraid to unleash the dogs of war and hurt a lot of people in the bargain. This time the setting is South America, where an impatient U.S. president has decided to heat things up after it becomes ever clearer that the war on drugs isn't going so well for his team. Who's he gonna call? The Cobra, naturally, a spook bad enough to put the fear into anyone who hears the sobriquet. Said Cobra, aka Paul Deveraux, is a tough dude, to be sure, so tough that, says one of the president's aides, he was fired for being "too ruthless"—against the bad guys that is. Devereaux books on down to Colombia, where he's got to go up against the baddest guy of all—"educated, courteous, mannerly, drawn from pure Spanish stock, scion of a long line of hidalgos" Don Diego Esteban. In between Cobra and Don stands a small army of lesser players, from a right-hand man who's thorough but never timid to a Brazilian pilot bent on a kamikaze mission to miscellaneous cannon fodder on five continents. Forsyth's tale drags a little, particularly compared to his first and as yet unbested masterpiece, The Day of the Jackal(1971),at least in part because he takes time out to explain, at some length, the economics and chemistry (horse tranquilizer, anyone?) of the cocaine trade. All those minor players have to have something to do. Yet in the end this is a battle between titans, and it's fought to a bloody end amid heaps of bodies and at least a few unanticipated casualties, as far as the reader is concerned.
Forsyth still knows how to spring a surprise. Not his best work, but a taut, readable and swiftly moving tale well suited to the beach and airplane.