Behind the Curtains

Scott McEwen writes about what he knows when he tells the story of U.S. Navy Master Chief Gil Shannon, a deadly SEAL sniper who finds himself forced to go rogue to help rescue a helicopter pilot being held by Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan in Sniper Elite: One-Way Trip. That's not because McEwen was himself a sniper, but he was the co-author of American Sniper, the war memoir of the late Chris Kyle, who was a SEAL sniper operating in the Afghan theater, as well as several others. Just before being sent on a covert assignment in Iran, Shannon learns that the Taliban have captured a female helicopter pilot who has often flown him and his team to their missions. He also learns how political concerns block a rescue attempt. But when he returns from his assignment, he realizes that several of the independent-thinking types on his own SEAL Team Six and the US Army's Delta Force have mounted just such a mission, which failed. Shannon then uses his connections in the military and among the area villagers to mount his own rescue attempt.

Trip is a mostly meat-and-potatoes read of tough-guy soldiers who will buck the wimpy suits in offices to make sure none of their comrades are left behind. McEwen and co-author Thomas Koloniar handle the narrative smoothly, and lift it a couple of notches above the usual blowups and blood he-man soldier books as Shannon reflects on what years of bringing death from a distance have done to what kind of a man he is. They obviously draw on McEwen's work with Kyle. It's a reflectiveness found in most real-life soldiers even if not in their print and onscreen counterparts, and it gives a reason to check out what McEwen and Koloniar continue to do with Shannon and his fellows.

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Ryan Kealey is having a Michael Corleone moment, and not one of the good ones. He's trying to work himself out of the field in the intelligence game, not trusting a generation of officials and agents who rely on data mining, electronics and seemingly everything else but the judgment and expertise of trained and knowledgeable men and women in the field. But once he thinks he's out, he gets a call, and he gets pulled back in. In The Courier, the Iranian military has managed to get its hands on a nuclear weapon, and that could mean disaster for an American city if Western agents can't recover it. Kealey will team up with Iranian-born nuclear physicist Rayhan Jafari, whose knowledge of the Farsi language could be crucial to finding the nuke and wresting it from enemy hands. But she is an amateur in the intelligence field, and Kealey will have to make some dangerous alliances to be certain the nuclear weapon and its fanatical courier are kept from destroying its target.

Courier is the fifth Kealey thriller from Andrew Britton, but doesn't rely so much on a known cast of characters and back story it loses a new reader. Britton has an excellent sense of pacing and maintains the tension at a high level, especially once Kealey and Jafari enter the field and begin their pursuit of the bomb and its carrier. The ending, though, fizzles when it takes most of the resolution of the chase and the plot out of the hands of the lead characters we've been following and hands it off to a relatively minor player. It's a misstep that leaves The Courier much, much weaker than it should have been.

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For the United States, the Robert Hanssen case from 2001 is certainly one of its worst intelligence disasters, if not the actual top. Hanssen sold U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union and then to Russia from 1979 to 2001. For Great Britian, the top (or bottom) spot is taken by the so-called Cambridge or Trinity Five, a group of four known and one suspected agents who sold British secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II and into the 1950s before defecting to the U.S.S.R. The ring, some of whom held high positions in the government as well as British intelligence, were all students at Trinity College in Cambridge University and thought to have been recruited then. In The Trinity Six, Charles Cumming supposes a sixth member of the ring, previously kept hidden by the MI6 foreign intelligence service, whose identity is about to be exposed by a journalist. That journalist dies, and her friend, college professor and Russia expert Samuel Gaddis, takes her research and tries to follow her leads to expose the long-forgotten spy. But intelligence services like to keep their secrets secret, and they have fewer qualms than many about how they do so. And there may be some others involved, with even fewer scruples. Gaddis has begun a game with stakes far beyond faculty politics, and one he is not ready to play.

The actual Trinity/Cambridge spy ring serves mostly as a MacGuffin for Cumming, as it is the secrets behind the secret that will both drive Gaddis' search and his enemies' moves to stop him. So a significant part of the story seems wasted; much of it could have been trimmed to move into the meat of the narrative a lot more quickly or to give it more of a purpose for being there. Gaddis himself isn't someone you'd root for if you had many choices; he begins a relationship during the early part of the story and not long after contemplates how he will make a move on a researcher he's met during a records search. He's also not too bright; doing things to put himself in danger as well as those close to him and failing to grasp how far ahead of a college professor actual professional spies might be in a spy-related matter.

The combination drains The Trinity Six of much of the interest it could have had; Cummings' wry tone and ability to keep from telegraphing a plot twist make it barely palatable but nothing that would add him to any list of must-reads.