Scimitar SL-2

".....With his trademark military hardware, GEOPOLITICAL DETAIL, AND CUTTING-EDGE SCIENCE, Patrick Robinson is at the top of his game with this new tale that you will pray will never come true....." [from the back cover of audio cassette case]

Book was received in good shape. The book was interesting, and spell binding.

Patrick Robinson is back with his long-awaited follow-up to the excellent BARRACUDA 945, where we first met ex-SAS turned HAMAS General Ravi Rashood(aka Ray Kerman). The story opens in London when Rashood and some fellow terrorists kidnap Dr Paul Landon, a renowned expert in natural disasters. They force information out of him on volcanic eruptions and their effects, and how to set them off . . . Landon is later executed. The year in this book is 2009. The Republican Administration is ousted from the White House by a new Democrat President, Charles McBride, a thinly-fictionalised Clinton or Kerry. Admiral Arnold Morgan and his fellow military chiefs have also resigned or retired. Morgan, the regular good guy in Robinson's books, marries his secretary Kathy and they honeymoon in the Canary Islands, which are well-described here. Morgan and Kathy visit the mountains of Cumbre Veija, a dormant set of volcanoes and see four Arabs which Morgan suspects are up to no good. One of them, unknown to him at the time, is Rashood. Nobody thinks anything of it at first, until Lt James Ramshawe, a brilliant intelligence officer, has a hunch. It is later learned that after the unexplained eruption of Mount St Helens, HAMAS, using a second BARRACUDA-class submarine stored for them by the devious Chinese navy for money, and armed with North Korean-built missiles, has hatched a plan to force the withdrawal of all US forces from the Middle East and the creation ofa Palestinian independent state by forcing the Israelis off the West Bank - or the BARRACUDA will fire nukes at Cumbre Veija and create a mega-tsunami which would destroy America's east coast and parts of the European coastline as well. The President refuses to believe it, passing it off as a sick hoax. This President is more interested in the welfare state, it seems, than security of the country. Admiral Morgan fails to convince this new Administration, so when a second eruption triggered by HAMAS missiles occurs and the President still refuses to believe it is a terrorist attack, Morgan stages a coup in the White House and Paul Bedford, the more patriotic Vice President, is sworn in. Morgan then organises a mass evacuation of the East Coast. There is also a massive naval operation to locate the Barracuda(a former Soviet sub purchased by HAMAS through China) all across the Atlantic. Whilst well-detailed, there were a few errors - F15 Tomcat??!! Probably just a typo. Plus that was a hell of a fluke shot with a Harpoon, why not just let the Patriots get on with the job. And while the build-up was excellent throughout, both with the naval deployment and the evacuation of the East Coast of the USA which would make for some great panic scenes in a movie adaptation, the ending was a little weak. I suspect the author had to finish it in a hurry, though there is another instalment on the way in May called HUNTER KILLER featuring the same characters! The scientific background was well researched - Cu

The real question you have to ask about this book is, "Would the explosion of a nuke really cause a volcano eruption that would in turn cause the most destructive mega-tsunami in history." I don't know. Mount St. Helens blew with a force estimated at 24 megatons. That's about 2,000 times the Hiroshima blast. "Mike" the first US H-bomb was 15 megatons. Mount St. Helens was triggered by an earthquake that caused a landslide that effectively removed the cap off of a high pressure chamber under the middle of the mountain. So yes, a fairly small nuke might releive the pressure on a volcano that is getting ready to blow anyway. Cause a tsunami, I think the volcano needs to be under water. Most destructive, if it hit New York, yup. With that as a start, then this book begins to make sense. After this you start to get into other questions like how to deliver the weapon, where to place it, and so on. If you're a navy fiction writer, then you've got to use a boat to deliver the device, and simply putting it into a cargo container wouldn't be very cool. And of course your adversary has to be another navy man. OK, now I've told you the story. Is it a good story? I liked it. To be sure there are some technical mistakes like a missile going near the speed of light - well the author meant sound. That's no worse than so many mysteries where revolvers have safeties and never, never fail to go off when they are dropped on the ground. The characters are supermen. They're kind of like people you wish could go solve problems rather than the politicians that we get into office. This book is an easy, fast read, not bad for a cold winter weekend.

If Stephen King has in fact retired, I think I have found his worthy successor. His name is Patrick Robinson. Robinson writes military thrillers, probably more properly classified as naval thrillers. And no, these are not books that speculate as to what Britney Spears might be wearing tomorrow. We're talking naval thrillers, as in big ships that can wreak havoc and destruction from far away. Does Robinson write horror novels? No. Is he as good a writer as King? No. What Robinson does do, however, is tell a great story, and tell it well, and scare the living vinegar out of you along the way. If anything, he is scarier than King. We all know, even while reading a King novel, that serial killer clowns don't come crawling out from under bridges, that there aren't towns in Maine inhabited by vampires, or that trucks don't attack people on their own. Robinson, however, deals with real boogeymen, the guys who are out there, right now, plotting the demise of you and me, and the United States and Israel, and now even Russia. Between the nightly news and the possibilities presented in SCIMITAR S-2, Robinson's latest novel, I haven't slept in days. Before I read SCIMITAR S-2 I didn't waste more than a brain cell or two thinking about tsunamis. If someone had asked me to define "tsunami" I would have stood up straight and tall as I was taught to do at St. Agatha Grade School and said, "tsunami: a really big wave that only occurs in Japan but that we don't have to worry about in the United States." As it turns out, I would be wrong. Robinson goes into great detail about the causation of tsunamis, and about how the fixings for one that could wipe out the entire east coast of the United States exists in the beautiful, idyllic Canary Islands. If that isn't enough to keep you awake all night, he brings a brilliant, deranged fundamentalist Islamic terrorist into the mix, a guy who has the inspired idea to set the wheels in motion to cause such an event to occur --- by shooting a nuclear missile into a volcano. Fortunately, Robinson has already created a hero to deal with the lunatic. He is United States Admiral Arnold Morgan, who is blunt, gruff, and to the point; a straight-shooter with a spine of steel tempered in the fires of war. There is only one problem: Morgan is no longer a United States Admiral. Given the boot by a new president hardly worthy of the title, Morgan has resigned himself to retirement until he receives a cryptic, taunting message from an old adversary --- the very man behind the plan to obliterate the East Coast. Knowing only that something big, dangerous and deadly is about to occur, Morgan interjects himself into the pending crisis, where he finds that his most significant adversaries are not the terrorists who plot the destruction of the nation, but the leaders who consider themselves anointed to lead the less-enlightened masses to glory while ignoring the clear signs of slaughter ahead. Morgan and his former Navy colleagues do their d