The Warriors of God

AWESOME! I actually bought this for $1 in a hardware store, thinking it was gonna be junk! Non-stop action and a REAL believable story. The shootout at the end in the White House was insane!This is a book that HAS TO be made into a movie.

The original copyright for this book is 1992. But just about everything described in this book has happened for real since it was written.First the Iranians attack the USS Makin Island with a devastating bombing that almost sinks the ship (can you say USS Cole). The United States retaliates with an attack on Iran's main oil depot at Kharg Island (cruise missiles and high technology weapons). The Iranians respond with a command attack on a major oil pumping station in the United Arab Emirates, and then go one step further. They decide it is time to take the war to the United states and target the President. A small dedicated terrorist group penetrates America and slips behind the barrier of missiles, ships and planes defending the country (it is a 9-11 style attack except with commandos).Through it all defense analyse Rich Welsh suspects the truth and tries to get somebody to listen. (I suspect he has a few real life aanalogues who saw the coming storm, but whose warnings went unheeded.) The Welsh character conveys the author's feelings about structural problems that plague the Marines and the Pentagon mentality.This is a well written and well paced book. Get a copy today, this guy deserves a better sales ranking!

After Iranian commandos sink a US warship in the Persian Gulf, the US retaliates by destroying the facilities on Kharg Island, vital to Iran's oil industry. Rather than risk a head on confrontation with the vastly more powerful US military, the Iranians seek their revenge on US soil. A daring planned is conceived, using commandos and suicide bombers, to first strike the marine base at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, and then launch an attack on the White House to kill the president. The rest of the story unfolds with the perfect combination of action, exposition, and characters. In a genre where it's easy to resort to the use of cliched stock characters, this book offers characters with depth, particularly the Iranians. Instead of portraying them as nothing more than religious fanatics, the author does an excellent job of explaining their tactics from their perspective. Add to this the chillingly plausible, relatively low tech methods of attack and you've got a real page-turner.

Although superficially like scores of other apocalypse-touting espionage thrillers, this book has two unusual strengths. Firstly, the sheer plausibility of the terrorists plots: Christie, a former Marines officer himself, has clearly thought hard about how to wage war against the world's sole remaining superpower, and has effectively written a manual on just how to go about it, while at the same time keeping the story moving along sharply without getting bogged down in tedious technical detail. Secondly, he refuses all temptation to demonise the Iranians, but draws a clear picture of their motivations. Indeed, he often seems to have more sympathy with them, outnumbered and outgunned as they are, and yet resourceful, determined and daring to the point of heroism, than he does with his over-complacent countrymen.

Really points out the weakness of our coutry to an organized terrorist attack. I am looking fo more from this author