This short, episodic military action/adventure revolves around an elite team of U.S. Army operatives who are experts in light and heavy weaponry, explosives, reconnaissance, electronics, and sniper tactics. Their mission: “remove from existence” designated U.S. adversaries.
The accent is on action. In 89 pages, the team of six sergeants (nicknamed Midnight, Seeker, Pappy, Boom Boom, Hound Dog and Butcher) graphically kill at least 200 people.
These men — who love 44 magnums and hate terrorists and “commie bastards” — begin by finding, stabbing and garroting the terrorists who killed their predecessors, Team Number One. Then after a short stint in advanced sniper school to hone their murderous talents, they fly to Kansas City to receive their first official assignment: to go to Panama — where they kill three would-be assassins at the Panama City airport, have a shoot-out at the Holiday Inn, throw a woman off a seventh-floor balcony, and proceed into the jungle where they kill everyone in a hidden terrorist camp.
Then it’s on to Rome, Paris, and Cairo, with a detour to Capetown to rescue Hound Dog, who has been kidnapped, by assaulting the airfield where he’s being held. With bullets ricocheting off the aircraft they’ve hijacked, they fly into the African desert, where they’re outfitted for an assault on a mad Russian scientist’s secret missile base in the Himalayas. Vastly outnumbered, they prepare to “go down in a blaze of glory.”
The gratuitous, non-stop action and violence presented here quickly becomes mind numbing. Implausible plot non-sequiturs, manifold grammar and spelling mistakes, jingoistic writing that seems more suited for a graphic novel, and crude comments from one-dimensional macho-man characters — such as “she was built like a brick shithouse,” “had legs that ran all the way up to her ass,” and “I’ll knock your teeth down your throat to you asshole” [sic] —will put off many readers.
In sum, the book needs solid rewriting and editing to be acceptable to all but a small audience.
Also available in hardcover and ebook.
