Tom Clancy’s Op Center: God of War by Jeff Rovin

The scene is a couple uninhabited islands midway between South Africa and Antarctica. Prince Edward and Marion Islands. Only a small research station is present. On a corner of Marion Island, a small yacht that ferries mineral poachers around in search of rare gemstones goes digging around in an easily accessible chasm of a coastal rock pillar. A combination of drilling and acid breaks open a chamber containing multiple storage vesicles. The lead geologist, Katrinka, grabs three intact vesicles thinking if someone went to such extremes to hide whatever is inside, the contents must be worth something. Breaking open the reinforced concrete vault damages a number of the other containers releasing contents into the air.

Minutes after opening the vault, Katrinka is back on o board the yacht. As she works to secure her discovery in the ship’s lab, she hears the crew erupt. Blood and internal viscera are being vomited up, flesh is being singed from the inside. With 20ish minutes, the entire crew is dead. Katrinka sees this through the lab door window and immediately dons her personal protective gear, boards the yacht’s small helicopter to escape. But not before arming the ship’s self-destruct device sending a ball of flame into the atmosphere and sinks the yacht, the heat of which helps send the emancipated contents into the atmosphere.

A commercial flight falls out of the sky over the southern Indian Ocean crashes nose-first into a remote corner of Marion Island. The research station head and his helicopter pilot go over to investigate. The helo pilot becomes ill, but not fatally. The station head was mostly sealed in his cold weather gear at first, but quickly pulls on his PPE, just in case.

The two explosions do not go unnoticed. Air traffic over the south Indian Ocean is locked down. South African military and intelligence organize to investigate. But so do the Chinese as they are keen to expand their influence in that region. As do the Russians, because they have connections with South Africa in part to stymie the Chinese.

And the Americans.

The President can’t send anything in publicly unless asked by Pretoria. But that doesn’t mean they’ll sit idly by. You never know.

The traditional Op Center morphed into mobile strike force in Sting of the Wasp (2019), previously reviewed by the MRB boys. Black Wasp is a single, small, mostly autonomous group that avoids the military bureaucracy and Congressional oversight by answering only to the President and funded by a non-existent budget line. They are tasked to find out what’s going on.

The Chinese have a navy vessel in the area and are the first to arrive. Katrinka has managed to get back to the mainland and hands over two of the containers to her boss. From what she saw, she’s sure they contain some bioweapon and other countries might be interested in purchasing it. Her boss, a native South African whose political views are exceedingly anti-white, has other more local ideas. 

The bulk of this book is the speculative research into the what, how, and why of the contents of the find and then what to do about it. The source of the contents is quickly uncovered. A treatment for HIV gone bad. A virus had been engineered years ago to hit HIV, but it turned out that the cure was worse than the disease. Not knowing exactly the best way to destroy the creation, it was sealed up tight and buried in one of the most remote locations on the planet. Dumb luck that it was uncovered. The dang bug has a short, but deadly life span when exposed to the atmosphere. It rose rapidly in the air when released and the jet flew right through the cloud. Within 15 minutes, every person on board was dead and the plane crashed.

Consistent with anything having Clancy’s name attached, this techno-thriller is told at a breathtaking, breakneck pace. Two-thirds of the book is planning and speculation. Once Black Wasp arrives in South Africa, the whole issue is contained within maybe 24hrs. But not before a mainland release of the toxin creates South Africa’s own version of 9/11. Love Clancy? You’ll love this. 

ECD

Tom Clancy’s Op Center: Sting of the Wasp by Jeff Rovin

The USS Intrepid sits at anchor at a NYC harbor. A significant tourist stop. On any given day, the flight deck has scores of people wandering around. For those of a certain age, they remember the Intrepid picking up Scott Carpenter, the 4^th American in space. A piece of American history.

 

To Captain Ahmed Salehi, the Intrepid is a target.

On a delightful spring morning, he, and a hired Iranian chemical engineer, put a figurative match to an incendiary device that spews flammable chemicals across the deck and incinerates hundreds of tourists. And in one final ‘fuck you’ to the American intelligence network, he looks directly into a surveillance camera as he leaves the ship.

It’s not like the US didn’t know about Salehi. His plan to set off a small nuke in Minneapolis was stopped and the ship under his command had been sunk. He was a known commodity. But somehow, he’d slipped under the radar. In particular, the radar of the center devoted to keeping track of people like him.

Op Center dropped the ball.

POTUS calls the heads of every 3-letter agency set up to protect the US. In the White House situation room, Op Center director Chase Williams is given a tongue lashing by every political opponent of the Center. At the end, POTUS shoves Williams out the door and the Center is ordered to be summarily disbanded. Today.

Williams’ entire team is out of a job. And he has to figure out his own future while mourning the loss of life in New York. Once he gets home, Matt Berry, an old friend and now the Deputy Chief of Staff to POTUS, contacts him to meet. Now.

With the full support of POTUS, Berry offers Chase a job. Head up a new covert team. Small. Out of the Defense Logistics Agency. Unlimited cash, supplies, support. Flexible. Forget about endless planning and getting approvals. Just go and get the job done. And this job is to get Salehi. Alive or dead. Just get him. An encrypted text is sent to three specific individuals:

“Black Wasp”

Lance Corporal Jaz Rivette. Sniper and an expert with any type of sidearm or rifle. Logged his first kill as a 10yo when he stopped a store robbery. Lt. Grace Lee. Hand to hand combat instructor at Ft Bragg. Doesn’t carry a gun. All she needs are her martial arts skills and a few knives. Commander Hamilton Breen. With the Navy JAG office. Yeah, he’s a lawyer. Sort of the team’s soul. But he is still a soldier, and a damn good one.  They drop everything to meet in ASAP in DC.

They don’t know Williams. Just that he’s been assigned to lead this team. With intel from every overt and covert agency passed to them, they start tracking Salehi’s movements. The chemical engineer fled to Toronto. Salehi heads to the Caribbean via Hartford, CT. Rumors of Salehi’s whereabouts run rampant. The engineer is found murdered. Apparently by a Jamaican Muslim group. That’s what Williams grabs and Black Wasp heads for a night parachute drop into a crime-ridden corner of Jamaica.

The hunt goes through Jamaica then after a couple flight changes, arrives in Yemen where Salehi meets up with his benefactor who has promised him a ship and a lifetime of cash as a reward for striking at the Great Satan. Black Wasp just has to catch up with him before he disappears to the ocean. Black Wasp is pretty effective when it doesn’t have to check back in with Momma in DC every time a decision is necessary. It's a breathless week after the Intrepid attack.

I thought this was interesting and credible. It could happen. Whether there is something like Black Wasp buried deep within the government is open for debate. Not just on practical grounds. But moral grounds, too. The closer they get to Salehi, the more the bodies pile up. Most are bad guys, but there are what amounts to an execution or two along the way.

Way back when, I read every novel Clancy wrote (really liked Clark and Chavez characters. Wish Hollywood would make Without Remorse into a movie), but I began to tire of the plot lines when there was an attempt to pass the Jack Ryan flame on to Jack, Jr. I read the first couple Op Center books but didn’t return. While I’m not likely to go back to where I left off and work my way forward, I will say that if the Op Center series continues the Black Wasp theme along, I’ll be there. This is just the kind of book Men Reading Books was based on.

ECD