During a bombing raid over North Korea in 1950, an American B-29 has trouble with its bomb rack. When the bombs are finally released, they land on innocent civilians, killing everyone in Kang Chung Kwon's family. After the Korean War, Kwon is a major with a maniacal desire for revenge. He sends five agents to America to trace the members of the bomber crew and kill them. And that's just the beginning of a vengeful attack on the U.S. aircraft carrier Truman. For you newcomers to these troubled waters, John T. Campbell includes a glossary of terms. My favorite is RHIP, which means "rank has its privileges." Rank this one pretty high on the thriller meter.
John T. Campbell's Raid on Truman presents a tension laden North Korean naval thriller. North Koreans take over a nuclear aircraft carrier in an effort to use the ship, its weapons and its crew as hostages; but the plan backfires, leaving some of the 'hostages' as survivors who must regain control of the aircraft carrier. The chapter-by-chapter drama unfolds slowly but relentlessly as the crew faces its great challenge. Raid On Truman would make a great movie: as a novel, it excels in suspense and tension.
In the wake of a North Korean coup, an American nuclear aircraft carrier battle group is hit with a nerve agent that renders the crews unconscious. But through a freak ventilation malfunction, the engineers aboard the carrier Truman escape contamination. Through this quirk of fate, they are all that stand in the way of the takeover by a North Korean commando group of an American nuclear capital ship. It is a battle between the ship's 'snipes' and the North Koreans throughout this giant ship, and the engineers are about as lost as the Koreans in the non-engineering spaces of this supercarrier.
American sailors drop like flies in
this novel when nerve gas is sprayed on aircraft
carrier Truman by the North Koreans.
Through a malfunction in the ship's ventilation,
the engineering compartments escape contamination, leaving
the ship's "snipes" all that stand in the way of the
carrier's takeover by North Korean commandos.
Non-stop action with an unlikely group of heroes,
the navy engineers who "keep 'em turning."
The U.S. aircraft carrier Truman is attacked by the North Koreans, who use a chemical agent that renders the crew unconscious. The plan is for the Truman to serve as a bargaining chip in a global power play, but a freak ventilation malfunction spares the ship's engineering spaces and leaves the fate of the ship (and perhaps the world) in the hands of Truman's "snipes." Action and intrigue abound in this fast-paced story that is (thankfully) fiction.
When power changes hands in North Korea, the new government plans an international coup: a U.S. aircraft carrier and its escorts are attacked by nerve gas and, while the crews are unconscious, helicopters land commandos on the USS Truman's flight deck. A capital ship, its nuclear weapons and thousands of hostages will be the prizes of victory. But some of the Truman's engineers remain on their feet, and some of its planes are still aloft. Lieutenant Paul Simmons and commander Rex Hastings lead the battle to save their ship. Though its premise is interesting, this contemporary techno-thriller, a first novel, is handicapped by an unlikely love triangle involving Simmons, Hastings and Hastings's wife, and by a North Korean plan of attack altogether too dependent on luck. Campbell, a former Navy engineer, balances these shortcomings with an exciting account of the below-decks fight for control of the Truman and with several well-executed scenes of aerial combat.
A handful of American sailors fight to keep North Korean soldiers from hijacking their aircraft carrier on the high seas.
Ah, the fabled patience of the Orient.
Forty years have passed since an American bomber
accidentally dropped its load on the family of young Kang
Chung Kwon, but Kang, now a general in the army of North
Korea, has neither forgiven nor forgotten. And though
he has been able to send teams of crafty assassins to
the US to track down and execute every member of the
crew of that cursed aircraft, it is not enough.
Kang wants total humiliation of the US. To that end he has
wiped out his own country's dictator, seized the reins
of power, assembled a task force of a thousand helicopter borne
soldiers, and sent them over the sea to seize the U.S.S. Harry
S. Truman, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
The troops are preceded by airplanes spraying immobilizing
gas on the carrier and its escorting task force.
The gas works; the sailors drop in their tracks;
and the masked Koreans start dropping onto the flight deck,
ready to take over. But there is a glitch. A few sailors
and an officer in an unventilated machine room missed out
on the gas. They are wide awake and have absolutely no desire to
go to North Korea. There are also some angry pilots
buzzing around. Odds begin to even out as helos explode,
and the spunky officer decides not to give up the ship.
Far-fetched but entertaining swashbuckling in the modern vein.
Campbell, electrical engineer and former naval officer presents readers with yet another candidate for inclusion in the technothriller genre pioneered by Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October (LJ 10/15/84). The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Truman is attacked by North Koreans using chemical weapons in an attempt to board and capture an American warship. Lieutenant Paul Simmons, an engineering officer on board the Truman, escapes the effects of the chemical attack and leads his small engineering crew in an attempt to prevent the ship's capture. Campbell's own experience lends realism and excitement to the novel. There is excellent technical detail and an eye for the personal dimension of modern naval warfare. Readers will welcome this latest addition to the technothiller fraternity and eagerly await his next novel. Highly recommended for public libraries.