The Cobra – Frederick Forsyth

The drug-related death of one of the White House staff prompts the President to ask the question – can the cocaine industry be destroyed?

The report that comes back says maybe; but only if a certain Paul Devereaux is given free reign (and a budget of $2 billion) to plan and implement a strategy. It’s agreed and “The Cobra” builds his team of experts and armoury of ships, planes and weaponry.

When he is ready the Cobra strikes, and shipments of Columbian pure are intercepted with stealth, secrecy and scant regard for former niceties of international law – neatly sidestepped by re-defining cocaine trafficking as terrorism enabling the rules of warfare to apply instead.

The final stage of the plan, as supplies get scarce, injects the venom of misinformation into the paranoid underworld of the drugs barons, fomenting civil war and bloodletting.

The violation and violence gets increasingly difficult for the political masters in Washington and London to stomach; can they see it through or will they pull the plug on Devereaux? Can they trust the Cobra to deliver to their agenda, and are they powerless to prevent him achieving his own?

It is typical Forsyth; all high tech gadgets and high powered facts and figures that convince (rightly or wrongly) that he’s found stuff out and he’s letting you into the know. The narrative moves quickly and smoothly to a tense finale, but I find it difficult to identify with the protagonists, whose every plan runs smooth and whose tricks and cons play out to perfection.

My reality is somewhat different with cock-up and confusion reigning supreme, but some may be comforted by the fiction of masterful organisation portrayed here.

Unbroken – Laura Hillenbrand

Unbroken relates the extraordinary life story of Louis Zamperini, born early in the twentieth century in the USA of Italian stock. Any of several incidents in Zamperini’s life would be considered remarkable; that he went from on to another through a chain of, mainly, misfortune makes for a story barely believable.

His wild youth was diverted from delinquency by the discovery of a talent and love for running, which he pursued, becoming a top college athlete and a young pretender at the Berlin Olympic of 1936. Great things were expected at the Helsinki Games scheduled for 1940…

Helsinki of course never happened, with Europe plunged into war, and by 1942 Louis was in the US Air Force, risking life and limb as bombsight operator on a B24 in the Pacific. And then he was literally in the Pacific as the B24 ditched with only Louis and two crewmates alive to scramble aboard the inflatable life raft.

An incredible number of weeks later, after surviving storms, hunger, thirst, punctures, sharks and a strafing Japanese Zero fighter plane, they spot land in the form of a small island and start to row ashore.

Frying pans and fire have nothing on this – it is a Japanese base and what follows are two years of “life” as an unofficial prisoner of war (eventually declared dead by the US authorities). Moved from camp to camp, each more brutal than the last, he ends up in mainland Japan, and US air strikes soon make it clear the way the war is going. But is that good news or bad for the PoWs – will it result in liberation, execution or (an option unknown to them) nuclear incineration.

Hillenbrand tells the story brilliantly, her meticulous research producing a balanced mix of personal detail and historical context; eschewing sensation for clear reportage, which allows events to speak for themselves and so have even more impact. It is a good approach; Zamperini’s powers of survival need no exaggeration.

Following on from her earlier “Seabiscuit”, the excellence of the book is no surprise; the only surprise is that I had never heard of the remarkable Louis Zamperini before now.

The Redbreast – Jo Nesbo

Shooting an American secret service agent during a joint operation, however understandably, would not normally be a good career move for DS Harry Hole of the Oslo police; but as part of the smoothing over of the incident he finds himself now a DI seconded to the Norwegian intelligence service.

There he is assigned to monitoring neo-Nazi activity and filtering information referred from the regional police. Neither excites him until he reads of the discovery of unusual spent ammunition cartridges which, to him, point to the importation of a deadly rifle and a potential assassination threat.

While Hole follows his enquiries, the reader gets to follow an old man, unwell but on a mission, and with bitter memories of his time in World War II, when his country rapidly capitulated to Nazi Germany and when his countrymen split three ways: those who stood by in silence, those who resisted, and those who collaborated and joined the German army to fight the Russians.

Harry sees a link between the rifle, through the neo-Nazis, to the old wounds of Norway under Quisling, but it’s tenuous and obstacles appear within the forces of law and order – is this legitimate prioritisation or something more sinister?

The old soldier’s back story and Harry’s investigation unfold in tandem, pleasingly complex with blind alleys and red herrings, building tension as the truth dawns and time becomes of the essence.

This is my first Jo Nesbo / Harry Hole thriller and I was impressed with every aspect. Well written (and translated), well plotted with slowly developing reveals, unobtrusive glimpses of Hole’s personal life, and an interesting historical context. It is long (600+ pages) but reads less than that and is never dull.

I will be back for more.

The Monkey King – Timothy Mo

In 1950’s Hong Kong, Wallace Nolasco’s marriage to May Ling was arranged solely to satisfy the needs of the respective parents.

Mr Nolasco senior, respected but impoverished school teacher, had only his Portuguese name to pass on (the genes long lost in decades of intermarriage with the Cantonese) so sought a dowry and prospects for his son; Mr Poon, successful but miserly businessman, needed to get his daughter (by his second concubine) off his hands and a ‘Mecanese’ hybrid was an acceptable compromise between an unattainable high ranking Cantonese and an undesirable Chinese of lower rank.

So Wallace is thrust into the already crowded Poon household comprising in addition to May Ling, Mr & Mrs Poon, their spinster daughters, their son and his wife and sons, and a couple of servants (‘amahs’) who rule the kitchen and perform domestic duties without grace.

There is a complex pecking order and Wallace’s place initially is firmly at the bottom. Undaunted he uses his ingenuity to create alliances, gain favour, and climb, step by step, through the family rankings until he becomes more use than ornament to Mr Poon in his business dealings in the city.

Life in the Poon household, and later in a remote New Territories village (where Wallace is exiled temporarily due to a need to lie low) is told with a deadpan humour that is more wry than laugh out loud. The trials and tribulations, petty victories and manoeuvrings are played out against the strange exotic world of the colony adjacent to the newly Red China.

Written before Mo’s brilliant ’Sour, Sweet’, The Monkey King is engaging enough but lacks the contrasts – light and dark, East and West - of the later work.