False Flag (Jason Trapp #2) 1.5Stars

 

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Title: False Flag
Series: Jason Trapp #2
Author: Jack Slater
Rating: 1.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 362
Words: 114K

This was an absolute piece of garbage, trash, whatever word you’d like to refer to it as. I’ll be done with this writer after this.

To give any of those of you who have hung around for awhile, this reminded me exactly of the Agent Zero series and the Jet series, both of which were also about supposedly super duper secret agents written by authors who obviously don’t know a thing about that subject, and I do mean absolutely nothing about it.

I ended up emailing Fraggle to run some things across her radar to make sure I wasn’t completely out to lunch. I wasn’t. So I’m going to copy/paste the majority of that email to show just how stupid this author this and why a brick wall is smarter than he supposedly is.

/wide

I didn't start taking notes until later. I wish I had started from the get-go. But I'll try to list the chapter, the relevant sentence or sentences in italics and then my question or comment.

I also had a ton more notes after where I leave off, but most of it was around Trapp being wildly inconsistent in his methodology (who he kills, why, etc) that shows he's not a professional at all. We're just told that he is. I was getting steamed, again, so figured I'd leave off :-D

Plus a lot more pro-China stuff. The President of the United States would NEVER lower himself to talk to some random ambassador. He'd be on the Red Phone, or whatever color it is, with the General Secretary (ie, China's president) himself. And this is an instance of the author just not getting the American mindset. Whether it is of Trapp or anyone else, they do not THINK like Americans who are in those positions. It is Hollywood'ized beyond even Hollywood.

Chapter 14: about Trapp

"Maybe he was being irrational, but he couldn’t help it."

The "best in the business" agent, like Trapp supposedly is, has that kind of feelingzzz trained out of him. He CAN help it, or he would have been dead long before this.

Chapter 23: about Ikeda (female agent)

"Alstyne was her first kill. He deserved it, but the CIA operative was no psychopath. She should have been flown directly to an Agency shrink after completing the operation, for a debrief to check he mental state."

Is equating killing of any kind with being a psychopath. I can't even begin to describe how wrong that mindset is. Especially for those in a military/black ops situation.

Killing is part and parcel of an agents job. It is beyond unbelievable that she would have immediately flown back to have her little feelingz coddled. She'd get a 10min exam to make sure she didn't enjoy it and that would be it. She'd spend more time on paperwork for the poison lipstick. And only a naive idiot in the business would think otherwise. Or an uninformed writer.

Chapter 28: about Trapp arriving in China

"he knew that if America picked a fight with this country, it would be like Germany invading the Soviet Union in 1941, or Napoleon doing the same a hundred and fifty years earlier."

Choice of the word "picked a fight". The whole book is pro-China, anti-America and no agent of the United States black ops would even THINK that way.  And numbers aren't everything. Sure, China has 4 times the US's population, but 9/10ths of them are still uneducated peasants, because China's communist party keeps them that way to control them.  We'd kill the leadership and let the country wallow like a ship without a rudder. I'm a civilian and even I know that much military doctrine.

Chapter 39: about Trapp and his boss talking about Ikeda

"“Ikeda isn’t the priority,” Mitchell said sharply. “She knew what she was signing up for. Those are the risks in this business.”
Trapp’s fist clenched, and a pang of anger shot through his body. He knew that Mitchell wasn’t saying anything that he himself didn’t believe. Hell, he’d said exactly the same to others many times.
But this, somehow, was different. It wasn’t academic, or cut and dry. He had sent Eliza into that room and hadn’t been able to protect her.
She might have known what she was signing up for. But she couldn’t possibly have expected to have been failed in that way.
This was Trapp’s mess. And he damn well intended to clean it up."

He obviously doesn't believe it, otherwise he wouldn't be "reacting" this way.  He's no professional. It isn't different. Every agent can expect to die on a mission, and to be tortured first. Trapp knows this, Ikeda knows this.  And it isn't Trapp's job to "protect" Ikeda, she's a full fledged agent after all. Nor is it his "mess". His job was to kill the scumbag and recover the info/flash drive. He did both of those. Rescuing Ikeda is a good thing, but it's not priority, just like his boss says at the beginning. 

Chapter 42:

""But in all those years, at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the real threat had come from terrorists, not nation states."

And those terrorists were and continue to be, funded by Nation States. It's a series of proxy wars. 9/11 was funded by the Saudis. Libya trained and funded terrorist cells all during the 70's and up until Qaddafi died. And a "trained agent" would know this and not make asinine statements like the above.

★✬☆☆☆

From Devilreads.com

They say revenge is a dish best served cold.
But Jason Trapp is losing his taste for it. For six months, his personal crusade has taken him around the world, mopping up the last of the Bloody Monday conspirators. There's only one left, and after the crooked financier Emmanuel Alstyne meets his maker, Trapp's debt will be paid in full. He vows he's done with the business of death.
Unfortunately, it isn't done with him.
After a simple kill mission goes sideways in Macau, leaving a CIA spy kidnapped, half a dozen Chinese agents dead, and America's satellites burning in the skies, Trapp is propelled back into the game. Eliza Ikeda was taken on his watch, and he's determined to get her back–no matter the cost. The problem is, he has no idea who took her, why, or what they plan to do next.
Trapp knows he's being played. And with the world's only two superpowers hurtling toward the precipice of war, time is running out...