Atlantic Scramble (Phoenix Force #3) 3Stars

 

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Title: Atlantic Scramble
Series: Phoenix Force #3
Author: Gar Wilson
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 185
Words: 41K
Publish: 1982

Camel humping terrorists (and I’m pretty sure they are referred to in that kind of language) steal a prototype machine gun that is super powerful and could change the balance of power in the middle east. What’s worse, they stole it from under the noses of the CIA and the Army. That can’t stand and so Hal Brognola (the liaison between the US Government and the special strike teams created by Mack Bolan) sends in Phoenix Force to recover the precious cargo.

One of the kickers is that the terrorists have a superserum that turns anyone who ingests it into a total suggestion zombie, but with all their skills still intact. And this is what bothered me. Nobody, and I mean nobody, on the side of the angels, even thinks about getting this drug. It is a plot device for this instance and that is it. Just think, if we could take enemy combatants, drug them with this, they’d then give us everything they knew without a fight, without torture, without any chance of misinformation. And we just ignore it because of laser guided machine guns, sigh.

I did notice a particular weakness of such ghost written franchises, that is, character erraticness. There are five guys in Phoenix Force and each ghost writer writes them a little bit differently. Sometimes that doesn’t matter, but here, it takes two of them and turns them into blood thirsty Rambo-clones instead of the intelligent men we’ve seen in the previous books. I doubt teenage me would have noticed something like this, but middle aged me definitely does. It is not an insurmountable weakness or one that will cause me to dnf the book, but it is a big ding against the series as a whole. It’s the kind of thing that builds and builds until I eventually blow my stack and dnf the series because of it.

Finally, All Hail Hypnotoad!

★★★☆☆

From the Publisher

Phoenix Force was scrambled from the far corners of the world when intelligence learned about Red Anvil.This Libyan terrorist organization had left a trail of blood across the United States, confounding all security systems in a savage, sometimes suicidal, pursuit of a deadly goal - possession of the Dessler Laser Submachine superweapon.The five warriors of Mack Bolan's mercenary force tracked their thieving quarry to the high seas of the Atlantic, where the battle zone descended upon the subchaser U.S.S. Beaumont and continued, bloodily, beneath the waves.The deep-sea shoot-out is the most explosive climax yet for the fabulous, world-encircling Phoenix Force. Here is raw power and magnificent courage in the gut-chilling tradition of the Executioner.

And there is nothing that dictator Xi Jinping the goat humper can do about it.