Book Title: Tsunami
ISBN 9781465722157
Part of Series: Part of
Integra series – see Integra, Run!,
Ransom, Hydrocarbon, Lost!, Population, Meteor Impact, Recovery, Virus
Author: Nicole Stuart
Price: $5.99
Number of words (approximately): 53 125
Star Rating (of five): Five
Summary: Jason and
Jenny are on a working vacation in La
Palma Atlantic Ocean ! They try to warn the Spanish authorities, but
are blocked, so they call in the CIA.
There is not enough time to wait for official help, and they are forced
to take action themselves to stop the terrorists.
Extract:
- “They’re going to the south site, to load the nuke!”
whispered Jason, excitedly.
“Good! They’ll
find the man there dead, and when they try to lift the nuke out of the car,
they’ll get a nasty surprise!” Laurence
smiled widely at the thought. “We must
get ready to take these men out. It
looks to me that they’re almost ready to load the nuke.”
As he spoke, the leader ordered four of the men to
turn the box on its side, and he set to work with a screwdriver to open
it. In the meanwhile, another man worked
at attaching a drum of thin steel cable to a pulley they mounted on the drill
rig, obviously to be used to lower the nuclear projectile down the hole. Within a couple of minutes, the two halves of
the box separated and exposed the slim projectile in its rack. It looked both elegant and evil.
Jason pulled out his radio and gave three clicks,
waited a few seconds, then repeated the three clicks.
“Open fire!” said Laurence in a low voice. He took aim, and pulled the trigger. The leader flew backwards, a red stain on his
chest. There was hardly a sound from the
silenced rifle. His shot was followed
almost immediately by Jason, who took a bead on the drill rig operator,
flattening him. The other men at the rig
looked in puzzlement at the two men on the ground, then, suddenly understanding
that they were under attack, they dived for cover. Jason and Laurence quickly shifted their
aims, taking out another man before the remaining two hit the ground, taking
cover behind whatever they could find.
After a few seconds, the men began returning fire, shooting wildly. Jason pressed the transmit button on his
radio three times again, instructing Jenny to open fire immediately, as he and
Laurence backed away from their positions, separating and moving to other
points where they could see the men.
Jenny was lying under her camouflage cape, watching
the two men at the site, lazing in the heat of the day in the shade of the
lean-to. They showed no sign of the
tension that Jenny felt. Suddenly, there
came a sound of the three click command on her radio, followed almost
immediately by automatic gunfire from the distance. Taken unwarned, she quickly lifted her rifle
to take aim at the first of the two men, to see them diving to the ground, away
from where they had been sitting. She
took aim at the furthest of the men, squeezing the trigger quickly, riding the
recoil and bringing the rifle sight down onto the second man. His body was out of sight behind one of the
barrels, and his legs were withdrawing as well.
She managed to get off a shot at him, and was pleased to see his leg
jerk as the bullet hit. She looked
around for the first man she had shot at, not seeing him, but finding a trail
of blood where he had continued his roll to stop behind a stack of
barrels. Cursing under her breath, Jenny
withdrew from her position and moved to the side, taking care to keep under cover
as she did so. The move was just in
time, as several shots came from the man behind the barrels, aimed at the
position that Jenny had occupied just seconds earlier. By the sound of them, the man was using a
large-caliber pistol, probably shooting blind as he kept under cover. She took up her new position, and scanned the
area. She could just catch sight of the
foot of the first man she had shot, so she took careful aim and squeezed off a
shot, feeling the satisfaction of knowing that she hit her target. The pistols shots stopped abruptly. Jenny looked around the site, but could see
no target, living or dead. However, she
could see the nuke in its box.
Jenny recalled a lecture in which the lecturer had
informed the student group that it was most unlikely that a nuclear weapon
would explode unless the process was initialized by the weapon trigger, which
set off a simultaneous explosion of two opposed shaped charges to propel two
pieces of fissionable material together at high speed. When Jenny questioned him on this, he stated
firmly that the explosion of one of the shaped charges alone could not initiate
the explosion of the other shaped charge in the correct sequence and
timing. He was adamant that it was safe
to shoot at a nuclear weapon, provided, of course, that one did not hang around
too long in the immediate vicinity of its radioactive leakage! Jenny had retained her skepticism, but now
she recalled what the man had said.
Mentally shrugging her shoulders, she took aim at the box, firing five
rounds at it in rapid succession in a ‘X’ shaped pattern that she felt sure
must at least damage the contents.
Reviewer’s Comments:
Structure: The book is
correctly formatted, and is well structured, using the language correctly and
precisely.
Content: The story
tells of a terrorist attempt to precipitate a massive rock slifde into the
Atlantic, in order to set off a huge tsunami and destroy the eastern seaboard
of the United States United States Miami , through Algeciras
and Barcelona , Ramstein and Munich ,
to La Palma in the Canary
Islands . It flows
seamlessly from one event to the next, without any stretching of credibility,
and always with action.
Reviewer’s Comments:
Tsunami tells of the possible consequence of a
terrorist group using a known situation, one that exists now and could easily
materialize an event considerably more destructive than the 9/11 attack on the US
Karin B
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