Attitude, as they say, is everything. That is why I'm going to state up front that at
times while reading AMERICA, Stephen Coonts's latest thriller, my heart was in the wrong
place. Instead of struggling mightily to maintain this over the hill,
past-the-middle-of-middle-age body, it was in my throat. Lodged. I'm still trying to
swallow it down or cough it up.
Sometimes I think if Stephen King wanted to retire, or purchase ghosted ideas, he could
hire Coonts to fill in. Coonts doesn't deal in wampirs or rabid dogs or pyrotechnic
adolescent girls, however. He deals with the monsters that we ourselves have not only
created but also invited in with a bow and a sweep of the hand when they've come knocking
on the window late at night wanting to suck the blood right out of us. That would be the
monster called technology I'm referring to, my friends.
I love high tech stuff and all the good things that it has given us. I'm hooked. I love
the computers and the watches and the phones and the Palm Pilots and CDs and the medical
gear that keeps us all alive far beyond our time. And the stuff is so vulnerable
that...well, when someone points out how easy it is to turn it back upon ourselves, you
wind up like me, with your heart in your throat, retrieving all of those 5 gallon water
jugs out of the garage --- you know the ones, the ones you had stocked up and filled to
the brim for January 1, 2000.
AMERICA starts off easily enough. The testing of an antiballistic missile system goes
awry, sending the satellite spinning into the ocean, seemingly lost forever. That's bad;
what is much worse is when the U.S.S. America, a state of the art nuclear
submarine, is stolen literally minutes after its launching and right out from under the
collective nose of the U.S. Navy. Things go from bad to godawful when the sub's hijackers
begin to turn all of that shiny new hi-tech weaponry against some very select targets in
the United States. And life, as a good third of the country knows it, ends; temporarily,
sure, but for way too long a period of time --- because some of that shiny new weaponry
can blow out the chips in everything within a radius of several miles. And whether you
know it or not, you've got more chips around your house than a mouse in a Frito-Lay
factory. Jake Grafton, the Navy's Rear Admiral extraordinaire, is once again called
upon to 1) save the day by recovering the satellite while stopping the terrorists and 2)
show the youngsters how the job is done. He performs both tasks quite credibly. It's
unfortunate that he doesn't show up at your front door with a defibrillator, since you're
going to need one handy by the time you finish AMERICA.
Coonts --- and Grafton --- keep getting better and better. There's a reason for this; the
villains keep getting more evil and they keep doing scarier and scarier things. I'll be
amazed if Coonts can top himself next time out. I'll be eagerly waiting anyway.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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