Battling the JV Team

Without Mercy: A Novel – Col. David Hunt and R J Pineiro (Forge Books)

ISIS, the so-called JV Team, has managed to spin up a concerted attack on the heavily fortified U. S. Military installation at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, bursting through the heavy walls and distracting those tasked with guarding the base so a tactical nuclear weapon can be detonated on the base from a separate entry point.

And that is just the opening salvo from long time, tough talking Fox News contributor Col. David Hunt and his writing partner R J Pineiro in the new book Without Mercy. With a little help from their friends in Pakistan, the ISIS thugs have acquired a handful of tactical nukes and while America reacts to that first nuclear attack, a separate cabal of terrorist cells are on their way to try to deliver a death blow on our home shores.

This scenario reads like something out of the CIA's Red Cell program, where after 9/11 they brought in folks from varied backgrounds, including thriller writers, to dream up potential terrorists plots to see how well the U.S. was prepared to prevent or react to a given attack. The terrorists smuggling the nukes aboard oil tankers while masquerading as security forces is a plausible plotline and so too is the political correctness run amok that has those charged with protecting us spun off target.

Some Tom Clancy fans may get turned off by the technical issues and flaws that pop up, if you’re not distracted by the nuts and bolts of things and are simply in it for the adventure, than Without Mercy serves up the goods.