Black Eagles
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
With this novel, natinally bestselling author Larry Collins has written another irresistible thriller! Black Eagles presents a viable, "what-if" scenario with powerful international implications, pitting agents of the DEA and CIA against each other on the vicious and violent arena of the drug trade.
KIRKUS REVIEW
Collins (Maze, 1989, etc.) blends fact with fancy in a transnational melodrama, plausibly settling any lingering doubts as to the origin of crack, how Nicaraguan contras were financed, and the importance of Panama for laundered money as well as narcotics. Much of the tale is narrated (via tape) by the late John Featherly (Jack) Lind IV, an affluent and well-bred CIA officer. It's in 1988 Laos that Lind first confronts Kevin Grady, a dedicated DEA agent who can't accept the cloak-and-dagger crowd's winking at the drug-smuggling activities of its ad hoc allies. After their initial meeting, the instant antagonists go their separate ways, Grady to place an informant inside Colombia's Medell°n cartel and Lind to recruit promising young officer Manuel Antonio (``call me Tony'') Noriega as the CIA's man in Panama. Over the years, Noriega gains power and influence, becoming an invaluable source of intelligence. By the time the Reagan Administration decides to make Panama the keystone of its anti- Sandinista campaign, then, agency people like Lind have long turned a blind eye to Noriega's lucrative involvement with dope traffickers. Meanwhile, less concerned than Lind with the finer points of national security, Grady continues to stalk big-time drug dealers to the ends of the earth--including Noriega and the Cuban mercenaries the CIA has set to training contras with funds supplied by can-do Marine colonel Oliver North. (During all this, Medell°n's deep thinkers have developed crack to get the carriage-trade price of coke in US ghettos.) Lind warns Noriega of the DEA's approaching investigation; the strongman promptly orders the murder of an American undercover opponent of his regime; and, finally, Lind is forced at last to face the consequences of actions he's taken in the so-called national interest . . . just as Grady arrives with a warrant for his arrest. An engrossing, wide-angle yarn that could help confirm many conspiracy theorists' wilder suspicions and speculations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A premise budding with possibilities fails to bear fruit in this disappointing new thriller from newsman-turned-novelist Collins (Maze). The premise is that, for decades, two federal agents are unwittingly set against one another over the CIA's role in the nation's growing drug problem and the Reagan and Bush administrations' covert relationship with Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. The two agents are Kevin Grady of the DEA, who first becomes aware of CIA complicity in drug smuggling in Vietnam in 1968, and Company spook Jack Lind, who clashes with Grady in Vietnam and later becomes the main CIA link with Noriega, even as Grady is beginning to uncover the dictator's relationship with the Medellin cocaine cartel. Since each man remains basically ignorant of the other's involvement until late in the novel, however, the implied conflict between the two generates insufficient heat. The story is told in first-person flashbacks, through Grady's memory and through tape recordings left behind by Lind after his suicide; it's this death that opens the book, making suspense dependent on the tensions within and between the two men, rather than on their fates. But neither character is well developed, with Lind's ultimate change of heart turning unconvincingly on the death of a woman he has come to love. Much of the dialogue sounds wooden or false, as well. Cameos by real-life figures, including Noriega, CIA chief William Casey and drug lord Pablo Escobar, add some zing, but not enough. Even star hitters strike out sometimes, and a thriller writer as generally reliable as Collins can be forgiven for whiffing this time.
