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Alan Craik #4
Hostile Contact
With twists as harrowing as a high-g-force turn, Hostile Contact is vintage Gordon Kent: an electrifying blend of military suspense and espionage thriller. In it, Navy intelligence officer Alan Craik returns to action, strapping himself in for a wild ride into a dangerous, borderless realm of spies, counterspies, and high-tech warfare on both sides of a potentially lethal conflict--between China and the U.S.A.
Hostile Contact
When Alan Craik and NCIS agent Mike Dukas spearheaded a hunt for a traitor inside the CIA, they landed in the middle of a firefight--and made some very powerful enemies. Inside Washington, some still worship the arch spy Craik and Dukas took down--and now these men are plotting their revenge. With their expertise in counterespionage, Craik and Dukas have been lured into an operation that will put them in contact with the Chinese, an operation with only one real purpose: to destroy them both. But while they know better than to take anything at face value, Craik and Dukas cannot guess how another player will shape the game. Their contact in Jakarta is a Chinese double agent walking a high wire between his handlers, as the Chinese search for a mother lode of money lost on the covert battlefield.
Craik is also holding down his day job, flying a sub hunter S-3B crammed with high-tech gear off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Along with his astronaut-to-be wife, Rose, Craik and his team are acting on intercepts of a “ghost” radio whose purpose they can only guess. Craik's expertise in intelligence tells him to start searching for an unseen, unknown submarine that may be lurking off Whidbey Island--with the ability to strike a death blow against the Navy's most important missile-loaded subs.
Suddenly Craik is thrust into a secret war raging from the heart of Beijing to the depths of the Pacific, as espionage and sub hunting come together in a chase to rescue a Chinese defector and his family, while a U.S. Navy carrier group is threatened by hostile suicide boats acting on targeting information from a submarine.
From the Hardcover edition.
Hostile Contact
When Alan Craik and NCIS agent Mike Dukas spearheaded a hunt for a traitor inside the CIA, they landed in the middle of a firefight--and made some very powerful enemies. Inside Washington, some still worship the arch spy Craik and Dukas took down--and now these men are plotting their revenge. With their expertise in counterespionage, Craik and Dukas have been lured into an operation that will put them in contact with the Chinese, an operation with only one real purpose: to destroy them both. But while they know better than to take anything at face value, Craik and Dukas cannot guess how another player will shape the game. Their contact in Jakarta is a Chinese double agent walking a high wire between his handlers, as the Chinese search for a mother lode of money lost on the covert battlefield.
Craik is also holding down his day job, flying a sub hunter S-3B crammed with high-tech gear off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Along with his astronaut-to-be wife, Rose, Craik and his team are acting on intercepts of a “ghost” radio whose purpose they can only guess. Craik's expertise in intelligence tells him to start searching for an unseen, unknown submarine that may be lurking off Whidbey Island--with the ability to strike a death blow against the Navy's most important missile-loaded subs.
Suddenly Craik is thrust into a secret war raging from the heart of Beijing to the depths of the Pacific, as espionage and sub hunting come together in a chase to rescue a Chinese defector and his family, while a U.S. Navy carrier group is threatened by hostile suicide boats acting on targeting information from a submarine.
From the Hardcover edition.
576 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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55 people want to read
About the author
Gordon Kent
25 books26 followersPseudonym of writers Kenneth M. Cameron with his son Christian Cameron.
Series:
* Alan Craik
Series:
* Alan Craik
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 25, 2019
In Hostile Contact the story picks up directly where Top Hook left off, in this chapter we see the resolution of the Ray Suter story line and the continued fall out from the actions of George Shreed.
Alan Craig & Mike Dukas attempt to decipher a investigation file that has been foisted on them by the CIA, which appears to have been seeded with bait material that draws them into a meeting which is... a 'Hostile Contact' hey hey. The title also comes into play later in the novel when the carrier battlegroup Alan's detactment is a part of has hostile contact with Chinese & Chinese backed actors.
The novel itself is quite good, it does not suffer from the flaws evident is Peacemaker and with Top Hook having done the lead in work it pretty much launches into the story line with little delay, although there is a little lead in with the introduction of Jerry Piat, and some other tertiary characters that are relevant to this books plot.
Pretty good, climactic ending, bit of feel-good subplot wrap up for some of the Navy men and the reader also gets some satisfaction with the outcome of some of the seedier character's subplots.
Alan Craig & Mike Dukas attempt to decipher a investigation file that has been foisted on them by the CIA, which appears to have been seeded with bait material that draws them into a meeting which is... a 'Hostile Contact' hey hey. The title also comes into play later in the novel when the carrier battlegroup Alan's detactment is a part of has hostile contact with Chinese & Chinese backed actors.
The novel itself is quite good, it does not suffer from the flaws evident is Peacemaker and with Top Hook having done the lead in work it pretty much launches into the story line with little delay, although there is a little lead in with the introduction of Jerry Piat, and some other tertiary characters that are relevant to this books plot.
Pretty good, climactic ending, bit of feel-good subplot wrap up for some of the Navy men and the reader also gets some satisfaction with the outcome of some of the seedier character's subplots.
June 2, 2024
I found this book to be very slow and it seemed to confuse the reader a bit with the storyline all over the place. I'm not sure why they looked at the Chinese sub and the thoughts of the captain and then they seem to forget that he was part of the original story. They did mention him and the sub, but that is all.
It took me a while to read this book as I didn't seem to get into the story, as I do with other books.
It took me a while to read this book as I didn't seem to get into the story, as I do with other books.
December 19, 2014
Quite a good read if into USA naval and spy contact. Bit hard to keep track of all the plotting and the end could have been more suspenseful .... what if the genetics came back negative in the last sentence!
May 27, 2010
This might have been a good story if I had finished it. The writing style
was just too awkward and tedious for me.
was just too awkward and tedious for me.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews