Breed's got an irate crew of pirates on his trail, and not because he didn't leave them a box of Milk Tray on his surreptitious after-dark snorkel-and-flippers visit to their vessel, the Goliath, off the coast of Rhodes. On the contrary, the thirty tons of gold—two billion dollars’ worth—he was expecting to find stashed in their hold was noticeable by its absence, and his hasty departure thereafter was assisted by the none-too-warm waving-off of his unwitting and gun-toting hosts.
Back on dry land, Breed meets up with associate Stein—that’s Anya Stein, deputy director of the CIA—and Englishman Harding-James, agent of Lloyds, who've underwritten the missing gold and who want it back. The big question: where is it? It was on the Medusa, which has vanished, and failed to rematerialise on the Goliath, as hoped by the good guys.
Time for Breed & Co to swing into yet more action, in a well-balanced plot which moves between Rhodes and Crete and includes billionaire Greek shipping magnate Kyrios Athanasios and his dynamic daughter Hecate—a potential partner for some love interest?—as well as Kyrios’s old business associate Drakos and Colonel Maxim Orlov, a Russian officer and unlikely acquaintance from Breed’s past. There are car collisions, shoot-outs, helicopters, perilous clifftop-climbs, fights both over and under the waves and an impressive arsenal of armaments in abundance, both large and small, of every type imaginable.
The story fulfils the expectations of an action thriller, swinging from up-tempo action sequences to slower scenes where the characters interact to help us get to know them in a social setting. There’s mystery too, of course, in the hunt to find not just the gold but those behind its disappearance. Breed makes an effective protagonist, admitting his fear—but only to himself—when he’s really up against it, otherwise putting his entire focus on the situation in hand as he moves from each one to the next. On the not-quite-so-positive side, he spends altogether too much time describing the layout of his surroundings, the contents of the gun cabinet and their makes, the actions of the helicopter crew and everything else, for my taste. It’s great technical detail, but at the cost of getting to know the characters better—and correspondingly, the latter do become a little two-dimensional as a result.
This is not to detract from the many positives of the story though. At two-hundred and thirty-six pages it’s just the right length, as fast-paced action shouldn’t be dragged out. A handy map of the Aegean and its islands—the area covered by the mission—is included, as are diagrams of the Medusa, the Goliath and the MH-60 Sea Hawk helicopter involved in the heist and the recovery operation. There’s been some good research into the Greek aspects of the story, including a dedication to Olympia, who may have been one source of this.
Overall, a pistol-packing piece of storytelling that pretty much delivers what it promises.