Devil's Bargain

Super Bolan #100

by Dan Schmidt

DANCING WITH THE DEVIL

Alpha Deep Six. Wet work specialists so covert, they were thought dead. Now this paramilitary group of black ops assassins and saboteurs has been resurrected in a conspiracy engineered somewhere in the darkest corners of military intelligence. Their unleash Armageddon.

They've got America's most determined enemies ready to jump-start the nightmare, and the countdown has begun. Blood and terror are pouring through America's streets. A presidential directive has cut through red tape, dropped Mack Bolan square in charge. His orders are abort the enemy's twisted dreams.

If Bolan survives, then it gets really personal. Because Alpha Deep Six has a hostage. A Stony Man operative...

352 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Librarian Note: There are multiple authors by this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Don Aiman · Rating 3 out of 5]

ok with action but was a little week and the kidnapping of Price was kinda just thrown in just because it sounded good

[Glen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mack's after some deep cover ops out to unleash armageddon, but it never seems too imminent. The franchise was running on fumes at this point.

[Lianne Burwell · Rating 1 out of 5]

For an event book (volume 100 of this series), Devil's Bargain was a serious disappointment. First we get a wave of violence unleashed on the US by sleeper agents whose strings are being pulled by a black ops team that faked their deaths and went undercover. Apparently they want to start wars to kill lots of people and give them a leg up in the world. Then they go out of their way to kidnap Stony Man director, Barbara Price (who is looking way too sulky on the cover, wearing a bikini top for some unknown reason). Then the attacks vanish from the plot, because it turns out that this group want to take a bunch of super-secret maney caches knows at The Bank of Islam. And Barbara? Well, they haul her around the world, apparently planning on forcing her to reveal the facts of the Stony Farm operation to create distractions from their own operations.

As you can guess, it is a muddled mess. I never did figure out how many people were in this Alpha Six group. Their puppets never made sense (let alone that they would be able to get around like this so soon after 9/11, which is referenced). The running battles that make up most of the second half of the book just didn't flow, so I couldn't tell who was where doing what. Having Barbara kidnapped made no sense, other than to lead Mack to someone who could send him off to the middle east after the bad guys. The two turncoat generals were repetative. And seriously, this outfit is claiming they created a main terrorist organization in the middle east by themselves? Yeah, right.

I do get the feeling that this was actually supposed to be two books, since there was a clear deliniation between the first half (trying to stop the umpteen suicide bombers in the US) and the second half (tracking the badguys trying to rob other badguys in the middle east). Maybe if it had been two books there would have been a chance to actually fill out the action and the plot to the point where it would have made more sense.

Definitely should not have been a milestone book. Very disappointing.