Flash Point - Softcover

Huston, James W

3.78

325 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380732823 ISBN 13: 9780380732821

Publisher: Avon, 2001

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F-14 flying ace Sean Woods has been ordered by the military to remain silent about the death of his best friend in a brutal terrorist attack and his government's reluctance to retaliate. But the maniacal leader of a resurrected society of assassins dating back to the eleventh century isn't going to be satisfied with the blood that has already been spilled. And a U.S. ally has offered Sean the opportunity for vengeance that his superiors have denied him -- though it means taking actions without their knowledge that could spark the most devastating air battle since World War II.

But if his own nation won't declare total war on a killer...Sean Woods will.

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About the Author:

A graduate of TOPGUN, James W. Huston flew F-14s off the USS Nimitz with the Jolly Rogers. He served as a naval flight officer and worked in Naval Intelligence before becoming a lawyer and the acclaimed author of The Shadows of Power, Balance of Power, The Price of Power, Flash Point, and Fallout. He lives in San Diego, California.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Huston's third military thriller is also his best as it examines the cost of another hypothetical American reprisal against terrorism, this time with a supersonic fighter-jet pursuit of a bin Laden stand-in to his secret desert fortress.In what is probably the only thriller series based on a passage of the U.S. Constitution, Huston, a former Navy F-14 flyboy now practicing law, typically has some plucky legal type--here it's a Navy JAG officer aboard an aircraft carrier off the Israeli coast--discover Article 1, Section 8, which gives Congress the legal clout to determine how force should be applied when American interests are threatened abroad. Huston used Section 8 both in his excellent debut (Balance of Power, 1998) and its much less powerful sequel (The Price of Power, 1999); now he employs it to have Congress declare war on a single person, Sheik al-Jabar, who has apparently revived an 11th-century Islamic sect of assassins to commit mayhem against Israel and the U.S. When one of al-Jabar's attacks against Israel kills a Navy pilot seeking quality time with the beautiful Israeli mystery woman he wants to marry, the pilot's best buddy, Lieutenant Sean Woods, whose father died in a terrorist attack, wants revenge. After discussing his feelings with the carrier's JAG officer, and getting some tips about St. Aquinas's definition of a just war from the ship's chaplain, Woods writes his congressman and, miraculously, gets results. Of course, killing al-Jabar, who hides in ancient fortresses protected by Syria and Iran, will not be easy. While Woods flies spectacular aerial dogfights over Lebanon and Iran, Sami al-Hadad, the NSA's top Arab intelligence analyst, finds evidence that Israel may be using al-Jabar to force the U.S. to declare a war that can't be won. A thinking man's military thriller, with superb action, crackling hardware-speak, and just enough tragedy to emphasize the emotional price for so much gung-ho American heroism. -- Copyright � 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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