The Flight

When a brilliant young doctor who has just discovered the miracle cure for cancer is caught during World War II and imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp, the dying President Roosevelt launches a top-secret mission to rescue him. Reprint.

The US President is dying of cancer, and the cure lies 50 years in the past. A retired Army officer agrees to go back and get it. Readers are asked to accept a little time travel, but it's for a good cause and it's far from the whole story, which is also about America's callous abandonment of the Philippines to the Japanese in WW II. Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Joe Kogan is the last-minute replacement for the leader of project SUCCOR who, in the autumn of 1994, has committed suicide rather than cave in to blackmail from someone trying to kill the project. Kogan and his predecessor were selected for their expert knowledge of the American military history in the Philippines. Project SUCCOR has been launched to rescue the formula for a sure-shot cancer remedy from its inventor, a Dr. Babcock, before he is or was captured by the Japanese. If found and if it works, the remedy will cure a dying President and preserve an antinuclear treaty from its destruction by the unspeakably villainous and dangerously ambitious Spencer Pyle, who knows all about the secret time- travel project and is doing his best to sabotage it at every turn. Kogan and his crew make it back safely to 1941. They're full of good intentions not to upset history in any way, but Dr. Babcock turns out to be a first-class rat, the Japanese are closing in earlier than the history books said they did, and there's this exceptionally pretty Army nurse who has a thing for Kogan. Buy the time travel, and you've bought a pretty good war story. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

It is 1994, and retired lieutenant colonel Joseph Kogan, a Vietnam veteran turned aspiring academic, is serenely researching the U.S. defense of the Philippines in World War II when his life is disrupted by a call from the U.S. president, Simon Moody. Stricken by cancer, Moody is desperate for a cure, and believes he has found evidence of one in a letter written by an American doctor stationed in the Philippines during WW II. Kogan is persuaded to take on an unusual assignment. Through the use of a top-secret time-travel machine, so erratic that plans to develop it were scrapped by the Carter administration, Kogan flies back in time to the Philippines in 1942 to search for the cure. Any novel prominently featuring time travel and cancer cures obviously isn't too concerned with adhering to the tenets of realism, but Runyan, also a retired lieutenant colonel and military historian, establishes his wild scenario with as much credibility as can be expected. The protagonist is brave and canny, the foes are nasty, the plot moves at an efficient clip, and the thrills come right on time.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.