Red Cell: Rouge Warrior 2

In a novel created by the former Navy SEAL with himself as the hero, Dick Marcinko, a free-lance security consultant, engages in a deadly fight with North Korean operatives and makes a startling discovery. 100,000 first printing.

According to Marcinko, following the publication of his bestselling autobiography Rogue Warrior , he was forbidden to reveal any more secrets about SEAL or other defense activities; so he has taken to fiction to continue his story. The novel's cynical, coarse, egotistical, irreverent and bloody hero (also named Dick Marcinko) is involuntarily recalled to his old rank as Navy Captain and ordered to assemble a team of Red Cell SEALs--mavericks in a service known for irregular practices--to stop the sale of American nuclear devices to North Korea and to test the defenses of various military installations. The resulting action boasts high-tech equipment, gory hand-to-hand combat and various forms of mayhem, climaxing in Red Cell's attack on a contraband-filled tanker in the Pacific Ocean. The atmosphere is electric with real weapons and locations, and Marcinko provides copious details of training and planning and accounts of previous missions. The guilty parties here include not only mercenaries of various countries but also high ranking corrupt American politicians; paranoid military conspiracy buffs will find plenty to worry about here. A surefire bet for wannabe soldiers of fortune, this is also a frighteningly plausible scenario of political and military power gone astray.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rogue Warrior, a blood-and-guts account of Marcinko's stormy- petrel career as a Navy SEAL, earned its author a top spot on 1992's bestseller lists. He could land on the charts again with this fictive sequel whose profanely opinionated, relentlessly macho, and immensely entertaining narrator is a retired naval commander named Richard Marcinko. Now a freelance operative, Marcinko is testing security at Tokyo's Narita Airport, where he finds that treacherous Americans are supplying Japanese and North Korean buyers with nuclear detonators. The trail appears to lead back to Grant Griffith, a former Defense Secretary who retains considerable clout in Washington as well as with the ailing military-industrial complex. Before Marcinko can bring the influential elder statesman to book, however, he's dragged into a deadly series of turf battles, shootouts, sting operations, and shadow wars. By no coincidence, moreover, he's recalled to active duty by Admiral Pinckney Prescott III, a longtime nemesis who puts him in command of the Red Cell, a unit that's Prescott's own creation. With help from friends in the old-boy network of Special Forces personnel, Marcinko's merry men run wild--on assignment or off--covertly acquiring the high-tech tools of their violent trade, infiltrating laxly guarded bases in the US, and otherwise trying the patience of higher authority. Leaving scores of corpses in their wake, Red Cell stalwarts find time to carry out a reconnaissance/sabotage mission in North Korean waters and to launch a mid-ocean assault (from a stolen aircraft) on a contraband-carrying vessel crewed by black-hat mercenaries. Fast action and advanced weaponry at every turn; in-your-face commentary on the powers that be; a steady stream of imaginatively salty language: What more could any red-blooded, two-fisted, he-man fantasist want? -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

How much of this sequel to the legendary and unorthodox SEALs leader's memoirs, Rogue Warrior (1992), is fiction and how much novelized actual fact is likely to remain forever in dispute, at least partly for security reasons. Marketed as a novel, this story of how Marcinko and a handful of picked SEALs defeated a high-level plot to smuggle nuclear weapons into the hands of Japanese rightists does, however, read just like an excellent thriller of the hard-boiled, action-loaded variety. Also remember that Marcinko, in spite of his maverick history and salty vocabulary, is an exceptionally proficient special warfare leader. Fans of the first Rogue Warrior will lap this one up, and general thriller aficionados may have fun with it, too. Roland Green

Marcinko risked autobiography in the best-selling Rogue Warrior ( LJ 2/1/92), but here the founder and first commander of SEAL Team Six, the U.S. Navy's elite counterterrorist unit, and Red Cell, the SEAL team that tests navy security, fictionalizes his experiences--focusing on international smuggling.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.