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author Douglas De Bono.

REVIEW CORNER

Firewall
by Douglas de Bono

[Douglas De Bono / DouglasDeBono.Com] Did you ever think that things were not always as they seemed? Did you wonder if there was more to the story than what was being fed to you by the mainstream media? If you are convinced that there are covert operations that take place without the knowledge of the American public, then Firewall will support your conviction.

Firewall covers the “things you never were told” concerning the Iranian hostage crisis, the Iran/Contra scandal, and the invasion of Panama. It is a fast paced book, containing both fictitious and historical characters, covering events in recent history from 1979 through the 80’s. It goes into detail about America’s “shredded” secrets, demonstrating what it meant to support the contras, no matter what. It takes a closer look at the question that was repeatedly asked during the Iran/Contra hearings, “Did the United States trade arms for hostages?”

Firewall is an intriguing book right from the beginning. One of the reasons why it is so gripping is simple: it discusses true events. It covers history that most of us are able to remember, and it challenges the way we think of the events and the people involved in the making of that history.

--Amanda Holzmer

Point of Honor
by Douglas de Bono

Metropolis Ink,
February 2002, 380 pp.
ISBN: 0-9579858-6-X

Genre: Thriller
Subgenre: Military
Reviewed: 4/5/2003

Review Originally appeared at: http://www.mtbca.com/pointofhonor.html

Washington, D.C.
Saturday November 15, 1997 10:45 AM EST

[Douglas De Bono / DouglasDeBono.Com] "All right, so we’ve got our weapons expert and some marines to shoot bad guys. So who’s the computer whiz and team leader?" Lisa Borden, the Deputy Secretary of State asked.

"You have such a way with words, Lisa," snapped the NSA. He flipped the page on the briefing folder to a photograph of a soldier in fatigues. "May I present Major James Harper, United States Special Forces Retired. He will serve in both capacities."

Brian Stillwell found it somewhat curious that nowhere on the dossier or photograph was there an indication of service branch or unit designation. There were no insignia like Navy SEAL or DELTA. This Harper seemed as faceless and nameless as the spook sitting next to him. Special Forces was an ambiguous title.

"He was at the top on both lists of available personnel who fit our mission criteria," continued the spook. "Major Harper is conversant with most information technology likely to be encountered on the mission. He has previously broken into Iraqi computer systems and—"

Lisa Borden looked up from the briefing book. "It says under the psyche profile that he’s a born-again Christian." She laughed—not a very nice laugh. "You’re going to send some fruitcake Jesus freak on a mission into the desert? What are you, nuts?" Her voice rose with passion and volume. "Everyone knows these type of people favor Israel over everything else over there." Brian was unsure whether these type of people or Israel received more derision from Lisa Borden. But then, she was from the State Department, and American Foreign Policy seemed to be dedicated to a mission designed to deify Yassir Arafat and blame Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for most Arab terrorism.

"That’s all we need at the UN. Saddam gets his hands on a Jew-loving, Jesus freak on a black op to one of his presidential palaces. No, gentlemen, I’m afraid State can never approve of this choice. I—"

"Ma’am!" interrupted the Two Star. "I don’t care whether State will approve or disapprove of Jim Harper. From 1980 to 1992, he took care of some this country’s biggest problems. He’s something of a legend in the Spec War community. Most everything we know about the inside of Saddam’s computer network came from Jim, and one of the reasons you’re here today is because Jim Harper stopped a mess like this once before.

"I’ve had men under my command. I wish all of them were like Harper." Something seemed to boil out of the Two Star who no longer cared about promotion. He was obviously destroying his chance for career advancement. "We are going to send in a team without support, without backup, to find something the Red Chinese gave to a crazy man. Now the only reason we don’t go in with all guns blazing is because we want the Red Chinese to like us. So, we’ll ignore the problem of a sub running loose in the Gulf, and the transmission of a weapon to the Iraqis because it is politically expedient to do so. We’re talking about sending my friend back to hell, and you’re upset because he goes to church."

Six years after the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein still burns with the need to enact revenge upon the country that humiliated him. In China, he has had devised a more virulent form of VX nerve gas, otherwise known a the City Killer. On November 15, 1997, during a secret flyover, a U2 photographed the Chinese Han Class submarine 404 in the Persian Gulf, where they should not be. The 404 had been specially designed with an elevator to deliver the nerve gas. But when something goes terribly wrong with the delivery and some of the gas escapes, the Iraqis start shooting the Chinese sailors. Major Jim Harper is pulled out of an early retirement to go back to Iraq and gather data about what exactly happened in the Persian Gulf. Years earlier, Jim had lost his best friend in the Iraq dessert and sees this as a chance to enact some revenge on Saddam Hussein and his computer infrastructure. A team has been gathered by Louis Edwards, a man who has worked on black ops for the past twenty years. Going with Jim to Iraq will be four Force Recon Marines and Brian Stillwell, an expert on unconventional weapon systems. They intend to penetrate Iraq's central Data Center to find out exactly who, what, where, and how the Iraqis are preparing banned weapon systems. Jim is convinced that his best friend died because there is a mole somewhere high up in the US government. He tells Louis, right before he leaves for Iraq, that if he feels that his mission has been compromised again, he will come back and kill him. Of course, the mission is compromised.

Point of Honor is a Jim Harper thriller by Douglas de Bono. It is a fast-moving fictional tale based on actual happenings in Iraq. Douglas de Bona easily blends the lines between reality and fiction in this tale of a deceit and deception.

From the moment I met Jim Harper, I liked him. He is a very intriguing character because we learn that he was in the blackest of the black ops working secretly to keep the America a superpower. We do learn that he did a lot of work for Ronald Reagan in helped bring down the communists rule in the USSR. Douglas de Bono does an excellent job taking a bit of history, twisting is some to the right, turning it back to the left, and squeezing out a story that the reader will find hard to put down. Who is the mole that is passing the info to the Chinese? Will the mission into Iraq be as easy as it sounds? Will Jim make it out alive? All of these answers can be found in Point of Honor. I found reading this book at this time to be extremely poignant because Operation Iraqis Freedom started right before I picked up the book. I had just witnessed on the television what the desert in Iraq looked like, so that really helped me form a picture in my mind of where Jim and his crew were. If only Major Jim Harper were real, I am sure that President Bush would send him in first to wreck havoc with Iraqis personnel. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it to any fan of military novels, or just to anyone that wants to have a pleasurable experience. Move over Rambo, now we have Major Jim Harper.

I rated this book an 8 out of 10.

Blood Covenant

by Douglas de Bono

Metropolis Ink,
August 2002, 415 pp.
ISBN: 0-9579528-4-8

Genre: Thriller
Subgenre: Military
Reviewed: 6/22/2003

Review Originally appeared at: http://www.mtbca.com/bloodcovenant.html

USSR

August 18, 1978

[Douglas De Bono / DouglasDeBono.Com] David squatted next to the KGB man. He looked like a child next to a Christmas tree and all the presents were for him. He pulled out the first static bag and unwrapped the heavy black plastic. Inside the bag, gently pressed into a white half-inch Styrofoam board, were rows of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips. They looked like an army of angry ants. He could make out the silk-screen printing identifying the chip number and Motorola’s logo. He reached out next to the plastic static wrap and touched it gently with his fingertips. He set the bag on the bench.

“I’ve never seen anything like these things,” muttered Yevgeny.

David nodded agreement. “Just some computer hobbyist in the United States.” He laughed to himself, “I wonder if the fools understand what they have created.” He turned, his eyes dancing. “Imagine, Yevgeny! A computer smaller than this case and more powerful than anything anyone has.”

“It’s not possible,” protested Yevgeny. “I’ve seen our computers. They are as big as this building. The disk drives alone are almost as large as your workbenches.”

David reached up, pulled a small Japanese transistor radio from a shelf, and handed to the Major. “This is how. They’ve abandoned tube technology almost completely, and they are moving towards the chip! The chip is getting smaller and smaller. Each generation has more capability in a smaller footprint. You can’t do that with tubes. Tubes get hot and take up space, and space requires a bigger footprint.”

“But we make the best tubes in the world,” protested Yevgeny.

David shrugged. “There used to be buggy whip makers too.”

He pulled out a larger bag and opened it reverently. There—each in their open bubble wrap and static bags, were 8080 microprocessors. Stickers indicated that there were stringent import/export control laws to be obeyed. International Business Machines and a second company called Intel were listed on the chips. David shrugged. Intel must be some minor manufacturer.

“These are the brains. According to my studies this chip can address up to one megabyte of memory.” He spread his hands wide and explained, “The memory board would have to be this large.”

“How much would that cost?”

“Thousands of rubles, I am sure. No one has done it.”

He found the PROM burner and a set of PROM chips next to them.

Yevgeny shook his head, “RAM, PROM, DRAM, CPU—an alphabet soup you’re brewing here.”

“Programmable Read Only Memory—we’ll burn the software onto these chips.”

Yevgeny pointed at the PROM chips asking, “On this you’ll build the program for the trigger mechanism?”

“Nothing quite so crude. It will all be logic gates and buffers. I’ll use machine code to make it work. Then, Major, you shall have your portable weapon.”

“How heavy?” he asked eagerly. Details were always important when talking to his masters.

David looked into the air. “I’d guess around seventy kilograms. The plutonium bomb should take about twenty-two kilos, and the lead shielding probably another twenty kilos. Then we’ll need some sort of steel housing and the computer trigger. I think we’ll need some batteries as well.” He stood and rustled through his notebook drawings. “I’m setting it up to use a dry cell in the event the lithium batteries fail. A capacitor should maintain all information in the non-volatile RAM.” He nodded confidently. “It’ll be quite a bomb.” He looked down at the Major and leered evilly. “You could carry it in a suitcase Yevgeny! But that’s the entire idea isn’t it? A man portable nuclear weapon.”

A cold finger traveled down Yevgeny’s spine. The Jew was supposed to be brilliant. Perhaps, he was going quite mad as well.

In the late 1970’s, Dr. David Kudrik, a Russian Jew is being held captive in Arzamas-16, a secret USSR town that does not exist on any map. David is a genius and has gotten a hold of some 8080 microprocessors. With this new technology, he is able to create approximately 132 nuclear bombs for the KGB. These small suitcase-size three-kiloton nuclear bombs, which David named “Samson,” are secretly placed around the world at designated spots by Major Yevgeny Yarovitsin. When the USSR collapses, the bombs are forgotten about because the KGB never reported them being made. Now, in 1999, Yevgeny is living the high life while selling these bombs to the highest bidder. Recently he has sold ten of these bombs to Iranian terrorist who plan on detonating them on United States soil. Lou Feldman, Assistant Director in charge of Domestic Terrorism Unit, learns of these suitcase nuclear bombs and has agents trying to figure out how many bombs there and who has them. Begrudgingly, he assigns Harvey Randall, who is on his black list because he embarrasses the FBI a few years back, to help figure out whom the terrorists are. Harvey, an overweight, middle-aged cowboy does things his own way, no matter the consequences, because he gets results. Louis Edwards, CIA officer and head of the Blackest of the Black, brings Major Jim Harper back to duty to help track down and eliminate the terrorists. Jim, with the help of Sergeant Darby Hayes and Harvey Randall is hot on the trail of the man planting the bombs, Michael Rehazi, an American-educated Iranian who is know as The Terror of Tehran. Little does anyone know, but David intended to seek revenge for the way he was treated by the USSR government. He intends to strike back at the USSR by programming a secret way for all of the Samson devices to detonate. Little does anyone know that twenty years after each device is build, the internal clock will send a message to activate the device. Now, the bombs are on American soil and the clock is ticking…

Blood Covenant by Douglas de Bono is the second book to feature Jim Harper. This is a military thriller revolving around terrorism in the United States and the planting of ten suitcase nuclear bombs. The first book featuring Major Jim Harper is Point of Honor. This story takes place about two years later.

This is the second book I have read by Douglas de Bono. De Bono has a talent for writing fiction that is incredibly realistic. While reading Blood Covenant, I could not tell how much of the story was reality or what was fiction. I believed it all! De Bono obviously knows a lot about guns and how the military works. This book does a great jobs of delving into the political games played by both the US and USSR governments, both in the past and present, while at the same time giving us a glimpse of how these same governments handle certain situations that would shock the populace of these same countries. Jim Harper is a wonderful character with human flaws. Is he the best killing machine the US government ever made? Quite possibly. But is he human? Yes, sometime too much, which can be a detriment to his continued health. I would have liked to have seen more of him in this novel, but I was happy to learn more about FBI agent Harvey Randall, who I think is a great character. One thing I really liked about this book is the list if characters at the beginning of the novel. I constantly found myself referring back to this list as a read the story. Overall, Blood Covenant by Douglas de Bono is an excellent read and should not be missed by any fan of either thriller or military fiction. You will be left wondering just how much of this story is real and how much is fiction.

I rated this book an 8½ out of 10.