Book Review: 'DEFCON One'

First hardcover edition. © 1989 Presidio Press

On August 1, 1989. Novato, California-based Presidio Press (now owned by Ballantine Books) published Joe Weber's DEFCON One, a techno-thriller that imagined what would happen if Soviet hardliners "disposed of" then-General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Mikhail Gorbachev and reversed his liberalization policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Judging from the novel's title (a reference to the Pentagon's Defense Readiness Conditions - DEFCONs - highest level) and the stark silhouette of a U.S. Navy carrier on the dust jacket art, such a development in the Soviet Union's internal affairs is not going to be a pleasant one.

Weber, a retired Marine Corps aviator and - before becoming a full-time author - corporate jet captain based in Colorado, had no illusions about the CPSU, its conservative (in Soviet terms) "old guard," or the notion that a more radicalized Union of Soviet Socialists Republics (USSR) would be more aggressive toward the United States if Gorbachev was either forced out of power or - in this fictional version of 1989 Russia - assassinated.

The book begins in what was, at the time, the near-future 1990s. Soviet hardliners, led by Viktor Pavlovich Zhilinkov, hire a Libyan Army officer to shoot down Gorbachev's Ilyushin Il-62 VIP plane as it takes off from Sheremetyevo Airport on one of the General Secretary's foreign trips. His replacement, Zhilinkov. had been ousted from the Politburo in 1988 due to his resistance to perestroika and glasnost.  Now backed by like-minded members of the Central Committee, Zhilinkov wants to reimpose the Communist Party's authority on the "liberalized" Soviet society, reassert the USSR's role in the world as a superpower, and eventually, defeat the United States once and for all.

Spooked by the present (presumably Republican) Administration's plan to deploy a new space-based defensive system and hoping to act while the West is still adjusting to the changes in the Kremlin and its policies, Zhilinkov and his backers in the Defense Ministry and KGB foment a series of escalating confrontations with forces of the U.S. across the globe.

Russian Tu-95 Bear bombers overfly Alaskan airspace in defiance of international law. American F-15 fighters scramble to intercept them in a scene of white-knuckled suspense. In the North Atlantic, a U.S. Navy carrier battle group is attacked by submarines and air-launched cruise missiles. In space, a Soviet hunter-killer satellite attacks the space shuttle Columbia, sabotaging key components of the Star Wars defensive system. 

As civilization hurtles towards the brink of nuclear holocaust. the president of the United States and his cabinet work feverishly to avert the crisis. Only a lone CIA operative in the Kremlin knows the full extent of the impending horror, but will he escape to transmit his awful secret? - Dust jacket synopsis, DEFCON One


My Take

Military and espionage fiction - and combinations thereof -  were not new genres in the 1980s, the era in which DEFCON One was published. Serious war novels predate the Victorian era and can trace their roots to Homer's The Iliad. But it was in the late 19th Century when military fiction came of age with the publication of The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red Badge of Courage. 

Popular military fiction, especially "speculative" novels about possible future conflicts between world powers, became a "thing" at the turn of the century, with some British writers coming up with scenarios for a large scale invasion of Great Britain by a powerful Continental enemy, usually Wilhelmine Germany. The trauma of World War I temporarily reduced the genre's popularity, so it waxed and waned throughout much of the 20th Century, and books like Alfred Coppel's Thirty-Four East and The Dragon often languished in the "men's fiction" corner of Walden Books and B. Dalton's.

That changed in the early 1980s, when the Naval Institute Press published its first-ever novel, Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October, which told the white-knuckled suspense story of a Soviet sub skipper who defects to the West, offering his top-secret Typhoon-class sub as a bonus gift to the Americans. The success of Clancy's first Jack Ryan book, as well as his World War III novel Red Storm Rising, inspired many would-be novelists to write their own stories in what the media dubbed the technothriller genre.

Joining the new group of military veterans-turned-scribes that includes Larry Bond, Harold Coyle, Dale Brown, and Stephen Coonts, retired Marine Corps pilot Joe Weber wrote DEFCON One in the mid-1980s and submitted it to the now-vanished Presidio Press, a publisher of mostly non-fiction military books based in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Novato. This was the publisher's first novel, and it sold well enough to allow Weber to quit his job as a corporate jet captain and become a full-time writer.

I bought a first-edition hardcover copy of DEFCON One, believing that it would be on the same strata of literary quality as the novels of Tom Clancy, Harold Coyle, Stephen Coonts, and Larry Bond.

I mean, when you see a blurb by Clancy, the late Master of the Technothriller, that says: "A blazing debut by one of America's new thriller stars,"  it has to be well-written, right?

Um, no.

To be honest, I wanted to love this book. I don't spend money ($18.95 in 1989 dollars) on stuff I don't like, but now I wish that I had checked it out first from the library at Miami-Dade Community College - South Campus (now Miami-Dade College - Kendall). 

Weber's premise, while not exactly original (Gorbachev-assassination plots were "in" at the height of Gorby mania, as evidenced by Orion Pictures' The Package, a movie that hit theaters a few weeks after DEFCON One was published) seemed intriguing.  It certainly promised to be exciting and full of "white-knuckled suspense."

Well, this novel is a good example of expectations being raised - then shattered.

The writing is awful.  Weber might have been inspired by Clancy's novels, especially Red Storm Rising, but he comes across as a third-rate Clancy imitator rather than a full-fledged member of the Masters of the Technothriller Club. His prose is terse and rushed as if he wants to finish one "white-knuckled" action sequence and get on with the next one.

Worse yet is the way in which he introduces major characters. For instance, after Gorbachev's plane is shot down in Moscow, Weber immediately takes the reader to the North Atlantic, where the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower's defensive perimeter is being "tested" by newly-aggressive Soviet bombers. Weber doesn't show how Moscow or the rest of the world react to the shootdown in a realistic, suspense-building manner; he just jumps to the first of many escalations between the Soviets and the Americans.

And when it comes to putting Viktor Zhilinkov up front and on center stage, he introduces him as a nameless, almost faceless character until well into the second chapter. Worse yet, Weber gives the reader an "information dump" of exposition about the new General Secretary of the CPSU, including the tidbit about being put out to pasture by Gorbachev in 1988 for opposing the liberalization policies of perestroika and glasnost, before he even mentions the man's name.

And if that's not bad enough, Weber violates many of the rules of style, such as the one about using acronyms and abbreviations in the body of a story.

For instance, proper style when it comes to mentioning the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka "Star Wars," is to use the full term at first mention, then use the abbreviation or acronym (SDI) after.

But the editor at Presidio Press was either overworked or overwhelmed when he got the gig to help Weber get DEFCON One ready for the presses, or he was lazy, because when the author mentions the never-deployed anti-missile system, he introduces it as "SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative)"  rather than the other way 'round.
 
I got so frustrated with DEFCON One that I've never finished it; I still have it - the dust jacket is tattered here and there - but I have not bothered to see how the world avoids nuclear annihilation. I assume it does and that Zhilinkov ends up meeting his Maker because that's how most technothrillers end. But as much as I like the genre, I'd rather not kill any more of my gray cells reading this dud of a novel.