During a fleet exercise in India, Alan Craik faces a minefield of explosive events that threaten to tear the country and a U.S. battlegroup apart. A military base is attacked by "fringe elements," an Indian submarine mutinies and then shoots down a U.S. Navy aircraft, and a group of Indian scientists are killed when they are attacked with Sarin gas. Craik, ignoring the conventional wisdom that the incidents are unrelated, believes that a fanatical group have control of certain elements of both the Indian government and its armed forces. Then the rebels seize part of India's nuclear arsenal. Suddenly, a U.S. carrier battle group joins Pakistan, China, and Saudi Arabia on the target list. The world is faced with the spectacle of a nuclear-capable nation in the hands of a self-destructive religious cult, and it's up to Craik and a team of specialists to re-capture the nukes and prevent massive devastation. But with time running out and the cult leader still at large, are they already too late?
Gordon Kent was (is, I suppose) two people, my son - Christian Cameron, author of TYRANT and WASHINGTON AND CASEAR and other books - and me. The reason for the pseudonym was the obvious one that two names on a cover were not thought as good as one. And of course the one needed to be anglo and male; my suggestion of Max Cohen got nowhere, as did several dozen others we trotted by the publisher. Eventually, we settled on Gordon Kent: Gordon was my father's name, my son's middle name; Kent, oh, well.
We wrote eight novels - the Alan Craik books - under this pseudonym, starting with NIGHT TRAP (RULES OF ENGAGEMENT in the US, probably one of the most overworked titles there is) and ending with the much darker (and more satisfying) SPOILS OF WAR and THE FALCONER'S TALE. The books were about the air side of the US Navy, mostly about intelligence, but with a lot of derring-do that real intel officers never get to play at. They were usually fun to write because we'd both been in the navy, my son a good deal longer than I; we had our differences, as any two people must, but it was a surprisingly workable relationship. Lots of long-distance telephone calls, occasional meetings to go fishing and use the time in the car to plan books. We worked from outlines made on those trips, then divided the scenes up - we quickly learned who did which sorts of scenes and which characters better - and then we wrote and exchanged files and bickered and praised and wound up with a book.
Is Gordon Kent finished? We wonder. We're both writing our own books now under our own names, but occasionally we feel a nudge to go back to that partnership. Maybe, maybe....
