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Hostile Contact [Hardcover]

Gordon Kent (Author)
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)


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Book Description

July 2003
With twists as harrowing as a high-g-force turn, Hostile Contact is vintage Gordon Kent: an electrifying blend of military suspense and espionage thriller. In it, Navy intelligence officer Alan Craik returns to action, strapping himself in for a wild ride into a dangerous, borderless realm of spies, counterspies, and high-tech warfare on both sides of a potentially lethal conflict--between China and the U.S.A.

Hostile Contact

When Alan Craik and NCIS agent Mike Dukas spearheaded a hunt for a traitor inside the CIA, they landed in the middle of a firefight--and made some very powerful enemies. Inside Washington, some still worship the arch spy Craik and Dukas took down--and now these men are plotting their revenge. With their expertise in counterespionage, Craik and Dukas have been lured into an operation that will put them in contact with the Chinese, an operation with only one real purpose: to destroy them both. But while they know better than to take anything at face value, Craik and Dukas cannot guess how another player will shape the game. Their contact in Jakarta is a Chinese double agent walking a high wire between his handlers, as the Chinese search for a mother lode of money lost on the covert battlefield.

Craik is also holding down his day job, flying a sub hunter S-3B crammed with high-tech gear off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Along with his astronaut-to-be wife, Rose, Craik and his team are acting on intercepts of a “ghost” radio whose purpose they can only guess. Craik's expertise in intelligence tells him to start searching for an unseen, unknown submarine that may be lurking off Whidbey Island--with the ability to strike a death blow against the Navy's most important missile-loaded subs.

Suddenly Craik is thrust into a secret war raging from the heart of Beijing to the depths of the Pacific, as espionage and sub hunting come together in a chase to rescue a Chinese defector and his family, while a U.S. Navy carrier group is threatened by hostile suicide boats acting on targeting information from a submarine.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kent's clever and complex thriller, his fourth featuring navy intelligence officer Alan Craik (Top Hook, etc.), has one foot in the techno-thriller genre and the other in traditional espionage. Craik and his pal and frequent partner, Special Agent Mike Dukas, are fresh from a shoot-out with CIA traitor George Shreed, during which Craik lost two fingers and took a bullet in the collarbone while trying to arrest the turncoat. Brooding over his injuries, Craik is reduced to snapping at his wife, Rose (herself a hotshot navy pilot). Before he completely loses it, he manages to get back into action with a trip to Jakarta to test a plan for dealing with Chinese agents. Unfortunately, the plan is a setup; fellow agent Jerry Piat is on Craik's trail, determined to avenge his mentor, Shreed, who Piat believes was innocent. So are some Chinese agents in search of another of Craik's victims, Colonel Chen. The intricate thriller weaves together three major plots: Craik must reveal and stop the CIA coverup of Shreed's treason, break up a Chinese espionage ring that is communicating with submarines off the U.S. Pacific Northwest Coast and prevent Colonel Lao from using that intelligence to launch a terrorist attack against an American aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. As superbly drawn as the characters are (even secondary ones like Dukas's fastidious backup, Dick Triffler, and his deceptively ditsy secretary, Leslie), they are also multitudinous, with subplots and shifts in viewpoint to match; sometimes the plot is simply too busy. This is a relatively minor flaw, however-Kent's thriller is still top-notch.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

With twists as harrowing as a high-g-force turn, Hostile Contact is vintage Gordon Kent: an electrifying blend of military suspense and espionage thriller. In it, Navy intelligence officer Alan Craik returns to action, strapping himself in for a wild ride into a dangerous, borderless realm of spies, counterspies, and high-tech warfare on both sides of a potentially lethal conflict--between China and the U.S.A.

Hostile Contact

When Alan Craik and NCIS agent Mike Dukas spearheaded a hunt for a traitor inside the CIA, they landed in the middle of a firefight--and made some very powerful enemies. Inside Washington, some still worship the arch spy Craik and Dukas took down--and now these men are plotting their revenge. With their expertise in counterespionage, Craik and Dukas have been lured into an operation that will put them in contact with the Chinese, an operation with only one real purpose: to destroy them both. But while they know better than to take anything at face value, Craik and Dukas cannot guess how another player will shape the game. Their contact in Jakarta is a Chinese double agent walking a high wire between his handlers, as the Chinese search for a mother lode of money lost on the covert battlefield.

Craik is also holding down his day job, flying a sub hunter S-3B crammed with high-tech gear off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Along with his astronaut-to-be wife, Rose, Craik and his team are acting on intercepts of a ?ghost? radio whose purpose they can only guess. Craik's expertise in intelligence tells him to start searching for an unseen, unknown submarine that may be lurking off Whidbey Island--with the ability to strike a death blow against the Navy's most important missile-loaded subs.

Suddenly Craik is thrust into a secret war raging from the heart of Beijing to the depths of the Pacific, as espionage and sub hunting come together in a chase to rescue a Chinese defector and his family, while a U.S. Navy carrier group is threatened by hostile suicide boats acting on targeting information from a submarine.


From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Delacorte Press (July 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 044033425X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0440334255
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,458,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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....

 

Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.8 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and exciting read, October 15, 2005
This was an exciting and enjoyable read. Although I read it before I read the preceding three novels, I had no trouble following the story, although I would obviously recommend prospective readers to start with the earlier novels first! A US Naval Intelligence officer, Alan Craik, has been wounded on a mission that went very wrong, in a which a fellow officier, George Shreed, was killed. Shreed was supposed to have been captured alive, since he is a suspected traitor. Craik is held responsible for the mission going bad, and has not met with much sympathy from his superiors, in spite of his injuries. Craik is given a chance to redeem himself, and the story takes off from therem with sizeable measures of intrigue and manipulation, both on the behalf of Craik's own side, and that of the Chinese, who were "running" Shreed when he was killed. I very much enjoyed the way that this father-son team of authors dealth with the Chinese in this novel! Oh man, Patrick Robinson could learn a ton and then some from this duo! And unlike Vince Flynn, these two get their airports and airlines right! While the characters are not particularly well developed, the plot is clever, action-packed, and fast paced, and remains exciting to the end. I recommend this novel with three-and-a-half stars.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A chilling thriller, July 2, 2003
This review is from: Hostile Contact (Hardcover)
US Navy intelligence officer Alan Craik and friend NCIS Special Agent Mike Dukas recover from a shoot-out with traitor George Shreed. Craik lost two fingers and was shot in the collarbone, which has led to his driving his wife navy pilot Rose crazy, as he is a terrible patient.

Not fully recuperated, Craik persuades his superiors to send him to Jakarta to evaluate a plan involving Chinese agents. However, Agent Jerry Piat is also part of the assessment and he wants revenge for what Craik did to his idol, Shreed. Piat firmly gives credence to someone as heroic as his mentor who had to be innocent and thus set up by Craik. The Chinese agents see this as an opportunity also for what Craik did to one of them, Colonel Chen. Suddenly Craik is caught in the crosshairs of the CIA erasing evidence of Shreed's treason and a Chinese espionage team communicating with submarines off the American Pacific Northwest that could lead to a terrorist strike against an American aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean.

If this novel sounds complex it is because HOSTILE CONTACT is a multi-layered tale that comes together as few can. The key to the return of Craik is the combining of modern techno spying with pre IT espionage smoothly consolidated into an action packed thriller that never slows down until the final convergence. The cast is strong and real whether they are heroes, counteragents, or even tertiary players. Gordon Kent provides the espionage thriller crowd with a superb the spy who returned to the cold tale that should turn Craik novels (see TOP HOOK and PEACE MAKER) into bestsellers.

Harriet Klausner

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5.0 out of 5 stars Tinker tailor soldier spy, June 23, 2005
This book took me back to by-gone realm when George Smiley battled his arch nemesis in Moscow Center. While the enemy is more up-to-date (the Red Chinese), the stakes nonetheless are the same.

George Shreed is dead. Long live George. Was he a double agent, stretching back over decades of deceit? Was a brilliant spymaster, who managed to land a master stroke against his enemies? Did Chen control Shreed or was it the other way around? And what was/is Chinese Checkers?

This book takes up where TOP HOOK ends. Only things are not going well for the good guys. I loved the tug of war and the not quite bad and not quite good characters.

The one thing I really don't like in this book is the hero Alan Craik. I think he's an over zealous hot dog that should have been yanked out of the Navy. Leaving that aside, the book has a marvelous pacing that keeps you reading well into the night.

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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
master chief, golden apple, comm plan, pos contact, bow sonar, cigarette boats, surface search radar
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Sleeping Dog, Orchid House, George Shreed, Chinese Checkers, Loyalty Man, Alan Craik, Crystal Insight, Pat Feisel, Nickie Groski, Sally Baranowski, Dick Triffler, Mister Tashimaya, Mister Chen, Captain Rafehausen, Jerry Piat, Mike Dukas, Whidbey Island, Ray Suter, Esek Hopkins, Thomas Jefferson, Captain Manley, Mister Dukas, Pax River, Colonel Lao, Carl Menzes
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