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Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

This is the military thriller-genre version of the Summarize SF novels from Memory Thread. Write up a summary of a book you read from what you remember; do not go back and check or look at Wikipedia until after you've written up a summary first.

I'll start with: a book that I do not remember the title or author!

It's the mid-90's so authors are desperately casting about for new enemies for the US to fight. This one lands on pirates and the book starts with a US freighter being captured in Indonesian waters. The military tracks them back to a big island fortress but the president refuses to green light an attack! This pisses off Congress something fierce.

Are Hero is actually not a military person at all but a staffer in I think the Speaker or Majority Leader's office. He discovers One Weird Trick to Authorize Military Force (the Executive Branch Hates Him!) and Congress issues a letter or marque and reprisal to the Nimitz battle group and attached Marine Expeditionary Force and orders them to go in.

This utterly wild turn of events leads to a bunch of legal wrangling back home but the book follows Are Hero as he delivers the letter to the Nimitz's captain and then for some reason ends up going ashore with the Marines I think as an observer. Anyway the pirates are defeated in several chapters of combat and the book ends with Congress flying the Gadsden flag from the capital building.

I think I also read a sequel where said president was impeached and Congress did some other weird legal trick but I don't remember anything about it.

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Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

Fair warning: I read every single pre-9/11 Dale Brown novel as a teenager and I will talk about them all.

McNally
Sep 13, 2007

Ask me about Proposition 305


Do you like muskets?

Moon Slayer posted:

Fair warning: I read every single pre-9/11 Dale Brown novel as a teenager and I will talk about them all.

Yes but did you ever read the short story that was part of an anthology that Stephen Coonts put together where Patrick McLanahan faces his toughest challenge yet: A promotion board?

Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

Dear god

bulletsponge13
Apr 28, 2010

Vertical Limit- a buncha bad guys take over an office complex- the only hitch?

Some Stockbroker who spent his 20s doing wet work in MACVSOG. And he is a bit miffed.

Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

Tom Clancy's Op Center series was several books that asked the question "you know that scene in movies where all the guys are standing around in a room with a ridiculous amount of monitors? What if my ghost writers did a bunch of books from their perspective?" I honestly don't remember what exact kind of situations they were involved in fighting (probably cyber-terrorists and the like) but I do remember that one book featured the "mobile op center" that was just a surveillance van. This multi-million dollar national security asset got captured by terrorists in Turkey (I think) by stuffing a wadded-up rag into the exhaust pipe and knocking the heroes out. Also one of the main characters was paraplegic and was being chased in the van and tried to jettison his wheelchair at his pursuers but the van wouldn't let him.

Madurai
Jun 26, 2012

Oh god. Where to start?

Are we excluding books that dip over across the F/SF barrier? Because that's a lot.

Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

Nah, :justpost: whatever garbage you want to talk about!

Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

So, Dale Brown. He was an actual Air Force back-seater on B-52s in the late 70's-early 80's and clearly has a chip on his shoulder about never getting to actually drop bombs on anybody for real. His main series books almost always amount to "what if some ridiculous geopolitical crises could be solved by flying cool secret airplanes into enemy territory and bombing something?"

Case in point, his first book Flight of the Old Dog. The Soviets have build a laser in Siberia that will be able to shoot down ballistic missiles. Instead of building their own and hailing the end of MAD the US decide to risk World War 3 and blow it up.

Meanwhile, Are Hero Patrick McLanahan is an Air Force officer who doesn't play by the rules all the time but gets results, damnit. He's working on a super-secret project to strap as much extra crap onto a B-52 airframe as possible. Air-to-air missiles? Sure thing. ELINT suite? Cram it in there. RADAR is cool and all but we're going to put LIDAR on this thing too because lasers are the future, baby! We're keeping the tail gunner, though, that's important.

Anyway this thing somehow flies and despite being called an AEB-52J or whatever it's named the Old Dog. The Old Dog crew get the order to fly into Siberia (it's also a stealth aircraft or can spoof IFF or something) and bomb this laser; I seem to remember that they were on a training mission or maybe their base was attacked? Either way they weren't necessarily prepared and there are a few extra people on board.

Because they weren't totally prepared they have to land at a remote Soviet airstrip in Kamchatka to steal some fuel. One of the crew sacrifices himself to delay the guards long enough to get the plane fueled (this will be important later). They fly to the laser sight, do some hiding from Soviet air patrols and shoot down a few more (lots of "I've got a lock on this airplane oh god it's shooting missiles at me and I'm a bad pilot because I'm Russian!). The Old Dog pulls off a Death Star trench run on the laser base, this somehow doesn't start a shooting war, and the program gets to continue.

The main series books follow this format pretty much to a T from here on out, but I'm going to take some time to recall the non-main series books because they are somehow even wilder. So I'm going to talk about, in no particular order:

- Dale Brown solves drug smuggling and illegal immigration with the V-22
- Dale Brown thinks airport security is too lax
- Dale Brown ... IN SPACE!

Defenestrategy
Oct 24, 2010

I don't know if it counts, but I vaguely remember an alt-history novel where due to time portal shenanigans a UN Fleet led by the USS Hillary Clinton, named after the greatest wartime president in history, was separated and teleported into WW2. The American contingent end up teleported into the middle of a pacific fleet action.... I want to say Midway... and the automated defense systems on the boats end up smoking both Japanese and American fleets and end up changing the course of history ending up with D-Day being accomplished with Night Vision Goggles and Black Hawks.

Other events in the books:
The Commander of the Future US fleet ends up creating an enclave in California that follows future laws so racism is frowned on, The US Congress aren't fans.

Subplot about a missing nuclear submarine from the fleet getting found by... the nazis or russians? I want to say

Madurai
Jun 26, 2012

As it turns out, Pearl Harbor could have been even worse because the IJN had another, super-secret, even bigger than Shinano supercarrier ready to go for the strike, only the reason it didn't was because its secret underground base in Hokkaido froze over and it was locked out of the war and everybody who knew about it was killed in the American bombing raids. So FORTY YEARS LATER when the ice finally melts and all these old dudes are ready to come out and get their banzai on, they take off for Hawaii, because those were their last orders and they've been observing radio silence IN BOTH DIRECTIONS, because duh, OpSec. Yonaga and her airgroup are still fully operable after all this time because the crew is hyper focused and committed to proper maintenance and I guess don't have anything better to do.

The carrier is overflown by a Soviet Tu-16 "Badger" recon aircraft, which they handily shoot down despite the difference in airspeed between a Zero at full military power and a jet at range cruise because Bushido, or something. The appearance of this mystery machine deters Our Heroes not one whit and they press on to their launch point north of Oahu without being spotted, somehow, and launch their long-delayed second strike on Pearl. They manage to sink a carrier (it's actually an LHA, but they don't register that fact, beyond noting the presence of the unusual number of "autogyros" aboard).

After killing hundreds of US servicemen and wrecking hundreds of millions' (in 1980s dollars) worth of USN capital assets, Yonaga and crew are allowed to return to Japan unharmed because you know, these things happen, where they are received as heroes.

That's The Seventh Carrier by Peter(?) Albano, and buckle up, because it only gets weirder from there. There are a whole series of sequels leveraged around the premise that a Chinese missile defense satellite constellation goes out of control and lasers anything with a jet or rocket exhaust around the globe, meaning-- you guessed it-- our octagenarian crew are now the main arbiters of military power in a world gone mad, because gunfire and piston engines don't attract the satellites attention.

edit: Since I did this one, someone else should have to do the Wingman series

Madurai fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Mar 1, 2023

Madurai
Jun 26, 2012

Defenestrategy posted:

I don't know if it counts, but I vaguely remember an alt-history novel where due to time portal shenanigans a UN Fleet led by the USS Hillary Clinton, named after the greatest wartime president in history, was separated and teleported into WW2. The American contingent end up teleported into the middle of a pacific fleet action.... I want to say Midway... and the automated defense systems on the boats end up smoking both Japanese and American fleets and end up changing the course of history ending up with D-Day being accomplished with Night Vision Goggles and Black Hawks.

Other events in the books:
The Commander of the Future US fleet ends up creating an enclave in California that follows future laws so racism is frowned on, The US Congress aren't fans.

Subplot about a missing nuclear submarine from the fleet getting found by... the nazis or russians? I want to say

Ah yes, Weapons of Choice, John Birmingham

Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

Same guy who wrote this other series!

Moon Slayer posted:

It's 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, when suddenly a giant energy field envelops most of the continental United States. All biological matter inside the field is instantly vaporized. It's oblong and overlaps parts of Canada and Mexico, leaving western Washington state, Hawaii, and Alaska the only parts of the U.S. unaffected.

Things understandably immediately go to poo poo. Iran attacks the coalition troops in southern Kuwait, Venezuela and Cuba invade Guantanamo, France descends into a civil war for some reason I can't remember, and then Israel goes "well nothing to lose now" and starts dropping nukes on the entire Middle East.

Our Heroes are Seattle's disaster response director, a secret agent lady in France who was infiltrating an anti-war group, and the highest-ranking military leader left (I think the Pacific Fleet commander).

In the end a new constitutional convention is held in Seattle and some unscrupulous businesspeople want to do away with the Bill of Rights but Our Hero and Bill Gates organize a protest march and democracy is saved. Right afterwards the energy field disappears. No explanation is given as to what it was: the characters just shrug and say "I guess we were like an ant hill hit by lightning and we'll never understand."

The author is Australian.

Notahippie
Feb 4, 2003

Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth
I recall one written by I think an Indian former officer where the Prime Minister of Pakistan finds out he has cancer and decides to go balls-out nuclear martyrdom by invading Kashmir, only to be beaten back by plucky Indian armor columns. I don't remember why it doesn't end in nuclear armaggeddon except maybe there's an SF raid on the PM's office?

Madurai
Jun 26, 2012

It's the Eighties! And there are terrorists! From Libya! (the pre-9/11 kind where they hijack planes and land them for hostages) America's had enough this time, though and so a plan is devised to mount an airborne raid into the Libyan desert to rescue all the hostages, taking the terrorist camp and holding an airhead long enough for everyone to be flown out. The problem: Qaddafi's military is in mid-upgrade, with Soviet advisors and a brand-new regiment of T-72's based right nearby. The solution: drop the 82nd Airborne's para-armor tank unit of M551 Sheridans to hold the door until the evac is finished. But wait! C-130s can't do the job, because of speed or range/payload or something. Solution: LAPES the Sheridans in using C-141s! So the Starlifters go in at 20 feet, in a completely reasonable and non-insane manner, drop the tanks, the rescue proceeds more or less uninterrupted as the para-tankers fight T-72s at point-blank range.

The whole thing reads as a junior officer's editorial article given some characters (including a Native American tank officer you should probably already be wincing about, because it's Not Good).

That's Fire Arrow, by Frank Leib

Milo and POTUS
Sep 3, 2017

I will not shut up about the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I talk about them all the time and work them into every conversation I have. I built a shrine in my room for the yellow one who died because sadly no one noticed because she died around 9/11. Wanna see it?
Even as a middle schooler the ending to rainbow 6 crept me out

Notahippie
Feb 4, 2003

Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth

Madurai posted:

(including a Native American tank officer you should probably already be wincing about, because it's Not Good)

That's Fire Arrow, by Frank Leib

Top of mind predictions:

1. Does he rip off of Joe Medicine Crow's life hamfistedly by like trying to talk about counting coup or stealing horses?
2. Does he talk about the ancient wisdom of his people as cavalry raiders?

Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

Dale Brown solves drug smuggling and illegal immigration with the V-22

Like the start of Clear and Present Danger, shocking acts of violence in the Caribbean convince the US military that something must be done. The solution? All sea traffic in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean (I'm assuming just US territorial waters but I don't actually recall; if not it seems like a big violation of international law) must adhere to specific corridors of travel. Any ships travelling towards the US but outside these corridors will be searched.

To accomplish this a new agency is created, based on an offshore platform in the Caribbean and flying V-22s so they can fast rope down to seize the drugs/illegals. At no point do any of the V-22s just randomly drop out of the sky which is how you know this is a fictional story.

There's a lot of fights between Our Heroes and various cartels, and also between Our Heroes and Congress because like in most books of this kind the civilians just don't have the guts to do what needs to be done. But they're so successful that the biggest cartel leader buys/bribes a bunch of MiG-21s from Venezuela (or Cuba or maybe Mexico, I don't remember) to attack the HQ rig. There's a big fight, somehow they fight off the cartel, the leader is killed, and everyone can be safe knowing that America's maritime borders are secure at last.

Hyrax Attack!
Jan 13, 2009

We demand to be taken seriously

bulletsponge13 posted:

Vertical Limit- a buncha bad guys take over an office complex- the only hitch?

Some Stockbroker who spent his 20s doing wet work in MACVSOG. And he is a bit miffed.

Lol a sibling randomly picked that up from the library and I went through it in a day during a slow summer. To my unrefined palate I liked it but I had never seen Die Hard or knew the thriller cliches, it was entertaining enough at the time.

Madurai
Jun 26, 2012

Notahippie posted:

Top of mind predictions:

1. Does he rip off of Joe Medicine Crow's life hamfistedly by like trying to talk about counting coup or stealing horses?
2. Does he talk about the ancient wisdom of his people as cavalry raiders?

Ah, so you've read it.

pantslesswithwolves
Oct 28, 2008

Ba-dam ba-DUMMMMMM

I'm blanking on the name of it but I remember there being a series involving some global cataclysm (WW3 maybe?) that thoroughly devastated the world, and our protagonist was a dude with a heavily modified F-16 that just flew around the world doing...something? For reasons? I remember finding one of the books in my local library and reading a little bit of it and being like "nah, this is too much" even while I was in my plane-obsessed, "I'm gonna join the USAF and be an F-22 pilot or a PJ or BOTH," cadet A1C in the CAP phase. I only remember one thing and that was the guy bragging about having to touch down in a village populated only by women, who held him there until he impregnated as many as he could? I dunno, poo poo made Dale Brown look like Michael Shaara by comparison.

Notahippie
Feb 4, 2003

Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth

pantslesswithwolves posted:

I'm blanking on the name of it but I remember there being a series involving some global cataclysm (WW3 maybe?) that thoroughly devastated the world, and our protagonist was a dude with a heavily modified F-16 that just flew around the world doing...something? For reasons? I remember finding one of the books in my local library and reading a little bit of it and being like "nah, this is too much" even while I was in my plane-obsessed, "I'm gonna join the USAF and be an F-22 pilot or a PJ or BOTH," cadet A1C in the CAP phase. I only remember one thing and that was the guy bragging about having to touch down in a village populated only by women, who held him there until he impregnated as many as he could? I dunno, poo poo made Dale Brown look like Michael Shaara by comparison.

Oh poo poo, that reminds me of a book series, maybe the same one, from the late 80s/early 90s. It was a postapocalyptic wasteland inhabited by "Radiation Induced Human Mutations" and the kid had a Harrier that his dad had somehow refurbished and he would fly around blowing poo poo up. In my memory it was deliberately tongue-in-cheek and very much intentionally "America, gently caress Yeah" and over-the-top in a metal way.

Edit: "Silver Wings and Leather Jackets" by CT Westcott, 1989. A book that time forgot, there's very little about it online and there's two used copies on Amazon for $6.00 each. The google books blurb is "When Will Bucko's father is shot down while on a mission, he leaves as a legacy to his teenage son a leather bomber jacket and a stolen fighter plane he has hidden in the desert. To retrieve it and avenge his father's death, Will must battle punker outlaw gangs and radioactive mutants"

Notahippie fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Mar 1, 2023

bulletsponge13
Apr 28, 2010

Hyrax Attack! posted:

Lol a sibling randomly picked that up from the library and I went through it in a day during a slow summer. To my unrefined palate I liked it but I had never seen Die Hard or knew the thriller cliches, it was entertaining enough at the time.

It's a solid airport novel. I really enjoy it.

Deptfordx
Dec 23, 2013

drat, Dale Brown wrote a whole load of books since I stopped reading him 20 years ago.

Madurai
Jun 26, 2012

pantslesswithwolves posted:

I'm blanking on the name of it but I remember there being a series involving some global cataclysm (WW3 maybe?) that thoroughly devastated the world, and our protagonist was a dude with a heavily modified F-16 that just flew around the world doing...something? For reasons? I remember finding one of the books in my local library and reading a little bit of it and being like "nah, this is too much" even while I was in my plane-obsessed, "I'm gonna join the USAF and be an F-22 pilot or a PJ or BOTH," cadet A1C in the CAP phase. I only remember one thing and that was the guy bragging about having to touch down in a village populated only by women, who held him there until he impregnated as many as he could? I dunno, poo poo made Dale Brown look like Michael Shaara by comparison.

That's The Wingman.

bulletsponge13
Apr 28, 2010

There was some dumb novel of similar ridiculous plots that the only thing I recall was the aircraft were able to travel in complete stealth because they used lasers instead of radios to communicate with each other, so they had no electronic signature? Something like that. I think we were at war with Japan for no loving reason.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Sharuq and Stingray, both by William Keith in the mid 90s.

In Sharuq Russia is selling off military hardware for cut rate prices in the far future of 2005. The United States Navy picks up a couple of Typhoons for fun, and outfits one of them with blue-green lasers and Cray supercomputers to let its crew see underwater in detail. It probably looked like Lawnmower Man though. Separately, they developed heavier-than-water mini-submarines that can be launched out of the missile tubes of the Typhoon and have lower powered computers and lasers. These minisubs have to be constantly moving to generate enough lift to not sink to the bottom of the ocean, so they act like airplanes, which is directly called out and acknowledged in the text, and there's some tension between the stodgy classical submariners and the cool dude fighter sub pilots, though the Typhoon's captain seems pretty with it for a classical submarine guy. Launching the minisubs is similar to a missile; the wings unfold once it's out of the tube. Recovery is flying the sub at a volleyball net sticking out of the tube, then pitching up and folding the wings at the last minute so you crash into the net belly first and get hauled back into the tube.

Iran (I think) buys an old Oscar from Russia (renamed the eponymous Sharuq) and is menacing the high seas with it, so the US sends their Typhoon and fighter subs to kill it. There's a Russian advisor on the Sharuq, at one point the crew starts chanting so loudly he's afraid the Americans will detect them so he unholsters his sidearm and shoots into some insulation to get them to quiet down. There some hot sub-on-sub action and the Sharuq is sunk. The main character's fighter sub gets banged up too badly to release the ejection capsule and it looks like he's headed to the bottom. But he's right over the sinking Sharuq, which implodes under him when it hits crush depth and the air bubble it releases dislodges his capsule so he makes it out alive THE END.

In the sequel Stingray, Japan has also developed fighter subs that look like stingrays and deploys them from bays in a custom built submarine, which is a way less dumb way to do it, and decides to challenge the US for supremacy of the high seas. There's a scene where the Americans get some new cool dude fighter sub pilots and some of them get kidnapped while out wenching at a Mediterranean port. The Japanese sub beats the hell out of the Americans but ultimately loses by some fancy sailing by the Americans USA USA USA THE END. I don't remember that one as clearly. I think the Japanese fighter sub pilots had the stereotypical dime store bullshido gimmick but that may be my faulty memory too.

Madurai
Jun 26, 2012

Midjack posted:

Sharuq and Stingray, both by William Keith in the mid 90s.

That sounds dire. I salute you for jumping on that grenade on our behalf.

shame on an IGA
Apr 8, 2005

pantslesswithwolves posted:

I'm blanking on the name of it but I remember there being a series involving some global cataclysm (WW3 maybe?) that thoroughly devastated the world, and our protagonist was a dude with a heavily modified F-16 that just flew around the world doing...something? For reasons? I remember finding one of the books in my local library and reading a little bit of it and being like "nah, this is too much" even while I was in my plane-obsessed, "I'm gonna join the USAF and be an F-22 pilot or a PJ or BOTH," cadet A1C in the CAP phase. I only remember one thing and that was the guy bragging about having to touch down in a village populated only by women, who held him there until he impregnated as many as he could? I dunno, poo poo made Dale Brown look like Michael Shaara by comparison.

WINGMAAAAAAAAAAAN

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Madurai posted:

That sounds dire. I salute you for jumping on that grenade on our behalf.

I was going to do Dale Brown's early works but Moon Slayer has that well in hand! :cheerdoge:

PookBear
Nov 1, 2008

clear and present danger is amazingly prophetic about the US using sof to manage a problem while ignoring the cause.

Stanley Goodspeed
Dec 26, 2005
What, the feet thing?



Breaking a long spell of lurking to reach back some twenty years to remember one of the not even mediocre Tom Clancy's NET FORCE books. Maybe.

Anyway, the main thing I remember was that an entire enemy airbase got wrecked by a magical acid-dispensing Clancy cruise missile that crop dusted all the airplanes and equipment until it melted into airplane goo. At one point, the protagonist (?) is driving in a jeep with a woman wearing a green dress and he forces her to disrobe so he can have a Saudi Arabian flag to wave around? If it was a NET FORCE book then there were probably super savvy teenagers running around too and I sure hope that isn't related to the last thing at all.

A real page turner, can't recommend enough. 4 / 5

Stanley Goodspeed fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Mar 2, 2023

GD_American
Jul 21, 2004

LISTEN TO WHAT I HAVE TO SAY AS IT'S INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT!
The WW3 series by Ian Slater, a guy I think was an Australian defense analyst.

Each book was a highly digestible size with snazzy colored cover and a super cool piece of military equipment. Obviously 14 year old me jumped at the chance.

OK, so there's a family that absolutely everything in America happens to. WW3 starts (don't remember how). The older brother is a Navy captain of a destroyer, which gets torpedoed and is going down; the captain launches depth charges while the ship is going down to try and kill the sub, which kills a lot of his own men in the water. I think he gets really bad burns? Anyway, he gets punished by the Navy (they don't believe the sub existed) by being made the captain of a oiler barge. Part of his job is cleaning up oil slicks and he notices one slick is not right, it's like...not US issue oil. So he has it tested and it's RUSSIAN OIL. There's a sub tracking all the Navy ships leaving San Diego, and he sounds the alarm and the Navy finds it and sinks it. He's vindicated so hard they make him an Admiral.

The younger brother does a bunch of poo poo I can't remember, then joins the SAS because now things are desperate and they take American soldiers. There's a lot of funny "what color is the boat house at Hereford" hijinks in training. He was a lovely character and I don't remember much about him.

Their sister married an ultra-billionaire who's the villain of the books, he's like the chief arms provider for the US military and also telecom mogul I think? Any way he regularly rapes and beats the poo poo out of the sister, until she finally gets free of him several books in and it turns out he's in bed with the Russians.

There's a general (not related to the magical family) whose name might as well be Not Patton, because he's a maverick rogue that nobody takes seriously but seems to always know how to beat the new Russkie ploy of the book. I remember he shot a beautiful Russian assassin who was mimicking a journalist with a double-barrel shotgun by his bed, then he made a joke and the evil billionaire's tabloid paper (I just remembered he's a media mogul too) acts horrified, not at the assassination attempt on a 5 star general, but by his flippant joke standing over a cut-in-half Russian assassin, and I think general gets fired.

The only other thing I remember from the books is one of the little slice of life vignettes is a British sailor in a convoy that falls prey to a Soviet sub wolfpack; he's badly burned by a flaming oil slick and probably dying in a hospital because he also inhaled some oil, so the sister that I mentioned above who is working as a nurse (I think this is after she escaped the husband) grants him one final act of mercy and blows him right before he dies

Jellyko
Mar 3, 2010

bulletsponge13 posted:

There was some dumb novel of similar ridiculous plots that the only thing I recall was the aircraft were able to travel in complete stealth because they used lasers instead of radios to communicate with each other, so they had no electronic signature? Something like that. I think we were at war with Japan for no loving reason.

I remember reading that, though I can't remember the title or author. Japan invades Russia with some fake super-stealth fighters so the U.S. helps out with a small number of F-22s that are invisible for some reason. The two air forces wear each other down to a dogfight between the last American and last Japanese pilot and it ends in...a draw? A mutual defeat? I think there was also a subplot about a Russian crew in a clapped-out old submarine that blew up a whole Japanese port by sneaking in and torpedoing an LNG tanker.

pantslesswithwolves
Oct 28, 2008

Ba-dam ba-DUMMMMMM

Madurai posted:

That's The Wingman.

Oh poo poo, that's it indeed. Man, somehow the author milked over a dozen books out of the concept. Has there ever been a "Let's Read" of this series? That'd be a thing.

McNally
Sep 13, 2007

Ask me about Proposition 305


Do you like muskets?

Jellyko posted:

I remember reading that, though I can't remember the title or author. Japan invades Russia with some fake super-stealth fighters so the U.S. helps out with a small number of F-22s that are invisible for some reason. The two air forces wear each other down to a dogfight between the last American and last Japanese pilot and it ends in...a draw? A mutual defeat? I think there was also a subplot about a Russian crew in a clapped-out old submarine that blew up a whole Japanese port by sneaking in and torpedoing an LNG tanker.

Stephen Coonts, can't remember the title.

They were invisible because of, like, some kind of smart-skin that could change color or someshit.

GD_American
Jul 21, 2004

LISTEN TO WHAT I HAVE TO SAY AS IT'S INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT!
The only other thing I remember about Ian Slater is a oh snap-worthy review of a book of his I think I read in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

"If you find yourself nodding with the rhythm of Slater's writing, apparently you recognize it as the novelization of a Jane's Defense Weekly report."

Handsome Ralph
Sep 3, 2004

Oh boy, posting!
That's where I'm a Viking!


GD_American posted:

The only other thing I remember from the books is one of the little slice of life vignettes is a British sailor in a convoy that falls prey to a Soviet sub wolfpack; he's badly burned by a flaming oil slick and probably dying in a hospital because he also inhaled some oil, so the sister that I mentioned above who is working as a nurse (I think this is after she escaped the husband) grants him one final act of mercy and blows him right before he dies

Oh god drat :lol:

There was one I remember a friend in middle school had, it was a random book from a series about some American super CIA agent who's running things now while doing missions on the side, oh and America is in the midst of WW3 but with the Nazis in South America. Then they kidnapped his son or something?

shame on an IGA
Apr 8, 2005

pantslesswithwolves posted:

Oh poo poo, that's it indeed. Man, somehow the author milked over a dozen books out of the concept. Has there ever been a "Let's Read" of this series? That'd be a thing.

somebody in TFR did one a few years ago

E: Aw man it was Chitoryu, RIP what a legacy to leave behind.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3804298&userid=0&perpage=40&highlight=hawk,hunter,wingman&pagenumber=1

shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Mar 2, 2023

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Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose
Night Train by Clive Cussler

So there was this treaty thing where the cash-strapped British Empire was going to sell Canada to the United States, but both copies got lost before it could be announced or ratified or something. Dirk Pitt, an ex-Air Force guy who spends most of his time at sea, goes out to find them because the President and Prime Minister of Canada found out about it and think it's a good idea. James Bond from the Ian Fleming novels, now retired living under a different name tries to stop him but loses because I guess Britain got a bunch of money to fight World War One with and didn't hand over Canada. There's also some Quebec separatists in the plot somewhere and the Prime Minister's wife, who's secretly evil, gets buried alive in a car with her equally secret lover on the orders of the Prime Minister. Canada and the United States are united, and everyone seems OK with that because I think Quebec wasn't included in the deal.

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