Flash Point

Huston's third military thriller is also his best as it examines the cost of another hypothetical American reprisal against terrorism, this time with a supersonic fighter-jet pursuit of a bin Laden stand-in to his secret desert fortress.In what is probably the only thriller series based on a passage of the U.S. Constitution, Huston, a former Navy F-14 flyboy now practicing law, typically has some plucky legal type--here it's a Navy JAG officer aboard an aircraft carrier off the Israeli coast--discover Article 1, Section 8, which gives Congress the legal clout to determine how force should be applied when American interests are threatened abroad. Huston used Section 8 both in his excellent debut (_Balance of Power_, 1998) and its much less powerful sequel (_The Price of Power_, 1999); now he employs it to have Congress declare war on a single person, Sheik al-Jabar, who has apparently revived an 11th-century Islamic sect of assassins to commit mayhem against Israel and the U.S. When one of al-Jabar's attacks against Israel kills a Navy pilot seeking quality time with the beautiful Israeli mystery woman he wants to marry, the pilot's best buddy, Lieutenant Sean Woods, whose father died in a terrorist attack, wants revenge. After discussing his feelings with the carrier's JAG officer, and getting some tips about St. Aquinas's definition of a just war from the ship's chaplain, Woods writes his congressman and, miraculously, gets results. Of course, killing al-Jabar, who hides in ancient fortresses protected by Syria and Iran, will not be easy. While Woods flies spectacular aerial dogfights over Lebanon and Iran, Sami al-Hadad, the NSA's top Arab intelligence analyst, finds evidence that Israel may be using al-Jabar to force the U.S. to declare a war that can't be won. A thinking man's military thriller, with superb action, crackling hardware-speak, and just enough tragedy to emphasize the emotional price for so much gung-ho American heroism.