I bought this book for a quarter at the Bridgeton Trails Branch of the St. Louis County library. Because, I guess, I’m frugal and wanted to save the seventy-five cents extra it would have cost me for a non-former library copy of this book at a book fair somewhere. No, more likely, I saw it and knew that I didn’t have it, and I wanted it now, which was then.
As you know, I’m revisiting my Alistair MacLean fixation from high school (I read Partisans, Caravan to Vaccares, and Floodgate last year, as you remember, gentle reader).
Like Floodgate, this book ventures from MacLean’s strongest topic matter, World War II and early Cold War espionage. In this book, a band of criminals hijack the motorcade of the President and a couple oil sheiks as it crosses the Golden Gate Bridge. There, the criminals hold the hostages for ransom, but they have to deal with an FBI agent in their midst.
The book is written in the typical MacLean potboiler fashion, with characters reminiscient of others in his line. The plot is novel and preposterous, but one expects some of that from MacLean. Some of the scenes and technical descriptions within the book–more the depictions of technical details–let us know that the author has carefully considered and choreographed what he’s talking about, but the prose doesn’t bring it to life. Fortunately, as with Clancy, one kind of skims these to get to the action.
So the book is an acceptable piece of the genre work, but more importantly, it solves a discussing I had with a (foreign national) co-worker (who left Oklahoma City in late 1995) about how easy it would be to damage the Golden Gate bridge in a terrorist attack. I was right that an attack on the road surface or the towers themselves would probably be ineffectual, but we didn’t consider the effectiveness of attacking the suspension cables themselves. Probably because we’re not engineers, we’re not committed terrorists, and we were only killing time with spurious talk while watching the smokers gather on the sidewalk outside the entrance to the building across the street.
Never the less, this anecdote should at least illustrate the depth and the breadth of the Noggle Library. Odds are, I probably have a book about it, no matter what it is.
