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George Burns said: "The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible." Had this principle been applied to DARK PACIFIC, the first in David E Meadows' new Navy action series, I think I might have enjoyed it more. I'm a bit of a techno-nerd, but Meadows' obvious and extensive knowledge was too much of an influence for this civilian to grasp the full concept and actually understand it. Sea Base is the latest development in naval technology. Covering more than 80 acres, the artificial island is a self-contained citadel carried atop eight ships and is able to dispatch aircraft and submarines at a moment's notice -- giving America mastery over the world's oceans. Hidden deep within the lengthy, detailed explanations of what Sea Base is -- its purpose, how it's set up, including how the eight ships are physically linked together (there's even a handy little diagram), and how it operates -- is the story of Kiang Zheng, a Chinese-American naval engineer. Kiang's parents are taken hostage so that a man he knows only as the Colonel can use Kiang as his pawn to disclose the secrets of Sea Base to the Chinese government. Also on board is Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent Richard Zeichner, assigned to Sea Base on its beta-test voyage. Instead of observing the proceedings, however, his true mission is to uncover the identity of a saboteur who will stop at nothing to send the floating fortress to the bottom of the sea. The book opens with Kiang Zheng having 13 pages of flashbacks to his imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Colonel, followed by his present-day meeting with the man on the day he gives Kiang the task of infiltrating the Sea Base operation, all of which are a terrific beginning for a spy thriller. Then we meet Senior Chief Alistair Agazzi and Master Chief Boatswain Mate Jerry Jacobs, old friends and colleagues who are deploying to Sea Base for six months of duty. Jacobs' wife is furious with him for not telling her he was leaving, and there's a great scene where she chucks his duffel and clothes out the second-story window of their home while Agazzi looks on and Jacobs scurries around collecting and packing his belongings. After this dynamic but brief opening, the story slides into a dissertation on the workings of Sea Base, going into excruciating detail with only tiny sections devoted to what Agazzi, Jacobs, Kiang and Zeichner are up to, effectively losing the perspective of a point of view character and turning the book into an engineering lesson on the Navy's advancements in technology. Oh, and did I mention the story is set in the year 2121? I didn't realize this until about 40 pages in, and I was yanked completely out of the story and didn't really get drawn back in until somewhere around the last one-third of the book. It is about this time that the story finally regains focus on the characters and the action they're involved in -- explosions at sea, a saboteur whose identity is a mystery (deftly hidden until the very last chapter), and a spy for the Chinese. For me, the book could have started on page 161 and I might have enjoyed the naval action story disguised as an international spy thriller. Although never fully explored in his role, Senior Chief Agazzi becomes the apparent focus of the action, and it is he who ultimately discovers the identity of the saboteur. Although the final scene is written well enough to have forced all the important details to the forefront of my brain and make them gel into that "ah-ha" moment I was waiting for, the very detailed and continually repetitive explanatory narrative was just too distracting for a landlubber like me. The overuse of certain phrases and overwhelming technically detailed descriptions were enough to make me want to throw the book against the wall, but I persevered and was rewarded by finding the skeleton of a decent spy thriller buried deep within the ocean of information. I suspect that DARK PACIFIC and its successors will be the kinds of books that die-hard military action aficionados will eat up, but I'm just not politically savvy enough to have appreciated the concept.
Reviewed by J. B. Thompson, October 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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