Post Cold War Trilogy Background

By Chester Campbell

When I first wrote my post Cold War political thriller trilogy back in the early nineties, I had a character who, as a young man, had been led off course by a charismatic leader who then rejected him as a failure. I wanted to show how his courage and determination overcame the stigma of that experience and allowed him to regain his self-respect. It had to play out against the backdrop of tensions that remained in the aftermath of the Cold War.

For years I had devoured Cold War spy stories like a chocoholic with a plate of brownies. I supplemented my novel reading with a steady supply of books on the KGB, the CIA, and figures like the famous British-born Soviet spy, Kim Philby. By the time I took up novel writing, I was well-versed in the field of espionage. I also kept up with events in the Soviet Union and what occurred when it was dissolved and the Commonwealth of Independent States came into being.

The central character, Burke Hill, faces one crisis after another in Beware the Jabberwock, the first book in the trilogy. A former FBI agent, he has the moxie to tangle with rogue elements on both sides of the old Iron Curtain. Rather than have him battle the odds alone, however, I created a sharp, talented, independent young woman to share the journey, his old CIA pal's daughter, Lorelei Quinn. She provides additional incentive for Burke when the bad guys target her as a way of getting to him.

The second book, The Poksu Conspiracy, finds Burke working as director of clandestine activities for a PR firm that's a CIA spinoff. I continued to develop his character as a tough, uncompromising intelligence agent. Lori Quinn, now Mrs. Burke Hill, remains in the background, pregnant with twins. As with the first book, I spent almost as much effort creating the bad guys as I did the good ones. I gave them full backgrounds and valid reasons for acting as they did.

When it came to book three, Overture to Disaster, I had a different idea. Instead of starting the story with Burke Hill, I came up with two widely different characters on opposite sides of the world, both tormented by painful experiences from the past. I used my Air Force background and a lot of additional research to create Special Operations helicopter pilot Col. Roddy Rodman. His counterpart in the east was Chief Investigator Yuri Shumakov with the Minsk, Belarus city prosecutor.

Rodman was court-martialed for an error that resulted in his helicopter being shot down over Iran, with everyone aboard killed except the two pilots. While working to learn how his brother, a Soviet Army captain, was killed, Shumakov is falsely accused of murder. The two characters' paths cross in Mexico where they discover they're both looking for the same person. That's where Burke Hill comes into the picture as he joins forces with the other two men.

If you're a fan of conspiracy theories, you'll love Overture. Behind the plot is a shadowy group of international bankers and corporate socialists. It will be out as an ebook on Amazon in a couple of weeks.

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Epic Tale Needs Reviews

By Chester D. Campbell

The final segment on my post Cold War political thriller trilogy is about ready for the Kindle store. Titled Overture to Disaster, it's an epic tale that follows two widely divergent plot lines until they merge in Mexico. The story opens in 1991 just prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. One thread begins with a Soviet Army bivouac on a collective farm in the Ukraine where chemical weapons are to be displayed. The other takes place at the same time in Washington, where a secret Special Operations helicopter mission to Iran is ready to launch.

The fallout from the two events begins to surface a few years later for two of the central characters, a chief investigator for the city prosecutor in Minsk, Belarus and the former Air Force colonel who piloted the ill-fated rescue mission to Iran. They meet in Guadalajara as a diabolical plot by dissident Russians and world-order capitalists begins to unfold.

The book will appear first in the electronic version for the Kindle. Since I need some reviews to get it noticed on Amazon, I thought I would try something new. Any readers out there who would like to review Overture to Disaster can contact me by email (chester@ chesterdcampbell.com - after closing the space following @) and I'll send you an ebook copy, PDF or some other format.

The book is of epic proportions, running a little over 160,000 words, but my editor thinks this trilogy is my best work. You can decide for yourself.

Happy Reading in the New Year

By Chester Campbell

When you read this, it'll be Anno Domini 2013. I'm looking forward to lots of good writing and reading from my Murderous Musings colleagues during the year ahead. When I started this blog back in the summer of 2008, I had no idea it would still be around nearly five years later. According to Statcounter, we had 287 viewers today for a total of 15,891 during December. Since we started counting, we've had a total of 302,363 visitors. Not bad.

For my part, the new year will bring out the last book in my Post Cold War political thriller trilogy, Overture to Disaster. I wrote a post early in December about the conspiracy that forms the background for the story but only hinted at one track of the plot. Actually, it was the part of the book I particularly enjoyed writing, since it tied in with my Air Force experience.

This segment of the book starts in September of 1991 in Washington, DC, where Gen. Philip Ross Patton, the Air Force chief of staff, is preparing for the launch of Operation Easy Street. This was the time of the Lebanon hostage crisis, when offshoots of Hezbollah held American and European hostages. The militants were strong allies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In my story, the chief Iranian contact with the hostage takers wants to defect and has arranged with the CIA to take his family to the U.S.

Operation Easy Street involved an Air Force MH-53J Pave Low III Special Operations helicopter flying a Delta Force team into a small town in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, an area still friendly to Americans. Special Forces personnel had provided the townspeople with life-saving aid in the wake of a deadly earthquake back in the sixties, during an era that found the U.S. Army operating there as guests of the late Shah.

I had been an Air Force intelligence officer in the Korean War and  knew a bit about Special Operations units, but I did a lot of research while writing the book. One of my three main characters was the helicopter pilot, Col. Warren (Roddy) Rodman. He had helped kick off the air campaign in Desert Storm by piloting a Pave Low III that guided the Army's Apache helicopters into Iraq to knock out Saddam Hussein's early-warning radars.

In Operation Easy Street, he flew his helicopter from Kuwait into Iran at night and followed the spine of the mountains at minimum altitude to avoid Iranian radars. The Pave Low was strictly state of the art for this type of mission. Its AN/APQ-158 terrain-following and terrain-avoidance radar, plus the nose-mounted FLIR (forward-looking infrared) system, gave it the ability to fly right on the deck in total darkness. Using Navstar Global Positioning System satellites, the crew could plot the aircraft's position at any time within ten meters. 

The helicopter flew without lights and in strict radio silence. However, the crew remained in contact with the command center at the White House via a FLTSATCOM (U.S. Navy Fleet Satellite Communications System) satellite, which would relay any instructions. Should the National Security Agency's radio monitors detect evidence that Iran had penetrated the operation, Colonel Rodman would be notified to abort the mission.

I sent a copy of that section of the book to an operations officer at Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in Florida to verify the accuracy of my descriptions of what happened during the mission.

The main thrust of the story was that General Patton found himself under heavy stress from a member of Congress at the time of Easy Street. After being notified that the satellite bearing the National Command Channel had malfunctioned, requiring a change to an alternate, Patton received a threatening call from the senator, rattling him so completely that he neglected to pass word of the change to Colonel Rodman. When NSA reported the operation had been compromised, the message failed to reach the helicopter.

You'll have to wait for the book to find out what else happened. It should be out in a couple of months as an ebook. Meanwhile, enjoy all the books our Murderous Musings crew has written.

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