Reseaching Foreign Settings

By Chester Campbell

While I worked on revising the third book in my Post Cold War political thriller trilogy, I was reminded of the lengths to which I had gone in researching the locations where the story takes place. I originally wrote the book in 1992, so some of the settings were more fresh in my mind at the time. Two of the central characters in the book, Overture to Disaster, were a retired Air Force Special Operations helicopter pilot and a chief investigator for the Minsk, Belarus city prosecutor.

Col. Warren "Roddy" Rodman settled in the Guadalajara area of Mexico following his court martial for supposed negligence that resulted in the crash of his helicopter on a clandestine mission to Iran. The area around Lake Chapala, 40 kilometers south of Mexico's second largest city, was home to one of the world's largest colonies of expatriate Americans. Digging around on the Internet, I found the editor of a community newspaper that served the group and got lots of information on the area and its residents.

I used AAA maps, guidebooks, and similar sources to augment my knowledge of Guadalajara and its environs. I had attended a convention in Acapulco a few years earlier, taking a bus tour from Mexico City to the coastal resort. We stopped at towns along the way and en route saw many miles of typical rural countryside. In Mexico City I got a good taste of the metropolitan flavor.

Yuri Shumakov, the chief investigator, moves about his hometown of Minsk, with junkets to Brest on the Polish border and Kiev, the capitol of neighboring Ukraine. This was the period just after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose confederation of the former Soviet states. Belarus was the old Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. To get information about the country, I corresponded with the American Embassy in Minsk. I went this route with two of these early manuscripts and found it quite helpful.

I sent a list of questions concerning particular points I needed to clarify. My Embassy contact provided details on such items as soccer teams, locations of government buildings, the status of the old KGB, all items I used in the book. I turned to guidebooks and other sources to get the flavor of Brest and Kiev.

The Special Operations helicopter mission to Iran provided an interesting bit of research. I had a book on Army Special Forces (in which my younger son had been an officer) that told about U.S. Green Berets helping victims of an earthquake in a mountainous area before the mullahs took over the country. I picked that area for my mission as the people would still be friendly to American troops. Since I had been an intelligence officer in the Air Force and Air National Guard, I felt I had a little entree to the active duty force. I read extensively about the MH-53J Pave Low III helicopter and talked to an operations officer at Hurlburt Field, Florida, home of USAF Special Operations Command. He read the section of the book detailing the clandestine flight and offered some suggestions.

I used outside reading to fashion my chapter that takes place in Zurich, but when revising the manuscript twenty years later, I called on my memory of visiting the city during a European trip in 2000. The descriptions still sounded good, though I added a couple of features gleaned from my personal experience.

Visiting foreign locales can certainly improve an author's views, but extensive research can achieve almost the same end. If you love research, as I do, either route can be exciting. And by the way, Overture to Disaster should be out in March.

Visit me at Mystery Mania

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.

Visit me at Mystery Mania.







  

1992 Mission Foreshadows bin Laden

By Chester Campbell

My wife is a sporadic daytime TV watcher. She switches it on and off frequently. Most of the time it's to check the Dow or see what's new in the news. For the past couple of days, there's been little in the news besides the Osama bin Laden demise. It will probably continue to dominate the talking heads for another week, or until some other significant event occurs.

Air Force MH-53J Pave Low III

For mystery/thriller writers, what happened in a small town in faraway Pakistan is the sort of thing that makes us salivate. A helicopter-borne special ops mission into a hostile environment makes great reading. It takes me back to a book I wrote in the early nineties, after the Cold War ended. This was the third book in a trilogy about a former FBI agent who takes on an assignment with a CIA spin-off. One of the main characters, however, was a former Air Force special operations helicopter pilot whose mission was tragically terminated through a general's miscue.

The story took place shortly after Desert Storm. It involved flying an MH-53J Pave Low III special operations helicopter from Kuwait up the mountainous spine of Iran to a small village in the Zagros Mountains. Using its terrain-following and terrain-avoidance radar, the chopper could be flown almost at tree-top level at night without being detected. The mission called for transporting an Army Delta Force team that would pick up a man and his family at a landing area marked by CIA operatives.

The President was under intense pressure to get some American hostages out of Lebanon, and the helicopter's key passenger would be Iran's chief liaison with the Lebanese terrorists. With his brother marked for execution by a hardline mullah, he had made contact with the CIA to arrange his defection. The operation had been carefully planned and rehearsed like the bin Laden mission, and it had been given presidential approval.

This was twenty years ago, before all the technological wizardry that allowed the White House Situation Room to monitor the bin Laden operation in real time. The chopper in my operation would maintain strict radio silence. The only communication with it would be a secure signal via a FLTSATCOM (U.S. Navy Fleet Satellite Communications System) satellite on a national command authority channel that would alert the Pave Low commander to any change in plans. However, after the mission was under way, a problem developed with the alternate channel and it was shifted to a different satellite. Because of an onerous personal problem, the Air Force Chief of Staff neglected to pass on that information to the helicopter crew. When the situation room received information that the mission had been compromised, it failed to reach the aircrew.

There's much more to the book, titled Overture to Disaster, which follows the Pave Low pilot after his recovery from the crash and court martial. In fact, there was so much more that I had to make a lot of cuts before its acceptance by a literary agency. Unfortunately, the agency left it on the shelf for a long time. When they finally sent it out, a Tor Forge editor liked it but said it was too dated.

Now that post Cold War novels are back in vogue, I think I'll put it on Amazon for the Kindle and Smashwords for everything else. Joe Konrath and Rob Walker have had great success going this route. With the bin Laden venture fresh on everyone's mind, it could be a timely move.

Sarin Gas Attack Stirs Memories

By Chester Campbell

In Dr. Doug Lyle's The Writers Forensics Blog last Saturday, he wrote about the terrorist attack in a Tokyo subway on that date (March 20) in 1995 using sarin gas. It was headline news fifteen years ago as the first case of a CBW (chemical and biological warfare) agent being used in a major city.

The blog brought back memories for me of what might have been. I started writing end-of-Cold-War spy thrillers when I retired. I finished the first one in 1990, the second in 1991, and the third in 1992. Book three brought me a contract with a well-known New York agency. It was the last of a trilogy featuring Burke Hill, a former FBI agent who runs an international PR agency that's a CIA front.

In this book, which has the working title Overture to Disaster, Burke doesn't appear until midway through the plot. It starts out in the Ukraine just before the demise of the Soviet Union. A group of KGB officers steal several mortar shells filled with nerve gas from an army unit, killing a young army captain from Minsk.

At about the same time, a USAF special operations mission to extract a defector from Iran goes bad and the helicopter pilot is falsely accused of responsibility. He is court-martialed and discharged.

The story picks up a couple of years later with the murdered captain's brother, a chief investigator with the police in Minsk, the Belarus capital. He uncovers a plot by the ousted KGB officers to organize dissidents in the new Commonwealth of Independent States, a move designed to usher in a new Soviet-type state. Knowing the U.S. is committed to supporting the independence of the former Soviet republics, the plotters plan a diversion to keep the Americans occupied at home.

A team of Shining Path guerillas is trained in Mexico, where the former Air Force helicopter pilot now lives. This is where Burke Hill joins the story. It all winds up on the Fourth of July in Washington, D.C., where the nerve-gas shells make their appearance.

The agency let the manuscript gather dust on the shelf for a couple of years. When it finally went out, a Tor-Forge editor liked the story but said it was dated. What makes it so sad is that if they had found a publisher early on, the book would have come out about the time of the Tokyo subway incident Dr. Lyle wrote about. With that hook, the book could have really taken off.

Maybe (probably) I'm dreaming, but it just goes to show how the luck of timing enters into this peculiar business. I pulled up the the manuscript today (I still have all my old unpublished stories in the computer) and I still think it's a great story. I think I'll do a little revising and try it again.

Maybe my luck will change this time around. And the title? It refers to the 1812 Overture played by the National Symphony on The Mall behind the Capitol at the climax of the Fourth of July celebration. Makes for a rousing finish.

Chester Campbell's Website