book cover of Viper\'s Game
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Viper's Game

(1974)
(The second book in the Mike Locken series)
A novel by

 
 
The second in a trilogy of hard-edged action novels featuring former U.S. State Department specialist in security and transport, Mike Locken. There's trouble in paradise now, with Locken caught in the middle of it.

Carrying a mental load in the aftermath of a recent contract security job gone sour and ending in the suicide of a young woman on Locken's watch, he takes an assignment from an old pal with connections in Australian intelligence -- a thinly disguised rest and relaxation tour to guage the shaky political scene on a lush South Pacific island. Only to arrive at the precise moment the anticipated sleepy tropical island erupts in violence at the hands of a home-grown terrorist group in alliance with a primative hill tribe. Their first intention: to exterminate the small community of foreigners scattered near the island's seedy main port. At the outset Locken is the only one with the understanding of what is about to happen with worse likely to follow. And the cool-enough head to try to derail their plans.

Assembling a make-shift team including an ex-Marine marksman with a drug problem, an aging Aussie combat veteran packing his old Enfield, a missionary couple with plenty of grit and local knowledge, plus various odd-bods that weld into a team on the move, Locken gathers his international flock under fire. Heading off across the island now toward the abandoned airport, first aboard a battered school bus then via an ancient narrow-guage rail line, trying to out guess then fighting off the armed guerilla's in fierce pursuit with their machete slashing allies -- to reach the airport in a brewing storm and the single worn aircraft large enough to carry them all to safety. That is, if its drunken, mentally-shaky former pilot can remember what he was once made of. Based in part on two separate events that occurred in the south-west Pacific in the 1960s -- on Viti Levu in Fiji, and the hill town of Goroka on East Timor. "Rostand's best yet and it detonates excitement," says The New York Times. And Bestsellers adds: "One of those gutsy novels that ought to have bullet-holes in the cover."


Genre: Thriller

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