ROGUE WARRIOR: GREEN TEAM

Marcinko has not gone gentle into the good night of retirement following a rough-and-ready career as a US Navy SEAL (chronicled in blood-red, white, and blue detail in his bestselling 1992 autobiography, Rogue Warrior). Instead, he has coauthored his second to-the-ends-of-the-earth thriller starring a salty veteran named....Richard Marcinko. This time around, the fictive Marcinko (recalled to active duty as a full captain) and his band of lethal weapons experts shanghai a Muslim terrorist holed up in the heart of Cairo. The elite unit is next posted to coastal England, where a dockside explosion has damaged a British aircraft carrier and killed several high-ranking American and UK officers, including Marcinko's mentor. Something of a loose cannon, the combative Marcinko shoulders his way into the thick of the action to unearth a transnational conspiracy masterminded by Islamic fundamentalists and their turncoat allies in the West. As usual, he must fight a two-front war, battling Arab villains as well as rear-echelon wimps who disapprove of his unorthodox, shoot-the-works approach. At one point, trumped-up murder charges force the scapegrace hero to run for cover. With assistance from an old-boy network of Special Forces personnel, however, Marcinko makes productive use of his time as a fugitive, popping up in the Afghanistani interior to obtain proof of a fiendish scheme whereby a treacherous peer of the realm plans to use contraband canisters of anthrax to wreak havoc on European and North American capitals. The Green Team foils this plot in a climactic clash that wrecks a London town house and pushes the body count well over the triple-digit mark. Despite occasionally distracting halts for mutinous asides on authority or deadly serious critiques of contemporary firearms, another excellent adventure for the rogue warrior and his highly trained SEALs. (Author tour)