This chapter begins, I kid you not, with the team leaving the chamber, "two minutes later" to meet Noddy. Noddy then immediately gets his head blown off. Putting it more accurately:
"Noddy's head exploded, bursting like a smashed pumpkin, hit by a high speed .50 caliber sniper round."
Jesus Christ Matthew. I know that we have had guys eaten by crocodiles (thanks Wizard...) and Frenchmen plummeting to their deaths after getting blasted with rubber bullets, but wow, that's really something. It's not quite Shaun Hutson levels of gruesome, but for a character we have learned is a part of the heroes and is Spanish (granted, not the most well developed character, but better than those of a Joss Whedon production) it's a pretty nasty way to go. This is the norm for the novels of this universe, unfortunately.
Somewhere, Fuzzy is letting out a sigh of relief that Noddy took the first bullet.
What follows is then West ducking the same sniper's bullet, calling out to Stretch to:
"Give me some sniping, Stretch, enough to get us out of here!"
And our Israeli friend doing just that. He immediately crouches, raises the rifle and blasts the guy out of the air.
"And two hundred meters away, the American sniper was hurled clear off his speeding swampboat, his head snapping backwards in a puff of red."
Stretch is a ludicrous character. Unprompted, in the dark, with no spotter, he did the following: unshouldered his rifle, found a target on the back of a swampboat, fired, not only hit, but hit him in the face. That is incredible, putting it mildly. But I am not mad.
What we have here is something actually good in a Reilly novel: an establishing character moment. Granted, it is a rather stupid one, but it is still something better than what we have had so far. Our team, as we know it now, consist of:
A metal armed Crocodile-wrestling Australian
His pet falcon
A confused elderly supervillain
A clumsy Irish idiot
A woman
An Arabian version of "The Flash"
A sniper able to crouch down, arm, prepare, track, and headshot a moving target in the dark from 200 meters in the space of a second
And an annoying shit
If that is not already piquing one's interest, then I don't know what else to say. In the hands of a great writer, these guys would fight crime and have zany adventures.
Unfortunately this is Matthew Reilly, so they do something boring.
They make their way to a bunch of camouflaged boats of their own, only to be encountered by more of "CIEF", led by a man named...
Cal Kallis.
The names only get better from here. Even his minor characters are amazing.
Kallis has two roles in this story: to be a minor henchman for the heroes to have a fight with halfway through, and to give us exposition straight from Kung Fury:
"Well, would you look at that. If it isn't Jack West... I still haven't seen you since Iraq in '91. You know, West, my superiors still don't know how you got away from that SCUD base outside Basra. There musta been three hundred Republican Guards at that facility and yet you got away - and managed to destroy all those missile launchers."
Can we have a book about that?
Let's just get this chapter out of the way, because we have to get to something big...
A lot of things happen over the course of these next few pages, so I'll run through them very quickly:
1. Kallis takes Princess Zoe hostage, preparing us for her role in this book
2. West hands over "The Capstone"
3. Kallis attaches it to its helicopter, which flies away with it. Another helicopter is then shot down by the Europeans, giving West and the UN Avengers time to flee.
4. Kallis is told to let them go, as West and the girl are needed alive, resulting in a swamp chase.
5. Mortars get let off, like a firework display of boredom.
6. West calls for evacuation from somebody called "Sky Monster", one of those codenames which sounds an awful lot better in your head as a 13 year old
The swamp chase does not evoke any sort of reaction from me, for reasons described in previous posts about character and pacing. Nor does this happen:
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| That this was the fifth image when I Googled "Hard Target Jean Claude Van Damme" is a sign that the universe loves me. |
There we go.
Now we are at the important part of the book: Sky Monster.
West informs Sky Monster that they are to evacuate on (in the words of Sky Monster):
"That really tiny potholed piece of shit road? Big enough to fit two mini-Coopers side by side?"
This evacuation will be done on "The Halicarnassus".
The Halicarnassus is a Boeing 747.
This should be a great, powerful, climactic moment after some intense action. But since the chase sequence has been a muddy dirge of drudgery, with no sense of real escalation or momentum due to our "in media reas" storytelling (which leaves the viewer confused and unable to relate to the people involved, reducing the stakes to those found on my last camping trip), this climax doesn't feel earned.
I do appreciate the image of a Boeing 747 piloted by a man named "Sky Monster" landing on a country road in Africa to pick up a team of multi-national psychopaths, however.
More next time!
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