Viper's Game — Robert Rostand

Trouble in Paradise and Mike Locken, a once-upon-a-time ace specialist in transport and security for the U.S. State Department, is in middle of it.Still carrying a load from a private contract security job gone wrong, Locken takes on an assignment set up by an old pal on somebody's good-list in Australian intelligence --a thinly disguised rest-and-recovery tour to guage the shaky political scene on a lush tropical island. Only to land at the precise instant that the island erupts in violence at the hands of a home-grown terrorist group in alliance with a primitive hill tribe. Under the banner of Lenin's exhortation, that the purpose of terror is to terrify, their first intention is to slaughter the small community of defenseless foreigners scattered near the island's seedy main port. At the outset, Locken is the only one with the understanding of what's happening and the sufficiently cool-head to derail the plan. With a lot of ifs in the mix. Assembling a make-shift team including an ex-Marine marksman with a drug problem, an aging Aussie combat veteran, and 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 in a battered school bus then by narrow-guage rail line, fighting off the relentless pursuit by armed guerillas and machete-slashing tribesmen --it's an obstacle run to reach the single, worn-out aircraft large enough to fly them all to safety -- if it its drunken, mentally-shaky former pilot can remember what he was once made of. Based in part on two seperate 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 New York Times. Suspense kept at high pitch right to the last page, quotes The Library Journal. And from Bestsellers: One of those gutsy novels that ought to have bullet-holes in the cover.