Just Finished Reading: Cuba by Stephen Coonts

Fidel Castro is dying. Conspiracies are already underway to bring forward a successor. At the heart of the most dangerous is Minister of State Security Alejo Vargas. With his police force to command and the secrets he has accumulated over the years he has managed to intimidate almost everyone. He also has an ace in the hole if all else fails. For he knows of the secret locations of six remaining ballistic missiles left over from the Cuban Missile Crisis, now fitted with state of the art biological weapons – each aimed at the heart of a separate American city.

Thrust into this arena is Rear-Admiral Jake Grafton in charge of a carrier battle group off Cuba’s coast. He is under orders to prevent to launch of the missiles at all costs and must sacrifice the lives of the men and women under his command if necessary to save the lives of millions of his countrymen. The clock is ticking and Grafton cannot afford to make a single mistake.

I like Stephen Coonts. He manages to get across often quite fantastical ideas in a understated way – without being insultingly jingoistic (unlike Dale Brown). Coonts clearly knows his military but uses that knowledge in a more subtle and nuanced way than some other authors in this genre (like Dale Brown) so that I for one didn’t feel insulted by incessant flag waving. The portrayal of Cuba itself seemed to be rather stereotypical – though I don’t know enough about it to pick apart the particulars of his description – and the military personnel did seem fairly two dimensional at times but the story was an interesting one and the combat sequences were well handled. Whilst not exactly a book to win any awards this was a reasonably good and entertaining read. One for the beach maybe.