Deep Strike by Rick Campbell

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 16, 2021

Deep Strike is a story of submarines chasing and shooting torpedoes at other submarines. That’s what I look for in a Rick Campbell novel. The rest of the book is an ordinary thriller, but the underwater scenes are exceptional. This is the sixth book in a series but if you just read it for the action, you can easily get by without the context provided in the earlier novels.

The plot is driven by a villain named Lonnie Mixell who (too coincidentally) was the college buddy of Jake Harrison, a CIA paramilitary operations officer who has played the role of hero throughout this series. Mixell is a SEAL who went to prison and now has a grudge against the American government.

Using funding from al-Qaeda, Mixell bribes a Russian submarine captain to fire missiles at twenty American targets. The Russian captain accepts the bribe because his daughter has a disease that won’t respond to conventional treatment, although a very expensive treatment will save her life. That’s just a bit too convenient, but it sets the action in motion and maybe that’s all that matters. The Russian thinks he’s firing conventional missiles, not knowing that additional bribes have resulted in nuclear warheads being substituted for conventional warheads. As if that won’t cause enough mayhem, Mixell has an additional plan to cripple the American government that is revealed late in the novel.

Harrison has his work cut out for him, but much of the story takes place underwater. Early in the novel, an American submarine trails a Russian sub as it leaves port. Unaware that the Russian sub is commanded by a desperate man who plans to attack the US, the American commander thinks he’s on a routine mission.

After the mission takes an unfortunate turn, it’s up to a bunch of smart people with expensive technology to figure out where the Russian sub might be headed. Another American submarine sails into action, leading to the aforementioned submarine warfare. Campbell always combines technical precision with tactical savvy to create gripping scenes as submarine crews shoot and dodge torpedoes.

Some aspects of Deep Strike are bothersome. In the tradition of implausible thrillers, a villain captures a hero, wastes time explaining his plan to the hero, and then keeps the hero alive so that the hero can thwart the plan. Why doesn’t the villain just kill the hero before he carries out the plan? Because then the thriller wouldn’t have a happy ending.

A second plot thread involves Harrison’s partner, who seems to be a psychopath. Harrison is warned to keep an eye on her because her partners tend to die. Instead of reporting her behavior when she engages in unnecessary violence, or later when she ponders killing Harrison to prevent him from reporting what he saw, Harrison gives her a pass. I mean, team loyalty is one thing, but letting a crazed killer stay in her job without at least calling the boss’ attention to her professional inadequacies seems like piss poor job performance. The plot thread is an unnecessary distraction, particularly since another of Harrison’s partners also turns out to be less than ideal. How much bad partner drama does a thriller need?

The scenes leading up to and following the submarine warfare are standard thriller fare. They are executed with competence, but they aren’t fresh or exciting. Harrison’s non-relationship with CIA director Christine O’Connor, a character who played a central role in some earlier novels, gains no traction in this one. They both fret about what might have been but that’s old news, recycled from earlier novels. Neither of them has enough personality to make the reader care about their relationship. As far as I’m concerned, everything else in the book is ho-hum background to the real point of a Rick Campbell novel: submarines in action. But for me, and perhaps for other fans of submarine thrillers, that’s enough.

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