Sierra Six by Mark Greaney

Published by ‎ Berkley on February 15, 2022

Most Gray Man novels are pretty good. Some are really good. Sierra Six is on another level. It’s the best Gray Man novel I’ve read, in part because it humanizes Court Gentry. Or, at least, it proves that Gentry was once human.

Gentry’s life has changed over the course of the series. Once he was a CIA lone-wolf operative, essentially an assassin. Then he became part of a CIA paramilitary team. Then he was chased by the CIA and marked for assassination. He became a mercenary before he made an uneasy alliance with the CIA. He’s still a mercenary as Sierra Six opens and the fickle CIA wants him dead again.

The story follows two branches, one in the present, one twelve years in the past. In the present, Gentry has been hired through the dark web to plant microphones outside the Turkish embassy in Algeria. He assumes he’s been hired by the Indian government for a mission that India can deny if it goes haywire. The mission goes haywire after Gentry sees a man he thought had died twelve years earlier. Gentry ignores the mission for which he was hired in favor of his own mission: to kill the dead man.

Gentry’s revised mission goes haywire when the man he wants to kill, Murad Khan, eludes him and orchestrates the capture of his handler, a woman named Priya. Gentry adds freeing Priya to his to-do list, along with killing Khan. (Yes, there is a scene in which Gentry screams the name Khan. Yes, I immediately pictured William Shatner as Gentry. Yes, that makes me an aging nerd.)

To achieve his goal, Gentry needs to ask his former boss, Matt Hanley, for information. Hanley, a character who will be familiar to series readers, has been relegated to Palau as punishment for his friendship with Gentry. Another CIA character who will be familiar to readers, Suzanne Brewer, is now in charge of killing Gentry, but that ongoing storyline is only collateral to the main action.

Hanley’s information leads Gentry to a retired CIA station chief named Ted Appleton who is now living in Mumbai. Appleton is initially a character of ambiguous loyalty as Mark Greaney makes the reader guess whether he’s on Gentry’s side.

The story that takes place in the past explains Gentry’s animosity toward Khan. It also explains how Gentry transitioned from being a solitary assassin to a member of Sierra Golf, a CIA paramilitary team. That team and its leader, Zack Hightower, will be familiar to series fans from earlier books. The story explains Gentry’s training and early missions before Gentry tackles Khan’s plan to detonate dirty bombs at US military bases in Afghanistan.

Both stories are filled with action. The earlier story’s action culminates in a helicopter chases, which is a refreshing change from most thriller chase scenes. A helicopter piloted by Gentry chases down three other helicopters flying toward three different destinations while his paramilitary team tries to shoot them out of the sky before they can deliver their deadly cargo. Is that even possible? Probably not, but unlikely action scenes never stop me from enjoying James Bond movies.

The story set in the present culminates with Gentry trying to prevent Khan’s detonation of another dirty bomb, this one in Mumbai. Among other improbabilities, Gentry has to climb a crane and leap into a partially constructed building during a monsoon. We ask a lot from our action heroes, don’t we?

While working with Sierra Golf, Gentry finds himself attracted to a bright analyst in Afghanistan named Julie who, like Gentry, lacks social skills (she freely admits she’s somewhere on the spectrum). In the present, Gentry bonds a bit with Priya. Gentry’s intense desire to protect both women, and in particular his emotional response to Julie, gives Gentry the heart that makes it possible for empathic readers to connect with him. Unlike Hightower, who measures his morality by whether he kills more bad people than good people, Gentry (at least during his early days with Sierra Golf) has reservations about that moral equation.

Mark Greaney generally avoids overt political discussions, or at least he avoids having politics intrude on Gentry’s life apart from the scolding Gentry receives when he tries not to kill the innocent. Gentry is usually too busy avoiding death to give much thought to philosophical questions.

I appreciated the character development we see in Sierra Six and, of course, I enjoyed the nonstop action in the parallel stories. Action novel fans who haven’t read any of the Gray Man novels can easily read Sierra Six as a standalone. As an adrenaline rush, it’s one of the best high-octane stories I’ve read in recent memory.

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