Review: More terrorist outrages

From the Bangkok Post:  More terrorist outrages

Arab terrorists again, this time from Yemen. Osama bin Loony has come and gone, but his legacy of hate and destruction lingers on. What next after the outrage of 9/11? America again or some distant land? The world awaits the blow with trepidation. And with what weapon: chemical, biological, radiological?

The Storm by Clive Cussler 404 pp, 2012 Michael Joseph paperback. Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops, 695 baht

Not knowing gives novelists an opening to speculate and their imaginations are running wild. International intelligence agencies have their own thoughts on the matter, but not so far out. Perhaps the jihadists are reading the stories for ideas. Whatever else their failings, suicide bombers are presumed to be literate.
Yankee author Clive Cussler, who uses the revenue from his scores of books to finance his search for lost shipwrecks, has seafaring in his blood and in his plots. He's been around the seven seas more than once. The reader is given the benefit of his experience in exciting adventure yarns.
Unlike all too many scriveners, Cussler hasn't gotten on the Arab terrorist bandwagon. They don't appear in most of his writings, yet when they do, the spotlight is on them from the first page to the last. In The Storm under review, Jinn means to get universal power. A nut and a diabolical one.
His weapon of mass destruction is a pain machine, developed by the Americans for use against the Japanese but not used because World War II ended first. Turned on, it blows down and paralyses the enemy. Abandoned, Jinn acquires it and uses it for his own purposes on his Indian Ocean fortified isle.
Then there are bee-sized micro-robots which eat through everything _ human, steel, concrete. Commanded by a computer code only he has memorised, they are used to sink warships, devour their crews and cause manmade structures to crumble. The structure he is in the process of bringing down is the Aswan Dam in Egypt.
Can Kurt Austin, one of the author's literary creations, and his underwater team bring Jinn and his cohorts down in time to save mankind? If you are among the scribe's numerous fans, this question is rhetorical. For 404 pages they do battle on land and on sea.
In the penultimate chapter, will Jinn give up the secret code before the micro-robots devour them all, himself included? Clive Cussler, teamed with Graham Brown this time, offers us an exciting thriller in The Storm. By a character's account, 10,000 to 20,000 die. Is it really to be Aswan Dam next?