JOSHUA’S HAMMER

The bad guys have this secret weapon of mass destruction and want to vaporize the good guys with it. So what else is new? In Hagberg’s 13th Kirk McGarvey thriller, not much.

Saudi Arabian billionaire Osama bin Laden is a religious zealot who, as all veteran technothriller readers would know even if they hadn’t read last year’s real-life headlines, hates the US. Mind you, it’s not just talk. He has a terrorist record of considerable distinction: embassies blown to smithereens, noncombatants attacked broadcast, a full range of blood-curdling activity directed against American innocents abroad. And all this before he really had cause. Now, against the advice of the CIA’s McGarvey, deputy director of operations, the White House has gone ahead with a plan to destroy bin Laden’s Afghan headquarters. When bin Laden escapes, but his young daughter doesn’t, it’s jihad time. In retaliation, the Muslim leader orders the murder of the President’s young daughter and, for good measure, McGarvey’s. He sends his chief of staff, the devious, unprincipled Bahmad, to the US equipped with a Russian nuclear demolition device code-named Joshua’s Hammer. This one-kiloton killer weighs only 90 pounds, fits easily into a suitcase, and if exploded over Los Angeles, where both daughters are visiting, will take out the targets and upwards of a million more as bonus. Time is running out; no one knows where bomb and bomber are hiding. But is “the best field officer the CIA has ever known” daunted by the odds? Well, did Rambo join the Million Mom March? Battered, shot, and otherwise mangled, McGarvey locates the villain, deactivates the nuke, and once again (White House, 1999, etc.) earns the thanks of a grateful, if slightly addled, nation.

Still, McGarvey seems to have lost some edge. He has fantasies of becoming a Voltaire scholar, and anxieties about looming grandfatherhood. Somebody should give the guy a rest.