LARRY BOND’S FIRST TEAM

Bond and DeFelice send their First Team to Korea, where radioactive waste is turning up in the wrong places and a billionaire in the South is too chummy with nasty customers in the North.

Bob Ferguson, tough-guy-in-charge of the Special Demands First Team that takes on secret assignments for the CIA and the joint services, is still on the job despite the thyroid cancer that was eating him up in Larry Bond’s First Team (2004). Sexy and resourceful team-member Thera Majed, disguised as a mild-mannered steno, is part of an international inspection team on tour in the two Koreas and Japan. The inspectors are checking to see that all nuclear niceties are being observed, unaware that Thera is checking much deeper, with a special interest in what’s going on north of the DMZ, where Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il is known to be interested in manufacturing his own line of nuclear weapons. To the bewilderment of the Team’s managers, Thera finds radioactive evidence of the wrong kinds of activity in supposedly peaceful South Korea. The little detectors she’s sprinkled around what is supposed to be a legitimate waste-disposal site are glowing like so many Christmas bulbs. Thera’s news brings the fearless officer Ferguson and other teammates in for a Seoul search. Since everyone on the team has the guts of cat burglars, there is much sneaking into terrifying factories and bases and dumps, where their findings point to South Korean businessman and super-patriot Park Jin Tae. Park longs for Korea’s unified glory days and nurses a seriously deep grudge against the Japanese. Posing as a shady Russian arms dealer, Ferguson inserts himself into a “business trip” that Park and his associates make into North Korea and learns that Park is thick with a dangerous army general. But before he can get his news back to Washington, Ferguson is snatched and imprisoned and left to wither away from lack of thyroid medicine.

Relentless action. No time for reflection.