COMBAT

Ten original novellas dish out military/technothriller fiction. Editor Coonts, who has had several bestsellers of this ilk since Flight of the Intruder (1986), argues in his introduction that the marriage of the war novel and high-tech is a natural, suggesting perhaps that Homer, Tolstoy, and Hemingway would tell their stories today by riding the Internet and sending up rockets, missiles, and precision munitions. Coonts points out that high-tech classics, from H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds to Ernest K. Gann’s Fate Is the Hunter, use technology to maneuver character, not just for thrills. His own contribution here, Al-Jihad, is about vengeance, with cool, intense Julie Giraud offering a Marine sniper three million dollars to help kill whoever murdered her parents. Harold W. Coyle’s Cyberknights tells of cypberpunks enlisted to fight hacker terrorists on the Internet. Larry Bond takes us into ferocious space warfare in Lash-Up, while R. J. Pineiro places his nuclear threat on a space platform in Fight of Endeavour. Also recruited are Dale Brown, David Hagberg, Dean Ing, Ralph Peters, and Barrett Tillman. American troops go to hell and back to save the free world. Push comes to shove, then Fire away! and CARRUMPH!