Dean Ing (1931–2020)

In some ways, this is the most conventional of all the Ing novels that were marketed as mainstream works. There is no exotic tech here unlike The Ransom of Black Stealth One, The Nemesis Mission, or Butcher Bird. There are no sociopathic characters like Soft Targets or Spooker. This is a Cold War espionage story.

We open, unusually enough for Ing, in the past with a band of republican Albanian partisans fighting both the occupying German Army and communist Albanians in May 1944. Among the show more guerillas is Elbas Hamid. He helps bury a shipment of gold they discover after ambushing a German Army unit.

The novel’s second part is, stylistically, even more unusual for Ing. Covering the period from August 1944 through May 1985, it tells of Hamid’s further adventures after he leaves Albania. and is hired by the CIA to help run a partisan operation in that now Soviet-aligned country. Through a series of newspaper articles, the reflections of Hamid’s case officer turned college professor, and some undergraduate papers, we learn that operation was blown by Kim Philby and Hamid captured, and the complicated relations of Hoxha’s Albania with the USSR, Tito’s Yugoslavia, and China.

With the third part, set in Gilman, California in June 1985, the main story begins with skateboarding seventeen-year-old Mark Paladino attacked by three gun-toting men. He flees to the auto shop at his high school. There his, shop teacher, Stu Ransome, scares them off. Ransome offers call the police, but, if there’s one thing Mark’s father Justin has drummed into his head, it’s that you don’t call the police.

So, Ransome calls Justin Paladino, Mark’s dad. He’s met the man before and was impressed with his mechanical and model building skills. Justin says bad men are after him and will try to get to him through his son. He asks Ransome, as a friend, to hide his son, suggests how to do that, and gives him some money. Ransome reluctantly agrees but isn’t happy when Justin doesn’t really provide any details about what’s going on. Mark himself thinks his father has some kind of connection to the Mob. It’s not like they haven’t suddenly fled a place and changed their name before.

When Ransome realizes he’s being followed, he hides Mark out at his girlfriend Karen Cavender’s house. She is a librarian and part-time researcher for private eye Wiley Reed.

Ransome’s willing to help out Justin, but, after some Asian thugs try to break into Karen’s house and Justin’s home is blown up – because Justin is the kind of guy who booby traps his own house – his patience with Justin starts to run out. He hires Reed to investigate Justin and confronts the latter. He wants Justin’s story.

That story, of course, ties in with that horde of gold buried in Albania and will end in a shootout in the Sierra Nevadas.

The action is well-done with Ing’s usual blend of chaos and detail. The characters are vivid, especially Justin. The novel evokes the time with the beginnings of Silicon Valley, skateboarding, punk rock, the hippie and druggie past of Karen, and Hindu sex manuals. Ing presents us a few of his social concerns: youth too obsessed with short-term pursuits and Ransome, reflecting on his past as a mechanical engineer in the defense industry, wishing America would concern itself less with offensive weapons and, instead, an-antimissile defense (a major Ing concern).

I found it an enjoyable, page-turning thriller packed with interesting bits of tradecraft and Cold War history. But, because of its relative conventionality, I found it the least memorable of the non-science fiction Ing thrillers I’ve read to date. show less

As Spider Robinson once noted in a review of a Ing work, he’s something of a moral writer. And there’s no doubt about the main moral of this story. It’s right there on the front page quote in the original Ace paperback:

“Governments across the globe ducked for cover. Long-drilled and partly prepared, millions of RUS urbanites sealed themselves into subway tunnels, then slid blast-and-firestorm-proof hatches into place to ride out the blast-furnace interval. Most Americans were asleep, show more and in any case had only the sketchiest notion of adequate shelter. A few city dwellers – the smaller the city, the better their chances – sped beyond their suburbs before freeway arterials became clots of blood and machinery.

“The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its Cassandras, who had warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. We had always found some solution to our problems, often at the last minute. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.

“The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it.”

But this isn’t a Third World War fought with nukes. It’s the Fourth World War fought with nukes.

This is a geopolitical sequel of sorts to a popular book of the late 1970s: Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War: August 1985 which pitted NATO against the USSR and memorably culminated in a the nuking of Birmingham, UK and Minsk, USSR in a chapter which I. F. Clarke’s Voices Prophesying War considered the ultimate point in the evolution of the future war story. It’s not necessary to read Hackett’s book before Ing’s.

But, in August 1996, it’s the Sino-Ind alliance versus the Allies which include Russia and the United States.

Our hero is Ted Quantrill, fifteen years old when the novel starts. If the name Quantrill sounds familiar, it was the surname of infamous Confederate guerilla leader William Quantrill who led a massacre of civilians in Lawrence, Kansas during the American Civil War. It’s an entirely appropriate name given that Ted will become a killer in this series, including a killer of innocents. (Ing seems to like surnames with associations. The eponymous protagonist of his last novel, It’s Up to Charlie Hardin shares a surname with gunfighter John Wesley Hardin.)

Quantrill is out on a scouting trip when war breaks out, but it isn’t just the war that molds the man he’ll become. His education on the way the world works starts out with a dispute among the Boy Scouts which Ing explicitly presents as sort of a smaller version of the global conflict about to let loose. Intervening to help a friend being bullied by older scouts, Ted learns those in charge aren’t always interested in learning the truth, that the weak invite bullying, and gratitude isn’t to be expected.

We also, in a fight Ted has with those bullies, learn that he is what we might term a sociopath today though Ing doesn’t use the term. He’s calm in combat, strong, able to analyze tactical options quickly, and has what will later be called “gunsel” reflexes or, as the horrified scout leader notes, “all wire and ice-water”.

But his killing doesn’t start until later after he meets a woman fleeing from the paraanthrax already loose on the Eastern Seaboard. He helps her evade checkpoints and ambushes on the road as they flee from near Raleigh, North Carolina to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory where she works and lives part time. It’s with her he’ll have his first sexual experience. And, to avenge her death at the hands of the survivalists that have taken over the facility, he first kills.

The novel follows his journey from Tennessee to Texas and his joining the army of the new “Streamlined America”, the new name of a country that has lost everything east of the Mississippi to bioweapon plagues, some of its northern tier states to a Canadian protectorate, and some of its southern lands to Alta Mexico. His talents are recognized as too valuable to waste as cannon fodder in an invasion of China. He’s recruited into an elite intelligence unit that is, in effect, a hit squad operating under the cover of the government’s Search and Rescue organization. In the words of its head, it will “need to search out treason and rescue the system”.

Streamlined America is, in effect, a Mormon theocracy since Mormons, given their teachings on self-reliance and building communities, survived the war best. Some of Quantrill’s targets are dissident Mormons.

And lest any of the agents of the T (as in “terminate”) section of Search and Rescue get any qualms or ideas about defecting, there’s the “critic”, an explosive mastoid implant in all its agents that overhears all their conversations, provides real time advice, monitors their vital signs, and can be detonated remotely.

This being Ing, the plotting of the trilogy is strange, but it’s fairly standard in this book.

Quantrill intersects with several other characters who will play parts in the following books. Nine-year-old Sandy and her strange protector -- a huge, fiendishly clever Russian boar named Baal tended by her father who worked at an agricultural research station before dying from radiation -- have their parts to play. Like Quantrill, Banton Mills is a sociopath though with no great physical gifts. A US Navy officer, he’s not above betraying his country for personal gain no matter how many people die. There’s Eve Simpson, a very attractive teenager and nymphomaniac who, like Mills, happens to be an expert in media manipulation. And, of course, there are the other agents, leaders, and trainers of T-Section.

But Ing doesn’t just focus on the personal stories. There are several wide-screen chapters about the war around the world with individual set pieces including an old P-43 of the Confederate Air Force tangling with a modern Indian fighter above the skies of San Marcos, Texas.

It’s interesting to see, from the perspective of 1981, what geopolitical and technological developments thought plausible by Ing, a high tech enthusiast and engineer, in 1996

I’ve read most of Ing’s novels, and this is my favorite despite its dated aspect. I’ve read it at least twice, maybe three times, and I rarely re-read novels.

The Fourth World War is mostly over by 1997, and Ted Quantrill has begun his career as a government assassin. It will continue in the next book, Single Combat. show less

You won’t get any exotic aviation tech here unlike Ing’s more well-known mainstream thrillers, but you do get a pretty entertaining story of action and romance.

Teresa Contreras is vacationing in Mexico. A grade school and coach back in Tucson, she’s not only beautiful but fit. She’s minding her business when she sees two men try to kidnap a young boy and, in the process, kill his mother. Violently interfering, Teresa rescues the boy, eight-year-old Al Townsend. But, when one of the show more attackers shows up at the hospital, Teresa’s instincts are alerted, and she ends up taking him on a long journey to exfiltrate Mexico and infiltrate the US.

Ing does a good job with the byplay between them. Teresa is comfortable with children and a good person, but Al is also a substitute for her own dead child killed in a car accident.

But, back in Tucson, four men make another grab for Al and almost kill Teresa, so she bolts to the only refuge she can think of: the home of her friend Ross Downing near Ruidoso, New Mexico.

Downing has some horrible scars and some horrible nightmares from burns he suffered in unsuccessfully trying to rescue Teresa’s dead child from that accident. Except, Ross isn’t what he seems and neither was that accident.

The best thing about this book is that we’re not dealing with the usual crime or espionage story. Ing gives us a very unusual group of villains: a UN facilitator team. For foreign policy reasons, the United States government allows certain foreign nationals and members of “extranational organizations” to do anything short of “serial murder” on American soil. Certain foreigners appear on the “sensitive index” of American immigration records. UN safe sites exist allow foreign citizens to enter and exit the country without going through the usual customs and immigration checkpoints.

The four men on this team are amoral professionals willing to commit murder and torture. They have access to a multitude of records, do their own surveillance, are comfortable tracking and kidnapping. Their object: return Al to his father, a Kurdish politician.

The facilitator team may be my favorite part of his book. They’re competent, pay attention to details, but still squabble. Their leader isn’t above faking reports to cover up embarrassing details and becomes increasingly paranoid that maybe someone has set them up to fail.

This being Ing even the best laid plans of professionals can be undone by unfortunate coincidences leading to some dark humor. And, this being Ing, the action scenes are absorbing mixes of characters’ thoughts and kinetic violence and Ing editorializing.

Ing handles all the characters well though he doesn’t quite set adequately set up the turn the relationship of Teresa and Downing takes.

The lessons taught here by Ing, the self-described didacticist? Well, we get brief arguments about the lack of privacy American citizens have from the government and a one-sentence argument for drug legalization

But the main argument comes from Cicero: where there are many laws, there is little justice. Giving Al back to his grandparents in Seattle isn’t going to permanently protect him from a facilitator team and neither are a bunch of lawyers. So, Teresa and Downing are willing to illegally kill and torture to protect Al, the boy they become fond of.

Finally, Tor sold this book as a mere thriller, but, behind the title, is a science-fictional notion, a bit of Forteana that plays a key role in the plot. show less

In some ways, this will probably strike modern readers as one of Ing’s most dated works. His technothrillers, spy novels, and post-apocalypse stories probably have more enduring appeal. Readers will forgive a dated setting if it sets up a post-nuclear apocalypse story.

This novel, though, still has its charms, and it may be Ing’s most elaborate and plausible exercise in technological speculation. It centers on revamping the cargo transportation system of a future America to include short show more haul trucks for urban areas, high-speed rail and high-speed dirigibles, and rockets. Ing credits not only the help of physicist and fellow science fiction writer Robert L. Forward but the ideas of Leik Myrabo. Ing co-wrote a 1985 nonfiction book, The Future of Flight, with him, but I don’t know if technology here derives from that.

It’s America in 1995. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini is dead (in our world he died in 1989). In its wake, there was an uprising of Shiite Moslems in Saudia Arabia which put the country under Iranian control. Oil became very expensive though America is finally developing cheaper alternatives. The Soviet Union still exists.

This is another science fiction novel that induces a slight case of double vision, my term for stories that both failed and succeeded in whatever prophetic intent they had.

Unions play a key role here, specifically the National Transport Coalition (NTC) which seems to have inherited the place of the Teamsters. Among truckers, it’s still known as an organization that “rules the road”, but, led by Joseph Alton Weatherby, it scrupulously tries, for the most part, to avoid blatantly illegal activities though it will entertain their necessity. Lobbyists and whisper campaigns, it has learned, can be as effective. The Teamsters still exist in our world, of course, but they are one of the few private unions that hold much real power these days.

The story opens in May 1965 with a horrible incident. A truck driven by Manson Perkins, a wildcat trucker speeding in New Mexico with poorly maintained tires, causes an accident that kills a woman and severely injures a seventeen-year-old boy. He’s our hero, John Wesley Pee, and the woman was his grandmother. (Note, like Ted Quantrill in Ing’s Wild Country series and the eponymous hero of Ing’s final novel, It’s Up to Charlie Hardin, we have another character whose name has resonances with violent characters from American history.)

Two major things come out of that day. First, Peel vows to put long haul trucking out of business not only because of that accident but because both his parents, his father a trucker and his mother riding along, were killed in a trucking accident caused (according to Weatherby) by a forged cargo manifest listing explosive ammonia nitrate as gypsum board. Second, Peel takes a vow at his beloved grandmother’s request to never to have anything to do with the unnatural business of space travel.

Even at age 17, Peel is gifted with machines. He takes the large payout from his parents’ death to start his own business. A bit like Elon Musk, he is both a clever businessman and interested in technologically disrupting an established business – trucking. Twenty years later his short-haul trucks (seemingly low powered, low speed vehicles specially designed to move cargo containers from trains and ships to nearby cities) threaten the NTC’s business. He is cleverly using a high-speed rail maintenance car to develop his own high-speed rail train technology on another company’s rail line. without having to compete with bigger companies in actually building and running high-speed trains.

NTC begins a whispering and lobbying campaign against Peel as well as sabotage at one of his factories.

Another plot thread involves Middle Eastern terrorism (the focus of Ing’s earlier Soft Targets and his later Butcher Bird). Iranian agent Kosrow Nurbashi works with a radical college professor of business and economics, Bruce Hassan Winthrop, to sabotage America culturally and politically by picking out certain figures for assassination.

Ing tends to be a moral writer, and there are two morals here: America has gotten too risk averse in its industries and technological innovation and a call for patriotism.

The first is best illustrated when a railroad lawyer and accountant tells Peel his job is to rein cowboys like him in. They break laws and regulations and run financially risky, if technologically innovative, projects. That’s his official position. Unofficially, he tells Peel that the country needs risk-takers like him.

The second is illustrated in two ways. The first when Winthrop and Nurbashi target a movie director who is making high budget epics on American history with the goal of reviving American patriotism. The second is when Peel eventually gains some surprising allies.

There is also a major subplot of some of his employees running a side secret side project to use laser boosted dirigibles and high-speed trains to launch cargos into space.

Ing does his usual slo-mo, detailed scenes of violence: the opening truck accident and the fate of Nurbashi’s hit team at the end when they make one more try to kill Peel.

Ing does his usual semi-humorous dynamic between his villains, here the Iranian agents. A plan to kill Peel is partly sabotaged by one terrorist deciding to stop (shades of the the 9/11 hijackers visiting strip clubs) at a casino to taste infidel decadence before blowing himself up.

Of particular interest is the girlfriend of terrorist Zahra Aram, “an old-fashioned girl”, who proves to be more adept and smarter than her male comrades who regard her only as a pawn for their schemes.

Ing also loves pixelated plotting and improbable coincidences. Perkins appears again in a chance encounter with Zahra, and she will show up in the novel’s darkly humorous ending.

But most of the time is spent with Peel and his employees: a stereotypical test pilot he hires who develops a romance with Peel’s old girlfriend; Peel’s beautiful, folksy Cajun secretary who gets him to stop drinking and take up with her (the humor of their romantic interludes doesn’t always work); an old German airship designer who worked on zeppelins for Nazi Germany; his son-in-law and his nympho wife; a reporter; and the engineers running their secret side projects.

Ing’s transportation system eventually involves a dirigible grabbing cargo off moving high-speed trains and moving it to cities where it’s picked up by his short haul trucks. Lasers assist in boosting airship speed to climb over the Rocky Mountains getting, along with high-speed trains as a launch system, small cargoes into orbit.

Despite it’s dated context, the technological speculation and multiple plots of intrigue make this another enjoyable Ing novel. show less