Firefox

‘Firefox’ was released in 1977 and was a deserved success for author Craig Thomas. It spawned a movie, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, and an Atari arcade game which I loved. If you remember the ‘Star Wars’ wireframe game where you sat in an X-Wing cockpit and destroyed the Death Star, with Obi Wan in your ears, then the ‘Firefox’ one will be familiar. 10 year old me got to sit in the cockpit of a super advanced fighter plane and shoot down Russian planes represented by bitmaps layered on top of real aerial footage (played from a laserdisc).
It’s that fighter plane that gives ‘Firefox’ its draw, and title. It’s a secret new Mig being developed by the Soviets which is, we are told, a decade ahead of anything show more NATO has. The plot revolves around Mitchell Gant, an ace fighter pilot who flew in Vietnam, going to Russia to steal the plane from under the noses of the KGB. For all the importance of Firefox (the codename the West have given the plane), it takes Gant half the book to actually get to it.
This is a Cold War thriller, through and through, and the first half is a fairly slow, but suitably gripping, account of him sneaking into Russia and hundreds of miles cross country. There are wily policemen and KGB agents, heroic rebels and Gant himself, a suitably damaged hero plagued by crippling flashbacks.
Once he gets to the airfield where Firefox is hangered, the book clicks into a much higher gear and becomes a breakneck action thriller filled with aerial combat and adventure. It’s just as cool as 10 year old me thought it would be, even if the build up feels a bit like low rent Le Carre.
Overall, ‘Firefox’ reminded me a lot of Tom Clancy’s later ‘The Hunt for Red October’. It has a similar mix of commie-bashing, tech-fetishism and expertly handled tension. If you like that kind of thing this is a blast. show less

One of the best of the late 1970s military fiction/thrillers. A damaged war Vietnam veteran, a desperate mission to steal a world leading Russian fighter jet. What could go wrong? Hey it's the cold war, and that means everything. A great read.

Firefox is a fairly good thriller. It is the story of how the Soviet Union loses its newest and most dangerous weapon, a stealth fighter called the MIG-31 to NATO. A few factors hold it back from being something I would consider reading again. First, the majority of the characters are very under-developed. Characters are willing to sacrifice themselves with little emotion or reason. Also, the action (on which every thriller is reliant) is cumbersome and slow, and successfully kept my heart-rate at a tediously safe 80 beats per minute.

This got rave reviews on Amazon, but I don't think it lived up to them. The characters were slightly weak. The plot was OK in concept, but it didn't grip me enough to engender the all-important suspension of disbelief.

It passed the time—all-in-all, I'd call it an OK thriller.

The first Craig Thomas I read to introduce me to a cold war thriller author so much better than Ludlum et. al. Of course having seen Clint Eastwood's movie version of the novel before reading it. Oh, well the book is ALWAYS better than the movie if the book came first.

A classic cold war espionage story. A great read!

fiction