Captain John J. McIntyre, USN (ret)
“flew surveillance flights throughout Europe and the Middle East during the Cold War.” He is
the author of The Last Boomerang. According to the book description of The Last Boomerang, “it is late 1955. From tumultuous
Nicosia, snooping US Navy crews regularly taunt the Soviet giant with their “Boomerang” surveillance flights north
into the ”Pond” – the Black Sea. Nasser is in power in Egypt, Israel is independent,
and Great Britain is retrenching her Middle East forces to newly strategic Cyprus. There, at the center
of waning British influence, these flights superimpose Cold War tensions on the brittle politics of the region, while in Washington,
they fuel inter-service rivalries and stir up memories and paybacks long overdue.
Against a backdrop of seething
Cypriot tensions and growing terrorism, one American crew bravely pursues an important intelligence catch, and their story
spins out against the unusual ethical and romantic conflict their pilot faces as he grapples with the drive to protect his
men and, at the same time, perform his top secret mission. We watch the “Beast,” the specialized
American surveillance aircraft, take center stage in the lives of its crew in their adventures on a dark night in a strange
part of the world. Cypriot patriots and Cold Warriors, the British and (as the alluring Czech spy-for-hire
describes them) the “not so British,” churn toward a showdown engineered by a crafty American intelligence master.
Finally, we watch as an American Admiral
and a British Field Marshall - both historical personages - maneuver to insure that greater values are preserved as they cope
with the fallout from the highly charged intersection of their national interests.”
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One reader of The Last
Boomerang said, “What to make of this unconventional first novel that seems to work equally well on three
levels? As a techno-thriller, it delves into the primitive state of the art of electronic intelligence a half century ago,
capturing the audio clicks and clack of Soviet radar signals frozen in time on wire recorders "on the darkest night of
the year" in a thunderstorm over the Black Sea. On another level, it plumbs the psyche of its straight-arrow pilot protagonist
as he justifies a desperate romance by convincing himself that it and it alone insures the safety of his secret missions by
deceiving their targets, only to find that he's gotten it all horribly wrong. And as a sophisticated political examination
of the geopolitics of power and its balance in Nasser's Middle East, it does a creditable job of placing the players in
their historic field positions in the game of influence and strife. In the meantime, we are treated to mini-tutorials on aircraft
mechanics, celestial navigation, inter-service rivalry and old-fashioned skullduggery between an Admiral and a Field Marshall,
both historic people, who seem to come alive and sweat the problem. Put them all together and the word "non-traditional"
comes immediately to mind. A lot of fictional molds have been broken with "The Last Boomerang." This is a revealing,
fascinating, delightful read.”
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