| Summary, etc.: |
"The Bronze Frog is a violent, fast-paced, global thriller with plot, characters, and action shaped by the author's Navy, intelligence, foreign operations, and White House expertise. The reader joins Commander Linc Walker, a sharp, combat-seasoned Navy SEAL on a clandestine mission against the People's Republic of China, who is betrayed in this mission by leaders in The White House, and who vows revenge. Walker and SEAL Chief Gunner's Mate John Hall move out from the nuclear attack submarine USS Burlington after she punches up through the ice at the North Pole, to reconnoiter a secret Chinese installation camouflaged in the polar white. There is a firefight. Walker lashes his wounded partner to their ice buggy and speeds back to the submarine recovery point. The Burlington misses the scheduled rendezvous by 12 hours. Hall dies on the ice. A U.S.-Chinese political crisis has erupted. Once aboard, Walker - furious with the missed rendezvous and Hall's unnecessary death, knocks out the submarine skipper. Forced to retire, Walker learns that the President's National Security Adviser, a fellow Stanford graduate, together with the National Security Council's China expert, gave the orders blocking the submarine's scheduled recovery of the two SEALs. They alone are responsible for Hall's death - traitors in his eyes. They will pay with their lives; he maps and moves out on his plan of revenge. In Sweden's Grand Hotel, Walker, traveling under false identity, connects with a Russian Army surgeon expert in prostheses, who he has contracted through the black market to make exact castings of his head, right hand, and foot. The surgeon works deftly, delivers the castings the following evening to Walker in his cabin aboard the trans-sea ferry Baltic Star, in port in Stockholm. Walker kills him and, with the ship underway, dumps his weighted body into the Baltic enroute to Helsinki. His path crosses Michele Casidy's in one of the ship's all-night roaring bars. In their night in his cabin, he learns that she, too, has been viciously betrayed by a leader she trusted, as she climbs the academic ranks at Harvard University. Walker's blood boils. He will get the information he needs to act, and her department head will pay with his life. The novel moves swiftly from Helsinki, to Cambridge and Harvard, then to Bucharest, where the department head is addressing a NATO conference, then on to Moscow, Stockholm and Washington, with Walker drawing on his special forces skills, killing, repeatedly changing identities, leaving law enforcement on both sides of the Atlantic grappling with the unsolved murders. "-- |
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