Skip to content

Month: August 2019

SOBs – Eye of the Fire

Since I’m working on Brannigan’s Blackhearts #7 – Kill or Capture, I’ve been back to the SOBs series for some reading.  Which is when I realized that I haven’t written up the last few I’ve read.  So, here is Eye of the Fire.

Eye of the Fire has a couple of things going on.  The mission is an assassination in Cuba.  But the target isn’t a Communist official or guerrilla leader.  He’s an Argentinian known only as “Colonel D,” a torturer-for-hire who has spent decades finding inventive ways of making Communists die in agony throughout Latin America.  And, coincidentally, he’s also been employed by the CIA.

This makes him valuable to several people.  Jessup, “The Fixer” hires the SOBs to take him out in order to keep him from burning his contacts with the Agency.  Barrabas isn’t having any of it to start with; he says he’s a soldier, not an executioner.

But the mission isn’t the only thread in this book.  There are a couple of others, that make things much more interesting.

Hong Kong Crackdown

As the People’s Armed Police gather with their vehicles in Shenzen, it looks like Hong Kong’s semi-autonomy may soon be at an end.

I haven’t exactly been shy about casting the Red Chinese as villains in the past.  Despite the propaganda that they’ve been spreading around, and that has been often parroted by those with financial ties to Beijing, they’ve certainly earned it over the years.  (Try to get any official Chinese outlet to talk about Tianamen Square sometime.)  While it might be tempting, given the sheer weight of Chinese products sold to the West, to think that China has truly “embraced” the free market, the Chinese Communist Party is still firmly in charge.