Tom Clancy’s Op Center: Sting of the Wasp by Jeff Rovin

The USS Intrepid sits at anchor at a NYC harbor. A significant tourist stop. On any given day, the flight deck has scores of people wandering around. For those of a certain age, they remember the Intrepid picking up Scott Carpenter, the 4^th American in space. A piece of American history.

 

To Captain Ahmed Salehi, the Intrepid is a target.

On a delightful spring morning, he, and a hired Iranian chemical engineer, put a figurative match to an incendiary device that spews flammable chemicals across the deck and incinerates hundreds of tourists. And in one final ‘fuck you’ to the American intelligence network, he looks directly into a surveillance camera as he leaves the ship.

It’s not like the US didn’t know about Salehi. His plan to set off a small nuke in Minneapolis was stopped and the ship under his command had been sunk. He was a known commodity. But somehow, he’d slipped under the radar. In particular, the radar of the center devoted to keeping track of people like him.

Op Center dropped the ball.

POTUS calls the heads of every 3-letter agency set up to protect the US. In the White House situation room, Op Center director Chase Williams is given a tongue lashing by every political opponent of the Center. At the end, POTUS shoves Williams out the door and the Center is ordered to be summarily disbanded. Today.

Williams’ entire team is out of a job. And he has to figure out his own future while mourning the loss of life in New York. Once he gets home, Matt Berry, an old friend and now the Deputy Chief of Staff to POTUS, contacts him to meet. Now.

With the full support of POTUS, Berry offers Chase a job. Head up a new covert team. Small. Out of the Defense Logistics Agency. Unlimited cash, supplies, support. Flexible. Forget about endless planning and getting approvals. Just go and get the job done. And this job is to get Salehi. Alive or dead. Just get him. An encrypted text is sent to three specific individuals:

“Black Wasp”

Lance Corporal Jaz Rivette. Sniper and an expert with any type of sidearm or rifle. Logged his first kill as a 10yo when he stopped a store robbery. Lt. Grace Lee. Hand to hand combat instructor at Ft Bragg. Doesn’t carry a gun. All she needs are her martial arts skills and a few knives. Commander Hamilton Breen. With the Navy JAG office. Yeah, he’s a lawyer. Sort of the team’s soul. But he is still a soldier, and a damn good one.  They drop everything to meet in ASAP in DC.

They don’t know Williams. Just that he’s been assigned to lead this team. With intel from every overt and covert agency passed to them, they start tracking Salehi’s movements. The chemical engineer fled to Toronto. Salehi heads to the Caribbean via Hartford, CT. Rumors of Salehi’s whereabouts run rampant. The engineer is found murdered. Apparently by a Jamaican Muslim group. That’s what Williams grabs and Black Wasp heads for a night parachute drop into a crime-ridden corner of Jamaica.

The hunt goes through Jamaica then after a couple flight changes, arrives in Yemen where Salehi meets up with his benefactor who has promised him a ship and a lifetime of cash as a reward for striking at the Great Satan. Black Wasp just has to catch up with him before he disappears to the ocean. Black Wasp is pretty effective when it doesn’t have to check back in with Momma in DC every time a decision is necessary. It's a breathless week after the Intrepid attack.

I thought this was interesting and credible. It could happen. Whether there is something like Black Wasp buried deep within the government is open for debate. Not just on practical grounds. But moral grounds, too. The closer they get to Salehi, the more the bodies pile up. Most are bad guys, but there are what amounts to an execution or two along the way.

Way back when, I read every novel Clancy wrote (really liked Clark and Chavez characters. Wish Hollywood would make Without Remorse into a movie), but I began to tire of the plot lines when there was an attempt to pass the Jack Ryan flame on to Jack, Jr. I read the first couple Op Center books but didn’t return. While I’m not likely to go back to where I left off and work my way forward, I will say that if the Op Center series continues the Black Wasp theme along, I’ll be there. This is just the kind of book Men Reading Books was based on.

ECD