When a team of Russian sleeper agents leftover from the
Cold War mistakenly takes over an Alaskan radar station
during a realistic strategic drill, Russia attempts to cover
up its agents' mistake by landing Spetznaz troops on the island.
U.S. Marines also land and the battle is joined at the top of
the world. Engineer Frank Trask and a small group of the island's
survivors, one of whom is a traitor, battle the Russian
agents and the brutal arctic weather to survive.
COBRA DANE centers around an actual sophisticated radar located on the island of Shemya at the
tip of the Aleutians. See the photo at the bottom of the page. The COBRA DANE
radar tracks space objects,which could be satellites, spent boosters,
or nuclear armed Russian ICBMs headed for the United States. The radar
also tracks missile test shots that the Russians have fired toward
the Kamchatka Peninsula over the years.
The premise of COBRA DANE is tantalizing. Suppose the Russians had
teams of sleeper agents at our radar early warning sites to take
over the site, then send messages back to NORAD that a Russian ICBM
attack was not coming when actually an attack was on the way.
The confusion on the part of NORAD whether an ICBM attack was
real would make the President hesitate to order a retaliatory strike.
In that event, the U.S. would have to absorb the first strike possibly
losing the ability to retaliate at all.
When the Cold War came to an end, the possibility of a Russian attack
became remote. Then suppose a realistic drill, where the people manning the
COBRA DANE radar did not know it was a drill, triggered a takeover of the
radar site by Russian sleeper agents leftover from the Cold War.
Since the novel was published civilian personnel have taken over the
radar. The author has sent some copies of COBRA DANE up to the island's
personnel and has autographed a cover for inclusion in a display of the
radar's memorabilia.
John Campbell '69 E. E. is a self-taught writer.
He never took a course in fiction writing,
nor did writing assignments stimulate him much.
"I always was interested in writing, but subjects like
'What I did during my summer vacation' turned me off in
school", he says. At Villanova, Campbell majored in
electrical engineering. During daily business hours,
he's a satellite ground technical engineer at Martin Marietta
Corp. in King of Prussia, Pa. In his leisure time,
the Broomall resident orbits another kind of project:
writing techno-thrillers.
In his latest novel, Cobra Dane, the
stakes and his imagination run high.
World War III and the future of Western civilization hang
in the balance when renegade Russian moles known as SVR agents
seize a military base in Alaska. They disable America's most
sophisticated nuclear early warning system (the Cobra Dane radar
that Campbell depicts is genuine). The agents slaughter all
all but four of the facility's personnel. The survivors, three
men and a woman, not entirely unscathed, are trapped and
vulnerable on a remote island. They are the nation's
last defense,
pitted against the wrath of the key Russian agent and
the icy punishment of nature.
Between the covers of Cobra Dane,
Campbell sets loose much more: the CIA, U.S. counterintelligence
agents, renegade Russian moles, SVR agents
(from the elite Russian Foreign Intelligence Service,
formerly known as the KGB), NORAD, the
military-and Frank Trask. The novel's main character,
Trask is a civil service engineer
who helps maintain the radar.
"Why not an engineer?" says Campbell, "doctors and
lawyers are heroes in novels." Why not indeed? The novel's
terrain, after
all, as the author intended, is ripe territory
for engineers. And as a professional who appreciates
sophisticated technology and literally all of its
attendant applications, Campbell proves appreciably
well that engineering expertise can work as a writer's tool.
Between page 1 and the back cover, this action-packed
spellbinder is a read well-worth the suspension of disbelief.
Compared with fiction of other genres, techno-thrillers
probably depend more upon
a reader's ability to plunge headlong into imaginary worlds.
The good, the bad and the ugly-minded are, of course, the
meat of this genre. But his book is also a deftly crafted
techno,mystery/puzzle, if you will a not-so classic game
of who's who.
The search for the illusive Russian agent
is a riddle alive throughout and perhaps
even beyond the last page. "His code name was Vulcher,
Campbell writes, introducing the agent in the prologue.
Is Vulcher really who he says he is? Is Vulcher who the reader
believes he is? Or do the facts leading to Vulcher's
identity create a unity of impression that is deliberately
misleading?
Is there more to Cobra Dane than meets the eye in the
last chapter? It is possible that the luck of the
survivors is not their final destiny. Those few ends
left untied raise a couple of questions. Maybe the end
of the action is only a pause; maybe the author has in
mind a sequel? Only John Campbell
knows for sure.
His first book, Raid on Truman, another techno-thriller,
published in hardback in
1991 and in paperback in 1992, is about the takeover
of a fictional nuclear aircraft carrier called the USS
Truman. According to Campbell, President Bill Clinton
recently choose the USS Truman as the name for a newly
commissioned nuclear aircraft carrier. In addition to
publishing the two novels, the alumnus has recently signed
a contract for a third book and has caught the eye of a
publisher for idea No. 4.
And perhaps there's another sequel underway in the
Campbell family, at least
in the field of engineering: Campbell's daughter, Christine,
is a senior electrical engineering major at Villanova.