Chopper Ops (Chopper Ops Series #1) » (Abridged)

At 0230 hours, ArcLight 4, the most technically advanced armed cargo plane ever created, embarks on a midnight Scud hunt from an isolated American base in the Saudi desert. Then the ArcLight 4 vanishes off the face of the earth. For nine years, the fate of the Allied craft—its elite crew of U.S. Army Green Berets, Air Force top brass, and Defense Intelligence Agents—has remained a mystery. Until now. Fifty miles northeast of Baghdad, hidden behind the impenetrable walls of a guarded fortress is the key to one man's plan for world domination: the AC-130 ArcLight gunship. There's only one team in the world fearless enough to retrieve it—a special-forces squadron of America's bravest: trained, armed, and equipped for dead-on attack and assault. Their first chance at the ArcLight is their only chance, and the countdown to take-over has begun. Delivering high-pitch military action and hard-hitting techno suspense, CHOPPER OPS is the thrilling new series of the world's superpowers at war.

Publishers Weekly

Rookie CIA Agent Gene Smitz has been assigned the mission of recovering the Arc Light 4 (a spy plane that supposedly went down in Saudi Arabia almost a decade before) and freeing its original crew of 13, who are believed to still be held hostage in a fortress outside of Baghdad. After an intensive training session on a secret island in the Florida Keys, Smitz's ad hoc interservice military unit sets out for combat in the Middle East, armed in their high-tech choppers. The troops fight to take down the fortress of a reclusive, 400-pound billionaire named Zim, who now has the spy plane, but just when their tour of duty seems imminently victorious, something goes disastrously wrong. Maloney's (author of the Wingman series) technical descriptions of aircraft and weaponry and fluent militaristic terminology are authentic, but they are not enough to compensate for his underdeveloped characters, who are clearly secondary to the action. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.