Dragon Strike »

The deafening roar of Chinese Air Force SC 27 Flankers shreds the tranquility of the gathering dawn. Within minutes burning phosphorus, shrapnel, and delayed action mines have ripped apart the main naval base at Cam Ranh Bay. Operation Dragonstrike has begun.. "By the end of the twentieth century, China had grown from one of the most impoverished, technologically destitute nations of the world to a regional superpower with global ambitions - ambitions that some in the Chinese government will stop at nothing to achieve.. "When a desperate China, weakened by the economic turmoil in Asia, seizes the oil-rich South China Sea, it ignites a furious conflict with Vietnamese and Taiwanese forces. As U.S. and British task forces arrive to impose order, the Chinese strike first, sinking U.S. warships and killing hundreds. Suddenly, Americans find themselves fighting a desperate battle on, above, and beneath the ocean, naval officers frantically try to out-maneuver the Chinese Navy, and SEAL teams fight a brutal action against elite Chinese Marine commandos. Diplomacy proves useless as the conflagration in the South China Sea threatens to engulf the entire world.

Publishers Weekly

Long on political detail and short on well-drawn characters, this debut thriller from a pair of British foreign correspondents posits a chilling nuclear standoff with China that remains compelling despite the lack of a conventional cast of characters. Conflict is sparked when the Chinese begin a series of preemptive strikes against the Vietnamese in the South China Sea, intent on taking several small islands to gain control of critical trade routes in the resource-rich region. At first the battle seems like a controllable local incident. But when the Chinese sink an American vessel attempting to rescue U.S. workers stranded on one of the islands as de facto political prisoners, tension escalates exponentially, driven by a series of border skirmishes between the Vietnamese and Chinese and an underground nuclear test conducted by Japan in response to the Chinese aggression. Rather than creating the usual cast of high-placed political characters to carry the story, the authors have chosen to make the representatives of the nations themselves the characters, via a relentless series of dispatches documenting in detail the various moves of China, America, Britain, France, India, Vietnam, Korea and Japan as nuclear war becomes imminent. Their device is a series of dense, detail-riddled reports that will appeal to CNN junkies. It's a tribute to both the power and plausibility of the plot that this "narrative" remains riveting despite the difficulties inherent in plowing through wire service-like prose, and this title seems likely to attract attention, especially in political circles. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.