Dan Steele sequel better than the original
John Morse’s writing has matured for his second special ops tale
Dan Steele, a former SEAL lieutenant, now recovered from grievous injuries suffered from an underwater explosion, still wants to track down the terrorist who killed his wife and two young sons in an attack on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. That’s on hold for now as he takes on a new mission with a small team of highly trained special operators in “Chokepoint,” John P. Morse’s second Steele novel.
A rogue Russian general is holding a major shipping lane hostage (the chokepoint at the mouth of the Red Sea) to threats of damage and sinking — and has already sent a massive cargo ship to the bottom for refusing to pay his toll. Steele has to call on unfamiliar components of the Navy and cutting-edge science to get close enough to the Russian to bring his version of piracy and extortion to a stop.
This Russian bear is just that — a bad dude with a bad attitude, a 6-foot-8, 300-pound martial arts expert with a sadistic streak. He’s got his own loyal team of trained operators with him and counts on enough friends (paid or otherwise) to wiggle out of trouble with the Russian military and political leaders every time he runs afoul. His loyalty to his men isn’t as reciprocal as they think it is, he has unusual ways of “enhancing morale” (staging cage fights between them?), and he has a fail-safe escape plan they’re unaware of. He’s a formidable match for
Steele, his team and the wideranging military and intelligence assets supporting him.
Steele’s legal/official status as the general’s adversary is deliberately murky. He reports to a recently retired, back-in-the-game admiral in a bunker under the Washington Navy Yard; he has been active-duty Navy and a consultant, and now is an independent (“No W-2”) contractor. His associates are from various federal agencies; the admiral reports directly to the national security adviser. The organization is referred to as a “cell,” apparently gets assigned difficult tasks after more conventional units pass on them, and has a certain deniability
built in. This construct allows for a very short turning radius for decision making and fosters initiative. It doesn’t, however, give Steele or his team members a lot of cover if things go wrong.
“Chokepoint” moves fast, weaves in multiple plot lines and spans a big chunk of the globe. We learn something from the background of each critical event. Author Morse’s military experience, augmented by research and imagination, helps Steele consistently get to innovative but plausible solutions (in the Navy, Morse served stints in Hampton Roads, including as executive officer aboard the Spruance and as executive officer and commanding officer aboard the Iowa). Steele is tormented by the memory of his dead wife and sons but is able to compartmentalize it through most of the story. As a medically retired action hero, he presents an irresistible point of comparison with author David Poyer’s Dan Lenson (who should be retired medically or otherwise after the 30-plus years since his introduction as a lieutenant in 1988) and even Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, a medically retired Marine captain when his adventures began in 1984.
As a novel, “Chokepoint” is more refined, better plotted and better edited than “Half Staff” (2018) and reflects Morse’s learning and growth as a writer. There is noticeable improvement, though not perfection, in a couple areas; a love interest, introduced late in the story, comes across as clumsy and undermines the aura of professionalism the author has established for the woman. Readers, like potential employers, can probably guess an individual’s generation by his cultural references. If Morse intends to produce a series of Dan Steele novels, it probably shouldn’t be so easy to guess whom he voted for. Naval readers will catch the oblique criticism of the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt’s efforts to reform the Navy’s personnel practices or former Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr.’s 600ship Navy. Finally, the one event that strains credulity is the immediate reaction of Steele’s team when they’re unexpectedly confronted by a Russian killer at their target site. The reader is expecting anything other than what they do.
Raymond Leach is a retired Marine in Virginia Beach.