‘Shadow Tyrants’ is one of Clive Cussler’s better suspense thrillers Nico Walker is a convicted bank robber. ‘Cherry’ proves he’s also a must-read author.
Almost 2,000 years ago, an emperor avoided a coup and entrusted nine Scrolls of Knowledge to nine individuals to ensure that none would use the information for nefarious purposes ever again. These Nine Unknown Men’s descendants still maintain the materials, but there are factions inside the group that want to aggressively pursue change for the betterment of mankind and the world.
Juan Cabrillo and his team are pretending to be pirates adrift at sea to infiltrate a vessel they know is hiding deadly nerve gas. What they don’t realize is that the mastermind behind the bioweapon has hidden the materials, and he’s working with others on a bold attack that will do more damage than a mere toxin can.
The Nine Unknown Men uncover betrayal from within, and soon even the survivors of the rebellion don’t know whom they can trust. The crew of the Oregon has to save the world again, but on more than one front and possibly without the high-tech weaponry they regularly use. This mission will test them more than anything they have ever confronted.
Cussler and action-adventure fans will love this latest Oregon Files novel. New characters to the team are most welcome, and the sheer insanity of the story line will keep readers guessing about what’s going on until the last page of the book. Chapter one has the pacing of the climax of other thriller novels, and the pace from that fast start does not let up until the end.
“Shadow Tyrants” is one of the better entries in Cussler’s world.
You won’t hear Nico Walker on book tour soon because he’s serving two more years in prison for bank robbery. But don’t wait to pick up his lacerating new autobiographical novel about the horrors of war and addiction. “Cherry” is a triumph born of gore and suffering that reads like it’s been scratched out with a dirty needle across the tender skin of a man’s forearm.
In 2005 and 2006, Walker served as an Army medic in Iraq, where he was commended for valor and saw many of his buddies blown to pieces. Returning to civilian life depressed and traumatized, he became addicted to heroin, a habit he funded by robbing 10 banks in four months.
In 2013, when Walker was behind bars in the Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Ky., his journey from hero to thief became the subject of a harrowing profile in BuzzFeed. One of many people struck by that story was Matthew Johnson, a publisher at the independent press Tyrant Books. Fascinated by the historical tradition of war vets taking up bank robbery, Johnson sent Walker books and encouraged him to write about his life. Eventually, Walker’s disheveled manuscript ended up at Alfred A. Knopf, the nation’s most prestigious publishing house.
In a gracious and unusually detailed acknowledgment at the end of “Cherry,” Walker credits Tim O’Connell, his editor at Knopf, with transforming those typewritten pages into this tour de force. But when I contacted O’Connell, he claimed he did nothing but edit Walker’s manuscript as usual. “It is the fruit of his hard work and remarkable natural talents,” O’Connell said, “especially his voice, which is unlike any other. Nico simply poured everything he had into it.”
That sounds true to the searing authenticity of this novel, which tries to answer the question, “How do you get to be a scumbag?” But in the process of laying out the road to perdition, Walker demonstrates the depths of his humanity and challenges us to bridge the distance that we imagine separates us from the damned.
We meet the unnamed narrator in 2003 when he’s a listless college student raised by a nice middle-class family. His tone is one of mournful candor with a trace of straight-faced wit. “I sold drugs but it wasn’t like I was bad or anything,” he says. “I wasn’t bothering anybody; I didn’t even eat meat. I had a job at the shoe store. Another mistake I made. No interest whatsoever in shoes. I was marked for failure.”
With the same rueful smirk, he enlists in the Army “because I’d been saying I would.” The inane tests, the screaming sergeants, the empty slogans — none of it impresses him. “You just had to remember it was all make-believe,” he says. “We were pretending to be soldiers. The Army was pretending to be the Army.”
But there’s nothing make-believe about the blood that’s soon gushing across these pages. As an Army medic, he goes on missions that are vaguely explained, often impromptu, frequently disastrous. His fellow soldiers are regularly called upon to brutalize the local people. The Iraqis, for their part, are experts at planting IEDs in the roads. “I was supposed to pretend to be some kind of great healer,” the narrator says, but his medical expertise rarely involves more than scraping up bits of his friends and zipping them in bags. “I was not a hero,” he says.
Of course, we’ve heard these stories before, in fiction and nonfiction by other soldiers. But Walker, 33, brings a raw and casual brutality to the narrative of battle. His rambling collection of chaotic anecdotes involve drugs and porn, acts of cruelty and kindness, unending boredom pierced by spikes of terror. These juxtapositions convey the fundamental disorder of the American mission and its effect on the young people forced to implement it. His language, relentlessly profane but never angry, simmers at the level of morose disappointment, something like Holden Caulfield Goes to War.
But Walker’s prose also echoes Ernest Hemingway’s cadences to powerful effect like this: “By the time it was fall you could tell we were all a little off. In that state none of us could have passed in polite society; those of us who’d been kicking in doors and tearing houses up and shooting people, we were psychotic. And we were ready for it to end. There was nothing interesting about it anymore. There was nothing.”
Ironically, that sense of sliding into the abyss accelerates when the narrator leaves the carnage of Iraq and returns to Ohio. Suicidally depressed, suffering flashbacks, blackouts and chronic insomnia, he grows so addicted that his entire life revolves around dope.
Even as I hyperventilate about this novel, I’m wary of the tendency to romanticize criminals. But it’s that unflappable voice. In these propulsive pages, Walker draws us into the mind of an ordinary young man beset by his own and his country’s demons. His only weapon against disintegration is his own devastating candor.