It is relatively easy to understand why a former president whose
daughter is kidnapped by terrorists might want to organize his own unauthorized
paramilitary force to rescue her. But try explaining it to the current
president.
اضافة اعلان
“Director Blair, he can’t be conducting military operations on his own,”
President Pamela Barnes whines ineffectually to her FBI director in “The
President’s Daughter,” the second swaggering political thriller produced by the
unlikely writing team of James Patterson and Bill Clinton. “You’ve got to send
agents there and stop him.”
But “Director Blair” can no more stop the inexorable force that is
former president Matthew Keating — a hard-living, no-guffex-Navy SEAL — than
Keating’s friends can resist his entreaties for help in his foolhardy plan.
“You got it,” responds Trask Floyd, an old military friend turned
“wealthy actor and movie director,” when Keating asks for his support. “If I’m
not going to be riding shotgun with you on wherever you’re going, I’ll still be
behind you.”
Patterson is the author who has launched a thousand bestsellers, with an
army of co-writers. Clinton is the ex-president whose other works include the
memoir “My Life.” Their first co-written novel, “The President Is Missing,”
envisioned a scenario in which the American president, facing a deadly
cyberterrorist attack that threatens to disconnect the entire United States
from the internet, slips incognito into a baseball stadium and tries to solve
the problem by himself.
What to do for an encore?
Fans of the first book will be disappointed that its main character,
President Jonathan Lincoln
Duncan, doesn’t exist in this follow-up’s universe.
Unlike, say, the cinematic “Taken” trilogy, in which a raddled ex-green beret
and CIA officer played by Liam Neeson is continually called on to re-rescue his
serially kidnapped daughter, “The President’s Daughter” has nothing to do with
“The President Is Missing.” It has a new president, who has a new daughter and
a new problem.
But like its predecessor, this novel offers tantalizing clues into the
unconscious of Clinton, now 74. As before, the hero of this book becomes
president not via Yale Law School and Oxford University, but through the messy
man-of-the-people crucible of military service. As before, there is a disagreeable
female politician — in this case, President Barnes, Keating’s erstwhile vice
president, who treacherously ran against him.
“How do you feel about being the only president in American history to
lose reelection to his vice president?” a reporter asks Keating. It’s a rude
question, but then again, as one character observes, “most DC journalists are
27 years old, no real experience except for reporting on political campaigns,
and they literally know nothing.”
Written in the breathless present tense, with typical Pattersonian
staccato exposition expressed in short paragraph bursts (“I checked my watch.
It was time”), the book opens when Keating is still president, presiding over a
botched assassination attempt on the terrorist Asim Al-Asheed. Cut to several
years later: Barnes is president, sniping and scheming in Washington, while
Keating is irascibly adjusting to civilian life in rural New Hampshire.
Everything is thrown into disarray when Keating’s daughter, Mel, is
seized by terrorists while on a hike with Tim, her blameless boyfriend. Poor
Tim. No sooner has he pumped himself up to fight off the kidnappers — “OK,
let’s do this thing,” he thinks to himself — than he dies.
The perpetrator is Asheed, who is a scary guy, but an important feature
of this sort of book is a hostage who refuses to show fear.
Let us stipulate that we are not reading this book to gain valuable
insights into the inner workings of US foreign policy. No, we are reading for
as many references to military hardware as possible, a formidable alphanumeric
arsenal: the UH-60s, the AK-47s, the 7.62 mm Russian-made Tokarevs, the
Chinese-made QSZ-92 9 mm’s, the M4 assault rifles with TAWS thermal sights. You
get the picture.
The terrorists seem hired from central casting, as does Jiang Lijun, a
Chinese spy whose job is to represent Bond-movie stereotypes about
inscrutability and arrogance. “These peasants didn’t get the message that it
was time to wander back to their flea-infested hovels,” he thinks at a party in
Tripoli, smiling politely at his Libyan guests. There’s also Keating’s force,
comprising the requisite array of deadly commandos from various elite agencies
who treat the ex-president as one of their own.
It goes without saying that nothing in this silly but highly
entertaining book will end well for the terrorists, or the Chinese, or
Pamela Barnes and her creepy husband, Richard. It’s unclear whether, the rescue
mission notwithstanding, it will even end well for America. The novel sends up
a flare of distress.
“The real people are still there, with their problems and potential,
hopes and dreams,” says Keating’s wife, a brilliant archaeologist and astute
political blackmailer whose “tanned skin is flawless.”
“It’s just hard for them to make good decisions when their brains are
filled, and their spirits broken, with so much crap.”
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