“Sea of Fire”
Gregory Shepherd
Poplar Press, $24
Patrick Featherstone, a disgraced former Joint Special Operations Command sniper, is called back to service for an off-the-books assignment that will clear his record: Featherstone’s former partner, Tyler Kang, the man whose testimony at a court of inquiry ended his career, has defected to North Korea with top secret information on South Korean and American weapon systems. Featherstone is to find Kang and “neutralize” him. Accepting the mission will violate the oath of non-violence that is part of Featherstone’s preparations for becoming a Buddhist monk, but the North Koreans have kidnapped the woman he broke up with when he decided to become a monk. Next stop, Pyongyang!
Welcome to Gregory Shepherd’s fast and furious contemporary thriller, “Sea of Fire.”
Shepherd paces his story with the finesse of a veteran author and creates a convincing vision of contemporary North Korea as a place where nothing is as it seems. For instance, is Kang the traitor he appears to be? Is he a double agent whose “defection” was set up to feed the North Koreans fake information? Or did Kang use his assignment as a “double agent” to take accurate information north?
Other characters include a shallow U.S. president who doesn’t seem intended to represent any American president of the current century, a tough-as-nails U.S. Army general who anticipates the worst when the president orders American forces in South Korea transferred to the Middle East, a cosmopolitan North Korean computer expert named Choy Jung-hee, and a pair of ruthless men one short step below Kim Jong Un — Comrade Moon and Korean People’s Army General O Jun-suh.
Shepherd’s description of life in the north sounds accurate — or, at the least, in line with what defectors have described. The conspiracies of the North Korean power brokers and the struggles of the “little people” ring true throughout. The prisons and research labs sound like hell on earth.
How much power does Kim Jong Un personally wield on his own? Is there really anyone at the top levels of the North Korean government who has the power to eliminate him? After 66 years of unchallenged Communist/Kim Dynasty rule in North Korea, is there an anti-Communist/anti-Kim Dynasty underground still biding its time and waiting for the chance to strike?
Whatever the real-life answers to those questions may be, “Sea of Fire” is a tense and tautly written thriller in which the characters are just as interesting as the complicated mechanics of the plot. Readers will care which ones survive.
A sequel, “Rings of Fire,” is on the way.
