Book Review – Tom Clancy’s “Net Force”

Last night I finished reading Net Force, the first in a series of books created by military and political thriller author Tom Clancy.  Although this story concept was created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik, the same creators of the Op-Center series of novels, the book was actually written by Steve Perry.

First published in 1999, Net Force is set ten years later in 2010 and focuses on a world dominated by supercomputers.  To help investigate international computer crimes, Congress authorized the creation of Net Force, a branch of the FBI.

Net Force begins with the assassination of Steve Day, commander of Net Force.  Day had just finished having dinner in the city when his armored limousine is attacked and gunned down by a team of gunmen.  It’s not a complete victory for the assassins though as Day is able to shoot and kill one of his attackers.  By the time that the police arrive, the gunmen are long gone, complete with their dead companion.

Because of the assassination of his boss, Deputy Commander Alexander Michaels is quickly promoted to commander of Net Force.  His first assignment is to bring Steve Day’s killers to justice.  His team members include Assistant Deputy Commander Antonella “Toni” Fiorella and computer programmer Jay Gridley.

The assassination used a combination of small bombs and a tremendous amount of firepower.  The evidence pointed to a sloppy killing and not a skilled assassin.  The gunmen were there to kill Steve Day along with his security officers.

One of the top suspects is Ray Genaloni, head of New York Five Families mafia.  There’s no hard evidence against him, but Steve Day was involved with arresting and prosecuting some of Genaloni’s criminal associates.  Steve Day’s assassination could have been carried out as a final act of revenge by the mafia.  There’s not enough evidence to prosecute Genaloni, but it’s a direction to look.

In reality, the assassination was ordered by Vladimir Plakhanov, a Chechen computer programmer who wants to buy countries and become even more powerful.  Plakanov had already achieved a small fortune by using his computer skills to rob others and gain illegal wealth.  The first step in his plan for domination was to send a small hit team to the U.S. to assassinate the head of the Net Force.  The next step involves further complicating the relationship between Net Force and Ray Genaloni.

For the next step of his plan, Plakhanov has his hit team disguise themselves as FBI agents, complete with real identities stolen from dead agents, and license plates taken from the police motor pool, and kidnap one of Genaloni’s top associates, Luigi Sampson.  The fake FBI team makes their actions public so that Genaloni would receive all of the “correct” information.  Sampson is quickly killed, but as far as Genaloni knows, the FBI is holding him captive even though requests for information keep coming back negative.

Meanwhile, Net Force receives information that a data center in the Ukraine is going to be attacked by terrorists.  Colonel John Howard, leader of the Net Force Strike Team, flies out to the Ukraine along with his team of commandos.  They successfully strike the terrorists’ headquarters before they launch their surprise attack.  Most of the terrorists are killed, but a few are captured and taken prisoner.  Colonel Howard’s Strike Team doesn’t receive any casualties during the raid.

To retaliate for the kidnapping of Luigi Sampson, Ray Genaloni hires Mora Sullivan, a female assassin known as the Selkie, to kill Net Force Commander Alex Michaels.  Mora is near the end of her career as an assassin, and she’s planning on retiring after this last assignment.  She plans on erasing all of her old identities and then moving to another country to live off her millions of dollars.

One of Mora’s skills is the ability to change her identity and conceal her true secrets.  She disguises herself as an elderly woman, moves to a home close to Alex Michaels’s, and beings stalking and spying on the FBI commander.  When the strike comes it will be at her choosing after researching her target and determining the most opportune time.  Although the FBI has a security team constantly on watch around Michaels, they aren’t a concern for Mora.  Her disguises are simply too good.  She easily fools them and learns more about her target.

While the Net Force team is investigating the assassination of Steve Day, we learn more about some of the team members.  Commander Alex Michaels is a recently divorced father who has a young daughter and ex-wife living halfway across the country.  His relationship with his daughter continually grows more strained as he only talks to her through phone calls.  Toni Fiorella has the hots for her boss and wants a relationship with him, but he doesn’t see her advances.  Instead, Toni ends up briefly being involved with an FBI trainee named Rusty until he’s killed at the end of the book.

Just when everything seems calm in the world of Net Force, suddenly there’s another terrorist attack.  This one is a little bit different.  In the country of India, somebody had hacked into the computer systems that control the traffic intersections throughout the country.  The end result consists of thousands of traffic accidents and hundreds and hundreds of people killed by them.  It’s chaos.  Not only do the traffic problems kill many innocent people, but it also puts the country’s cities in gridlock, stopping the flow of commerce from food to merchandise to fuel.

This was another attack orchestrated by Vladimir Plakhanov.

Plakhanov is still raising money for his ultimate goal of purchasing several countries.  He figures that you can only steal so much money in the Internet without attracting too much attention.  The rest of the funding has to come through other sources.  It turns out that Plakhanov’s name is fairly well known in the computer world.  He designed the terror attack against the computer system so that the high-ranking people in India would pay top-dollar for his repair services.  He engineered the attack and would be the only person who could guarantee that it would not happen again.

In Washington, D.C., Mora Sullivan had disguised herself as Phyllis Markham, an elderly lady who lives in the same neighborhood as Alex Michaels.  Her disguise even includes a small but well-trained dog.  She has been using her disguise to penetrate Michaels’s security team, and the time has finally come for her to strike.

Mora hides her small dog outside of Michaels’s house.  She then rings the doorbell and tells Alex that her dog got loose and ran into his backyard.  He had seen the dog before along with Ms. Markham, so Alex allows her into his home to access the backyard.  Mora’s walking stick is really a martial arts weapon.  Just as she’s about to swing a fatal blow, her small dog barks at something.  Alex turns when he hears the dog, and he spots Mora and her attack.  She misses and he tries to fire back with his taser, but he also misses.  Mora barely escapes out of Alex’s house before he can get a closer look at her disguise.

The Net Force team is shaken by the assassination attempt, but fortunately Alex Michaels is still alive and well.  His security team is increased and now it’s virtually impossible for anybody to attack him at his home.  Mora is well aware of this, but she’s not about to give up yet.  The increased security was just the kind of challenge she desired.

In New York City, one of Genaloni’s associates informs him of the assassination attempt against Net Force Commander Michaels.  He’s outraged that not only did the attack fail, but the assassin is also a woman.  The Selkie had altered her voice over the telephone and Genaloni had always thought that his secret weapon was a male.  Nonetheless, she failed in her mission.  He orders his associates to find her.  Genaloni intends on killing her along with her target, eliminating all of the loose ends.

Mora discovers that she’s being investigated by Genaloni, so she decides to use her skills to eliminate him.  Attacking Genaloni directly is suicidal as he’s always surrounded by heavily armed guards.  After all, he is a high-ranking person in the mafia.  But Genaloni does have a secret mistress, and that’s how Mora attacks.  She forces her way into the home of the mistress and uses the woman to lure Genaloni inside of the house.  She then uses a silenced pistol to kill both Genaloni and the mistress.  Mora also kills one of Genaloni’s guards and makes a clean getaway.

The key to attacking Commander Michaels would be to strike him in a place where he would feel relaxed and secure.  That wouldn’t be his house but rather at Net Force itself.

Mora kills a low-level worker at Net Force, disguises herself as the dead worker, and then uses her identity to gain access to the secure compound.  She goes to the gym and holds Toni at gunpoint, holding her as bait.  Mora then places an urgent call to Alex Michaels and informs him that Toni was injured in the gym and paramedics were on the way.  Naturally, Michaels rushes to the gym, but instead of seeing an injured co-worker he’s looking down the barrel of a gun, a gun made from ceramic and designed to get through basic security checkpoints.

Rusty, Toni’s brief lover, enters the gym and distracts Mora.  This sparks a fight and Rusty is shot and killed, Alex is shot in the leg, and Toni is stabbed on her arm.  Mora is ultimately shot and killed when Alex acquires her pistol.

Meanwhile, Jay Gridley has been working in cyberspace (known as the “virtual world”) and investigating suspicious behavior.  Using the help of Colonel Howard’s teenage son, they’re able to identify Vladimir Plakhanov and pinpoint him to the mastermind behind the terror attacks.  More investigation quickly confirms him as being their number-one suspect.

Colonel Howard’s Net Force Strike Team infiltrates Chechnya and captures Vladimir Plekanov.  The Chechen security forces briefly interfere with the operation, but the strike team is able to get away.

Net Force ends with Vladimir Plekanov in the FBI’s custody in Washington, D.C.

So is Net Force any good?

While the concept behind Net Force is certainly interesting, the actual story here mostly fails.

Net Force is basically a story about assassinations, some terrorism, and a greedy person who wants to start gaining control of Eastern Europe countries.  The story is billed as cyberpunk and very technical, but those aspects of the story are few and far between.

The technical aspects of Net Force are dumbed down for the general audience.  Instead of talking about hacking, programming, or even the Internet as a whole, the whole computer world of Net Force is simply written as the “virtual world.”  This virtual world is represented through lifelike visuals like in The Matrix.  Only this is not The Matrix.  It’s far from it.  But that’s generally how the story is written when it comes to the Internet.  In this book you’ll be reading about people who use virtual reality gear as everyday computer equipment, and then they walk, drive and socialize in the virtual world.  The character Jay Gridley is particularly fond of driving a Dodge Viper in the virtual world while other characters favor motorcycles or even a Corvette.

Granted, Net Force was published back in 1999 just as Internet access was starting to become mainstream.  When reading this story in 2013, it’s easy to see just how far off the writer was when visualizing technology set only ten years down the road.  Sadly, in the end, the technical aspects of Net Force ruin what was otherwise a mediocre story.

In the end, Net Force is a mess of poor technology and everyday verbiage (Just what in the hell kind of words and terms were those teenagers using?  Holy cow.  That was incredibly annoying!), fairly lame characters, and rushed scenarios.  Considering the material and situations in this book, Net Force should have been at least double its current length.

Net Force is the first of ten books in this series.  As you can probably guess, I was very disappointed in this book.  Am I going to read more from this series any time soon?  Not likely.