Showing posts with label Cybernarc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cybernarc. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Cybernarc #6: End Game


Cybernarc #6: End Game, by Robert Cain
April, 1993  Harper Books

The Cybernarc series wraps up with a sixth installment that was clearly written as the series finale; William “Robert Cain” Keith doesn’t leave readers hanging with an unresolved cliffhanger, the title being a firm indication that we are truly reading the “end” of the series. And I’m happy to report that the bantering, action movie-esque spirit of the earliest volumes has sort of returned – if greatly minimized from, say, the first volume – though still we have to endure a lot of military acronyms and coke-industry info-dumping. 

Indeed, I get the suspicion Keith was pretty worn out at this point. End Game runs to an unwieldy 230 pages of small, dense print, and I suspect our author was struggling to fill the pages. Thus we get a lot of arbitrary detail on one-off cocaine industry characters, stuff on how cocaine is manufactured, all sorts of otherwise-mundane stuff that is greatly expanded upon for no other seeming reason than to hit the word count. The writing’s as good as ever, but you can’t help but feel that the novel would be greatly improved if it was a little leaner. Another change this time is that the plot is slightly more developed; the previous couple volumes have just been protracted action scenes, some of them taking up a full third of the narrative or more. This template is shaken up a little this time, but unfortunately the potential of the new direction isn’t fully exploited. 

I’m not sure how long it is after the previous volume; seems to be a few months. But we know at least that it’s been a little over one year since the first installment. Now Rod, the titular Cybernarc (apparently a name only used by his druglord enemies – and they all say “cybernarco” because they speak Spanish), has gone full HAL 2000 and has gained what appears to be a fully formed consciousness, with emotions and whatnot. What most troubles his government creators is his new tendency to ignore orders and make on-the-spot decisions based off his own conclusions. We see this in effect straight away, as End Game opens with Rod solo in a Peruvian jungle, tracking some drug-dealing forces. This is his first time out without his human counterpart, Chris Drake, and his mission is solely reconaissance. But Rod figures that he would do more good by destroying this pipeline, and thus goes into action, blowing stuff apart and running amok in the jungle in his Combat Mod body. 

An interesting thing about this series is that Keith writes so much of it from Rod’s point of view that you can’t help but think of him as human. But Keith’s strength is that he’ll have Rod do crazy, inhuman things, like operating on himself when he’s damaged, or accessing internal data banks. Even here though Keith relays it all in humanistic perspectives. In fact, Rod is really the main star of the book, with Drake relegated to mostly supporting status; I still like the publisher’s original request for the series, of a “crazy ‘Nam vet” building a robot to take on the drug barons, but I have to say Keith did a great job of taking the series in a more mature direction. I mean honestly that’s still the gist of the series – it’s about a friggin’ android that has been created by the US government, at the cost of millions of dollars, to combat the drug menance – yet Keith somehow has elevated it above its pulpy and goofy premise to something almost believable. 

Anyway, Rod dwells on his motive in life – to kill drug barons – and concludes, “I am Death.” Back on the mobile HQ, project boss Weston gives Rod the go-ahead for this Peruvian attack, but really it’s just so the robot won’t go nuts. Per resident hotstuff scientist babe Heather McDaniels, Rod could have some sort of mental breakdown, thus he must be treated a little delicately. Oh and meanwhile Drake and Heather are now fully an item, and indeed Drake drops the tidbit late in the novel that he intends to marry Heather and retire from the drugfighting game; yet more proof that this one was written as the series finale. As for the Drake-Heather relationship, it’s pretty much entirely happened off-page. Curious too that, while Drake himself has moved on from the murder of his wife and daughter, which happened in the first volume, Rod himself hasn’t; due to the PARET mind-symbiosis deal the two shared in that first book, shortly after Drake’s family was killed, Rod was imbued with Drake’s anger and desire for revenge. And it has now become a self-fulfilling thing, as Rod realizes that he not only was programmed to kill drugger scum, but that he now basically “lives” for it. 

Keith also resolves a longstanding series subplot with the apperance of Roberto Sandoval, drugger baron who appeared in the first book and who is one of the few survivors to have seen Cybernarc. Sandoval is about to meet with all the other major coke dealers of South America; he’s aware, due to his inside contacts, of Operation Takedown, a last-ditch CIA plan to wipe out the druggers at this meeting. Rod and Drake find this out when the two go to Bogota to round up a minor drug-world figure named Cardona. But as ever Rod shows independent thinking, and ends up blowing Cardona’s face off. This leads to an unexpected plot development: having learned of the big drug meeting, Rod and Drake will crash it…only Rod’s face will be changed to that of Cardona’s, and he will impersonate the man, with Drake acting as his American bodyguard. A further unexpected development ensues as the two arrive in the desolate Colombian jungle location of the meet – and Rod as Cardona runs into Maria, sexy fiance of Cardona. 

Neither of them were even aware of Maria, thus Rod must again fumble through the interraction. We learn here that Rod, in his Civilian Mod form, has the exact body of a human male, but the naughty parts aren’t, uh, operable, thus when Maria starts squeezing on his junk she doesn’t get the reaction she expects. Luckily a fully-clothed Rod is able to explain it away as being keyed up about the meeting – but this is that missed opportunity stuff I mentioned earlier. There was a lot of room here for some fun, with Maria trying to figure out what’s happened to her Latin lover, but she disappears for the majority of the narrative, and instead we have an overlong sequence where Rod sits in with the meeting of drug lords and they talk and talk. And we get inordinate backgrounds on many of them, and how their businesses run. Again, stuff that’s clearly there so as to fill pages. 

A quickly dashed-off subplot has it that Maria was secretly planning with Cardona to kill her own father, another drug baron who happens to be at this meeting. Rod, once he’s deduced the girl’s plot, goes about it in an odd way – he approaches Maria’s dad and tells him that his daughter plans to kill her! Something the kingpin already knows, and now he realizes that “Cardona” is someone he can trust. Again, not that anything comes out of this subplot: instead, we get into an extended action scene, as Rod, indulging in the “aggressively macho” temper of your average Latin drug lord, starts up a fight at the big meeting that culminates in a massive shootout. Here characters who were just introduced – at much page count – are casually blown away. And also Rod’s robot nature is revealed, as he takes several bullets despite his inhuman jumping around and accurate shooting; one of the shots shears off the skin of his face, so that the black metal beneath can be seen. But the robot’s CPU is knocked offline so that he appears “dead,” and Sandoval – who already suspected “Cardona” of being an imposter – assumes that it was really just a man after all, and not the cybernarc. 

Drake meanwhile is cut off from Rod and must figure out what to do. An interesting thing about Cybernarc is that Drake, who as a badass SEAL with a score to settle with the drugger scum, would be the main protagonist of any other men’s adventure series, but here he’s so out of Rod’s league that he comes off as a hapless sidekick at times. Eventually the two meet up, where Drake has to do high-tech surgery on Rod; more superb writing from Keith, as he again reminds us that Rod is not human, despite looking, acting, and thinking like one – he directs Drake on the surgery while it’s happening, even when Rod’s head is excised from his Civilian Mod body to be grafted onto his Combat Mod one. This leads us to the finale, capably depicted on the cover, with the two again bucking orders and taking the fight directly to the druggers. As Rod argues, there’s no better time than now to wipe them all out, given that they’ve so conveniently gathered here. 

Keith also excels at action scenes, but at times they tend to go on a bit. A neat quirk this time is that Rod wields an XM-214, a minigun which he uses to blast countless drug soldiers into bloody pieces. The gore is slightly toned down from earliest volumes, however, save for a crazy part where Rod, still in his Civilian body, spins like a top and uses his razor-sharp fingers to slice and dice a group of soldiers. Maria witnesses this and runs away, certain that “Cardona” is not human; she takes the info to Sandoval and another major baron, and the two realize that Cybernarc is here. This leads to a “hunted chasing the hunter” scenario where they arm themselves with LAW rocket launchers, determined to wipe out the robot that is coming for them. 

It’s here in this major action piece that Drake informs Rod he’s “too old” for this sort of thing, and plans to retire and marry Heather. Rod seems to take the info well, but as mentioned there is an air of finality to the entire book. It’s clear that Rod has gone too far rogue from his programming and, were he to return to Weston and his controllers, he would be deprogrammed or have some major changes to his CPU. The finale plays out in a well-done sequence in which Rod, alone, goes after Sandoval and the rest, blitzing them to pieces. The final confrontation is suitably apocalyptic, with Rod calling in an air strike on his exact location and strangling Sandoval as the bombs come down. In the aftermath it seems that the robot has “died” with the baron; Drake is told nothing at all is left of Rod in the destruction. 

But the book isn’t over yet; we’re treated to an almost humorously-rushed conclusion, in which it’s a few months later and Drake and Heather have just returned from their honeymoon. And of course they’re talking about Rod. Drake still wonders if he survived, but Heather’s like, “It’s time to move on.” But there are all those mysterious drug-world deaths Drake has read about in the papers…then the doorbell rings, and Drake answers it, and it’s none other than Rod at the door! This is the end of the book as well as the series. As stated it seems clear Keith knew this would be the final volume, but of course the setup exists for future installments, with a fully-rogue and independent Rod taking on the drug barons on his own. Actually now that I think of it, the series ends with the setup Keith was supposedly originally given: Drake’s not a “’Nam vet,” but he does now have his own drug-fighting robot, and plus he’s married to the scientist who created the damn thing. 

Well anyway, I enjoyed Cybernarc, and I’m always happy when a final volume of a series gives a fitting conclusion, which End Game certainly does. Overall this was a fun series, with the caveat that the first couple installments were better, while the last couple got more into humorless “military fiction” and somewhat lost the action movie-esque banter between Drake and Rod. But Keith did a great job with the series, investing it with a lot more thought and care than you’d expect.

Monday, November 11, 2019

Cybernarc #5: Shark Bait


Cybernarc #5: Shark Bait, by Robert Cain
December, 1992  Harper Books

The penultimate volume of Cybernarc seems to pick up on the final scene of the previous volume – namely, Rod the titular Cybernarc watching as his human partner Chris Drake and his girlfriend Heather McDaniels have sex on the beach (literally, not the alcoholic beverage) – but later it appears that this is something Drake and Heather do fairly often. And apparently Rod must watch them from afar pretty often.

But of course I might be wrong and this does indeed pick up after the previous book; to tell the truth William H. Keith (aka “Robert Cain”) leaves it a bit vague. We learn that Drake and Heather are now an open item and have been for a few weeks, but the previous mission in Sicily is sometimes referred to as being fairly recent. It doesn’t matter, though. Keith still focuses on the same theme that’s grounded the entire series: Rod’s internal debate whether he’s human or not. Luckily though Keith doesn’t beat us over the head with this concept as Simon Hawke does in the somewhat-similar Steele (which I really need to get back to).

As we’ll recall, Rod used the PARET system to learn Drake’s battle skills and reflexes in the first volume, with the unintended side effect that he also picked up Drake’s grief and fury over the murder of his wife and teenaged daughter. Throughout Shark Bait Rod still grapples with this; he’s a robot, no emotions programmed into him, but he feels things akin to what he understands are human emotions. Keith thankfully steps away from the path he was seeming to build a few volumes ago, that Rod was developing rebellious tendencies toward Drake, Heather, and the other RAMROD scientists and technicians who serve as his family. This time the focus is solely on whether Rod’s feelings are “real.”

But Keith doesn’t beat us over the head with this, either. Like the previous volume, the majority of Shark Bait is given over to a single action sequence that just keeps going…and going…and going. It seems that Keith himself was struggling at this point, with the series itself. While the first and second volumes were fun, action-filled yarns with comedic banter straight out of the summer blockbusters of the era, starting with the the third volume a more sluggish vibe has descended upon Cybernarc. Inventive situations and wry dialog (particularly around Rod’s inability to grasp certain things) have given way to major action scenes that seem to exist mostly so as to fill pages. Another thing becoming more prevalent is the military fiction vibe, which I’ve argued before is completely different from the men’s adventure vibe.

We get straight into the action. Rod and Drake are sent over to Turkey to wipe out a heroin smuggler. An interesting note about Shark Bait is that Rod is the central protagonist throughout, particularly in the action scenes. For the most part Drake is relegated to the sidelines, seeking cover while Rod blitzes the enemy. This opening action scene is our first indication of this. Rod, in Combat Mode, first pilots in an Apache helicopter (flying being a new skill he’s been granted) and then runs roughshod over the smuggler’s base. Keith as ever displays an action movie-esque penchant for sending off villains in novel ways; here Rod hurls a pipe through the heroin smuggler before he can make good his escape.

Meanwhile the Mexican cartels have banded together to take down Cybernarc; in the intro we’ve already seen some creeps watching Drake and Heather from afar while they frolick in the sand and snapping photos of them – you almost think these two should start charging people to watch their beach escapades. Led by one of the Salazars, ie the cartel Drake and Rod dealt with in the first volume, they plan to kidnap Heather and use her as bait – presumably the “shark bait” of the title. We get a few sequences from Heather’s point of view as she’s abducted and then brutalized by her captors, lending the novel the tone of the average installment of MIA Hunter. Salazar keeps his men from raping Heather, though the threat constantly looms over her due to one of the thugs in particular. In time Salazar realizes he should put Heather’s mind to use, having her reprogram Rod to fight for the cartels.

This is something Rod himself deduces, whereas Drake and RAMROD honcho Weston figure the cartels just want to destroy Rod. Weston doesn’t go the expected “we can’t do anything to help Heather” route, instead coming up with a plan – Drake and Rod, in Civilian Mod, fly in to Salazar’s compound in Northern Mexico, “delivering” Rod’s Combat Mod. Rod pretends to just be a pilot, able to fool the bad guys into thinking he’s a normal human. Keith as ever excels in displaying the otherworldliness of Rod, capable of transferring his consciousness among a variety of interlinked bodies and devices.

Here we begin the massive battle sequence that will comrpise much of the novel’s runtime. The novel thing this time is that Rod’s in Civilian Mod throughout, still stronger than a human but not nearly as unstoppable as he’d be in Combat Mod. As mentioned Rod is the star here and for the most of the battle Drake’s on the sidelines, either hiding or sneaking around the compound and coming upon a huge stash of heroin. Their weapons memorably stored in the torso of the Combat Mod, the two take on an entire army, and Keith this time keeps bringing up Rod’s battery power and how the fight is wearing it down, particularly when he takes on a couple tanks and armored jeeps.

Another thing that’s gradually disappeared from the series is the gore factor; Rod wipes out a ton of cartel soldiers but it’s rendered in an almost PG-13 tone. Also the battle goes on way too long, with lots of chapters ending on cliffhangers as Rod sees a tank coming for him or whatever; the fight goes well past its expiration date, and it seems clear that Keith is filling pages. And meanwhile Heather isn’t even here, having been taken away by Salazar and fellow cartel sleazebag Contrera to another cartel stronghold, a few hundred miles away. Speaking of which Keith has a grating tendency to only use the metric system.

This takes us into the next and last major setpiece; Drake and Rod race against time to cut off Salazar and Contrera before they can get to their destination, where they’ll be informed Cybernarc has run roughshod and destroyed everyone at the previous location. In other words Heather will for sure be killed, as they’ve already threatened her death if Drake and Rod go against their orders. Here Rod’s depleting battery is really rammed home, as he’s down to around twenty percent and, still in Civilian Mod (because it would take too long to transfer him to Combat Mod), about to engage another army in battle.

This is handled via another long action scene, wth Rod piloting an Apache and taking out hordes of cartel soldiers. We get more interesting stuff with a return of the Spider remotes, so memorably introduced last volume; Drake fires them into the fortress stronghold and, when he’s able to, Rod transfers his consciousness to each of them to see which has come upon Heather’s hiding place. And while Heather spends the majority of the novel in captivity, Keith does give her a nice bit of revenge on her captors. After this the novel climaxes again on an action movie vibe with our heroes chasing down a runaway plane, one of the villains getting chopped into burger by propeller blades.

At over 200 pages, Shark Bait moves a bit sluggishly, mostly because the characterization and fun dialog of previous books have been replaced by endless action scenes. Also the military fiction vibe is strong, with lots of acronyms and “realistic” data on such and such weapons. Hopefully the final volume of Cybernarc restores the series to what it was.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Cybernarc #4: Capo’s Revenge


Cybernarc #4: Capos Revenge, by Robert Cain
October, 1992  Harper Books

By this fourth volume Cybernarc has moved away from the action movie-esue vibe of the first volume, with its bantering lead protagonists and large-scale action scenes, and become more of a sort of military fiction deal. Gone for the most part is the bantering, and William “Robert Cain” Keith replaces it with a lot of weapons acronyms and shoehorned data about drug smuggling, the Mafia, and Columbian gangs.

It’s the early ‘90s so we’re hot on that “super predators” tip, as Hillary C. infamously referred to the black drug gangs at the time. (At the very least, it gave us a cool Massive Attack song.)  But the novel is filled with the paranoia that unchecked drug running and crime and the like would descend the US into urban warfare within a few years, a la Predator 2 and etc. Throughout Capo’s Revenge we’ll get panicked reports of what unchecked drug-running may eventually lead to, particularly given that the notoriously savage Colombians are about to engage in war with the Mafia.

It’s five weeks after the previous volume and Chris Drake and his android pal Rod have moved into their new digs at Pirate’s Cay, the Bahamas. Keith injects a bit of a body horror vibe with a few scenes of Rod being dissasmbled and put back together, usually with his head gorily removed from his “Civilian Mod” body and put in his “Combat Mod” body, or vice versa. The novel in fact opens with a scene featuring Rod in the former body, crashing a party in Florida and trying to make off with a Comlumbian bigwig in the melee, but failing to catch him. This scene inspired the atrocious computer-created cover art, featuring a machine gun-wielding Rod versus a helicopter.

We’re often reminded that the events of the first volume were a year ago, and Drake still simmers with sorrow and rage over the murder of his wife and daughter therein. Translation: as usual, there will be no hanky-panky in this particular series. At least until the very end, when Drake finally decides to move on – and, uh, promptly bangs Dr. Heather McDaniels, hostuff blonde babe scientist on the RAMROD initiative. However we’re given no sleazy details, this being an early ‘90s men’s adventure/military fiction hybrid sort of thing. That being said, Rod does watch stalker-like from afar as the two have sex.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. James Weston, CIA spook who runs the show, flies in and tasks our duo with their new objective: stop the Mafia and Columbians from warring. Off they head for Manhattan, where they find the local consiglierie murdered in his own home, his family massacred. Keith excels in showing how Rod detects things humans cannot; with his far sight he spots a Latino dude watching the house from a parked car, and further detects traces of blood and other fluids on his clothing, all of it invisible to the human eye. Rod breaks the dude’s arm and interrogates him at Drake’s instruction – Drake being particularly driven this time around to kill all the druggers – and soon the two are in a huge gunfight on the streets of New York, complete with even a trip to the sewer system and a mention of the long-running “alligators in the sewer” urban legend.

Another element familiar from early ‘90s action: the stupid chief. This would be Weston, who chews Drake and Rod out good and proper, screaming about how they went above and beyond their objective, pissed on civil liberties, and basically broke every law in the book. To go all the way with the cliché, he even calls them a pair of “loose cannons.” Weston threatens to shut down the program and send Rod back to the lab, but it all comes off like page-filling. Which, sadly, Capo’s Revenge is filled with. In most cases the padding is courtesy expository dialog about the Mafia, as follows here, Weston going on and on about a particular family’s history and its dealings on the drug front. Much of this stuff is skimmable.

After their ass-chewing Rod and Drake (I always want to type “Rod and Todd”) are sent to Sicily, as it’s been determined the mobsters, under the visonary guidance of a capo named Grecco, are meeting to determine how best to handle the Colombian threat. Rod, being a robot, merely downloads a language program and thus can speak in fluent, accentless Italian, but also, being that he’s a robot, he asks the suspicious natives all sorts of blunt questions. This leads to the expected action scene, a bit sooner than expected, as Rod and Drake, armed with only pistols, defend themselves from an ambush by lupara-wielding local Mafioso.

Keith fills pages with lots of cutovers to the Mafia characters, discussing and arguing about what to do; Grecco has them in an ancient clifftop castle, guarded by an army of heavily-armed goons. Practically 75% of Capo’s Revenge is dedicated to Drake and Rod infiltrating the place and then battling the occupants – a running action sequence that goes on for a staggering 100 pages. So far only The Hitman #3 has come as close to padding out the pages with such an extensive, exhausting action scene, but like Norman Winski, Keith excels at such stuff, and gives good gore. That being said, Capo’s Revenge isn’t as gory as the previous installments.

It starts off with Rod again trying out his Sea Mod setting, which entails Rod in his Combat Mod body being put inside like an armored boat. From there he and Drake perform a soft probe of Grecco’s Mafia summit, to discover that the capo plans a total war of atrocity against the Colombians, killing them all – men, women, children. After a quick radio call to get approval from Weston, our heroes determine there’s only one option: for them to kill all the Mafia bastards, right here and now.

So begins the extended action scene, and it’s a testament to Keith’s skill that it never seems to drag or bog the reader down with deadening banality. I mean just imagine a 100-page action scene by Joseph Rosenberger. You’d be looking for your cyanide pills by the fifth page. “Anything – just make it end!” Ever the researchers, Rod and Drake use the opportunity to try out their new Heckler and Koch CAWS auto shotgun things, ie “Close Assault Weapons Systems,” which of course bring to mind the weapons used in the almighty Able Team #8. It appears these guns never got out of the experiment stage, but boy the way Keith has his heroes employing them you wonder why the US military never moved forward with the things – they kill people real good.

Keith delivers memorable moments throughout. Rod now has this new roving camera robot device called a “spider” which he can shoot via grenade launcher into some remote area; the spider activates and crawls around, recoding both video and audio, and Rod can transplant his entire consciousness into the thing, controlling it from afar. This is interesting enough but Keith adds a novel scene where Rod, his mind in the spider, acts as a forward observer, on the ground with the mobsters, directing Drake’s fire as the ex-Navy SEAL charges in with CAWS blasting. And there’s plentiful gore throughout; one of the charges for the CAWS fires flechettes, and sundry Mafioso are ripped to bloody shreds. Another memorable sendoff has the titular capo harpooned.

In the bloody melee Chris Drake experiences a sort of catharsis, or something; there’s a part toward the end where he opens up on full flechette fire on a group of escaping old mobsters and whatnot, chopping them up, then hears a woman screaming that there are kids nearby. And Drake pulls his finger off the trigger…and feels real great about himself. Because he didn’t kill the woman and the kids(!). But otherwise he shoots to pieces every mobster he encounters, then he and Rod make their escape. After which we flash forward a few weeks, where Drake, sort of reborn now, admits to Heather McDaniels that he’ll “never forget” his dead wife and daughter, but hey, all that is like so last year, so let’s screw in the sand. Oh and Rod watches from afar, grappling with his own jumbled robot emotions, ultimately concluding that he’s not human and will do just what he was built to do – kill drugger scum!

There were only two more volumes to go, so here’s hoping the next ones get back to the action movie vibe of the first one.

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Cybernarc #3: Island Kill


Cybernarc #3: Island Kill, by Robert Cain
April, 1992  Harper Books

The Cybernarc series continues to capture the vibe of a late ‘80s action movie with this third volume, however there’s something a bit subdued and padded about the proceedings, as if Wiliam H. Keith (aka “Robert Cain”) were losing steam. While I greatly enjoyed the first two volumes, Island Kill sort of tried my patience. 

For one, it misses the greatest feature of those first two volumes: the growing camaraderie of heroes Lt. Chris Drake and RAMROD, ie “Rod,” ie “The Cybernarc.” Their humorous bantering at times reached the level of Remo and Chiun in The Destroyer, only based more on respect and friendship than on insults. But this time Drake and Rod only exchange a handful of lines, with Keith pulling an unusual trick by keeping Drake off-page for much of the novel and making Rod the star of the show. Again Keith makes the reader forget that Rod isn’t human; only at times when he focuses his eyes on something far away or puzzles over some latest human mystery does the reader remember that Rod’s just a bunch of circuits.

But that humorous rapport is gone in Island Kill, and the book suffers. Indeed, Keith at times attempts to add a troubling confrontational aspect to their relationship, with Rod at times disobeying Drake’s orders (to save Drake’s life, that is) and Drake occasionally wondering what would happen if Rod were ever to go crazy or something and come after Drake himself. All of that heroic sacrifice from the previous two books, like when Drake or Rod would go through hell to save one another at any cost, is also gone this time. For the most part this one’s just a standard action tale with heavy anti-drug sermonizing and a robot protagonist. Otherwise it’s run of the mill late ‘80s/early ‘90’s action pulp, neutered stuff when compared to the sleazy and lurid examples of the genre from a decade or two before.

Another sign of the times is that Cybernarc is beginning to become more and more like military fiction. The men’s adventure genre didn’t completely die in the early ‘90s; it got a makeover and lost the pulp stuff, replacing it with a lot of military acronyms and SEAL team protagonists or whatever. Such is the case here, with Island Kill stuffed to the wazoo with lots of military terminology and tactics sprinkled throughout. This again makes one wonder what the originally-envisioned series might have been like, as mentioned in my review of the first volume, with the “whacked-out Vietnam vet” building his own robot to kill the drug dealers of the world. Now that wouldn’t have been military fiction! But it sure would’ve been fun.

Unfortunately, “fun” is what’s missing from this third volume. It’s all too serious throughout, starting with the kidnapping of a senator and his wife in the Bermuda Triangle and leading to one sprawling action scene after another. Part of the uber-seriousness is courtesy Drake, who as we’ll recall still suffers from the horrific murder of his wife and teenaged daughter in that first installment. I’m starting to think this was a mistake on Keith’s part, giving us a co-protagonist who is so emotionally shattered. For once again there’s absolutely no sex, with Drake razor-focused on killing drug dealers and with little interest in women given his recent nightmare. Speaking of which, Ramona Montalva, the sexy villainess from #2: Gold Dragon, doesn’t appear and isn’t even mentioned this time.

Anyway, Island Kill takes place in the Bahamas, where Rod and Drake (I always want to type “Rod and Tod”) are sent after the abduction of Congressman Rutherford. The politician has been taken captive by Carlos Ferre, a coke-paranoid drug kingpin who rules his own island empire called Pirate’s Cay. The titular “island,” Pirate’s Cay only has a few natives, most of whom are American transplants and all of whom are basically hostages here, unable to leave and forced to work for Ferre. Keith spends a lot of time jumping into the various perspectives of these one-off characters, particularly one of Ferre’s subordinates, and it comes off like what it is: padding. The book runs to a too-long 213 pages of small print, and a lot of it’s inconsequential.

One thing that returns is the gore factor, present last time but greatly reduced from the blood-drenched onslaught of the first volume. Once again Rod smashes heads apart with his bare hands, Keith gleefully detailing the cascading brains and skull-shards each and every time. Likewise the frequent gunfights are also gore-drenched, in particular the climactic assault on Pirate’s Cay, where Rod, in Battle Mod, hefts a XM-214 minigun and blasts various gunners into “red mist.” In fact the rampant violence is about the only fun factor in Island Kill, as it all has the uber-gory vibe of Paul Verhoven at his most unhinged. Again, Cybernarc would’ve made for a great film.

As mentioned Rod is for the most part the star of the show. Throughout the book he’s ditching Drake and running off to monitor Ferre’s operations, usually pulling off his own assaults in the process. But again Keith does a great job of showing how inhuman our hero is, in particular when it comes to his patience; there’s a part where Rod sneaks onto Pirate’s Cay and just sits around for a day or so without moving. Not to mention when he hooks himself to the bottom of a boat during a drug run or walks around on the seabed. This time we also get the unveiling of Rod’s latest app: Sea Mod, which is a sea sled attachment for his Battle Mod. This is briefly used when he and Drake head to Pirate’s Cay for the climactic assault, which comprises the final quarter of the novel.

Keith also includes a new subplot featuring Weston, the shady CIA rep in charge of the RAMROD project. Turns out a lot of politicians in Washington are dirty, in the pockets of the various drug lords, and they’re trying to close down “White Sanction,” ie the RAMROD kingpin-assassination operation. Otherwise Keith doesn’t pick up many threads from the previous two volumes, with more focus placed on the Pirate’s Cay characters and long action sequences. And we get a bunch of them, from an opening jungle fight in Columbia to Rod taking out scores of henchmen, including crooked cops, on some Florida docks. The action is very well handled, with as mentioned copious gore, but again it lacks the emotional connection of the two earlier books.

The novel ends with a new direction in the lives of our two heroes: White Sanction must go underground, reporting directly to the President now that it’s officially off the records and condemned by the House of Representaties as illegal. Also Drake and Rod move to Pirate’s Cay, freed from Ferre’s yoke, its natives eager to help out in the drug war. Here’s hoping the next volume reaches the heights of the first two books, though.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Cybernarc #2: Gold Dragon


Cybernarc #2: Gold Dragon, by Robert Cain
December, 1991  Harper Books

Picking up two months after the first volume, the second installment of Cybernarc is all about the action, as if “Robert Cain” (aka William H. Keith) is attempting to make up for the lack of it in the previous volume. Not that Cybernarc #1 didn’t feature much action, but as with most other latter-era men’s adventure novels it was moreso focused on introducing its characters and series concept.

Gold Dragon on the other hand opens with an action sequence and remains heavily action-minded throughout. We meet our titular Cybernarc, Rod the robot, as he’s crashing into a Hong Kong high rise hotel that’s filled with “inhuman monsters called drug lords” (as the back cover copy so hyperbolically refers to them). Rod, in Civilian Mod (meaning he looks like a regular human) and armed with a subgun, blasts his way across various floors as he hunts and kills a trio of Chinese drug lords (Feng, Hsu, and Cho) who happen to be in the hotel.

Spotting for Rod in another room in the hotel is Chris Drake, Rod’s SEAL partner and “friend.” As in the previous volume, Rod’s burgeoning hummanity plays a central role in Gold Dragon, with Rod learning what it means to be a friend, leading to some downright touching scenes – that is, touching amid all of the exploding heads and guts. Speaking of which, this second volume is a little less gory than the first one; to be sure Rod does rip people apart at times, often hitting men so hard that his hand impales their entire head, but these moments happen less frequently than they did in Cybernarc #1.

Rod succeeds in blowing away Hsu and Cho, but Feng escapes in a helicopter, and Rod is heavily damaged in his own escape, which sees him swinging via a long cable down to Drake’s hotel room window. Terminator style Rod’s face has been scraped off so that the black metal skull beneath is visible, which makes for a nice horror vibe during the action scene, as Chinese combatants drop their guns and run screaming from the terrifying sight. There follows a memorable bit where Drake uses an iron to fix Rod’s face, pulling the latex skin so that it looks as if he’s a regular human who just suffers from a bad facial scar.

Feng was the prime target of the hit, and as they repair to Mobile One, aka a retrofitted 747, Rod and Drake briefly meet up with James Weston, head of Project Ramrod, and Heather McDaniels, chief programmer and resident hot stuff who has yet to start up the inevitable romance with Drake – though given that Drake’s wife and daughter were horrifically murdered last time around, I guess we still need to give the guy some time to move on. In fact, and likely due to the era in which it appeared, Cybernarc is barely focused on sex at all – for example later in the book Rod and Drake meet up with Tai Song, a pretty young woman of Hmong/American descent, and the Drake/Song romance expected from tradition never happens.

A DEA rep named Lassiter informs the group that Feng is likely in Mongyin, Burma, a location deep in the jungle in which the drug lord employs the sadistic General Aung to run a heroin factory. Lassiter wants Rod and Drake to parachute in via High Altitude/High Opening and do some reconnaissance. Yep, it’s all just like in Rambo: First Blood Part II, with our protagonists dropping into the exotic jungle with strict orders not to fully engage the enemy. And just like in the movie they of course decide to do their own thing.

Rod, now in Combat Mod (meaning he’s built like a football linebacker, only with black titanium skin), parachutes into Mongyin with Drake, each of them packing light for the mission – Drake carrying a FN-FAL rifle and Rod an Uzi. Meanwhile we meet the pretty young Tai Song, who we learn would be considered beautiful by Western standards, but is generally overlooked by the men in her Hmong village here in Mongyin – again, all of it seemingly building up the potential for some good lovin’ courtesy Drake, but the author bypasses this; indeed Tai Song is eventually relegated to “translator” status and is shunted out of the narrative with little resolution.

First though we have a climatic rescue scene where Song, as we meet her, is dragged from her hut by General Aung’s troops and tossed into a cage which is hung in the town square. Rod and Drake, coming across the village after working through the jungle, immediately decide upon a lightning strike so as to save the girl. We learn though that it’s a trap – back in Hong Kong, while storming the hotel, Rod came across a nude Columbian woman in one of the drug lords’s rooms and let her go, deeming her a hooker or whatever and thus unimportant. Turns out though that it was Ramona Montalva, daughter of a high-ranking Columbian druglord, and Ramona was in Hong Kong to start a partnership between her family and Feng, even sleeping with one of Feng’s cronies to sweeten the deal.

Having seen what Rod is capable of first-hand, Ramona has now gone to Feng to warn him. Their gambit is to set a trap with the pretty, Western-looking Tai Song as bait, but of course Rod and Drake manage to waste all of Aung’s soldiers as they save her. The Hmong are born warriors and thus they now want a piece of Aung, who has ruled over them sadistically, even butchering people who have slighted him and roping their corpses to trees as warnings to others. So then Rod and Drake now have a native army as they go on deeper into Mongyin to assault Aung’s heroin lab – this being very much against orders, Rod having received a satellite-relayed message that the two of them are to proceed out of Mongyin asap.

Actually Gold Dragon is also like an installment of MIA Hunter (except with a robot!), as it indulges in the tropes that series is known for, including the traditional battle against a heavily-armed PBR boat along the Mekong river. The assault on Aung’s heroin factory is appropriately epic, with Rod tearing a Russian-made automatic grenade launcher off of the PBR and firing it submachine gun-style from his hip. The violence factor here is also large, culminating in the reveal that Song gets vengeance on Aung by hacking off his head in true Hmong fashion.

However, Feng has friggin’ escaped again, and once again Drake and Rod launch an attack, this time on Feng’s ship as it readies to disembark from Thailand. Feng again manages to escape, and in the course of this battle Rod is nearly destroyed and Drake is captured. This sets the stage for the climax, in which Rod, again in Civilian Mod (his Combat body damaged beyond repair), parachutes onto Feng’s ship as it sails through a stormy sea and blasts his way across it in search of Drake.

Ramona Montalva appears again in this finale, and we see that she’s truly in the Pulpy Evil Female mold I so enjoy; Feng trusses up a nude Drake and has his men torture him for intel, all while Ramona stands nearby licking her lips. There’s a very uncomfortable scene where she even grabs hold of his balls and squeezes them. But as these things go, Ramona doesn’t get killed during Rod’s storming of the bridge, and indeed our heroes go to great lengths to ensure they get her off of the ship in one piece, keeping her alive so as to eventually interrogate her. Methinks Ramona Montalva will play a larger role in future volumes, but we’ll see.

This final battle is one of those sequences the author excels in; Keith is great at delivering climatic battles that resonate both from an action standpoint as well as the emotional, with Rod the robot consumed with worry as he desperately searches for Drake. And the author turns it around with Drake, after being rescued, battling to get the critically-damaged Rod safely off of the ship.

So far the Cybernarc series has come the closest of all the men’s adventure series I’ve read to capturing the feel of a big budget summer blockbuster – I mean like the kind they made in the good old days, when they were action-focused and rated R. With the thrilling sequences, witty banter, and strong characterization, the series offers a whole lot more than you might expect.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Cybernarc #1


Cybernarc #1, by Robert Cain
August, 1991  Harper Books

This obscure, six volume series might be untapped gold. You can hardly find anything about it online, other than this background info on the author’s website, “Robert Cain” being a psuedonym of prolific series author William H. Keith. But I’m here to tell you that, desipte the lack of reviews or online awareness, Cybernarc is friggin’ great, one of the best first volumes of a series I’ve yet had the pleasure to read.

If you check out the link above, you’ll see that the original plotline of the series was about “a whacked-out Vietnam vet” who built “a robot in his basement in order to take out drug lords all over the world!” Now, Keith went in a different, more “serious” direction, but damn if that original concept doesn’t sound so wacky and absurd as to be awesome. Regardless, Keith chose to favor more of a realisitc approach, but make no mistake – the protagonist of this series is a robot, and indeed one who takes on drug lords all over the world.

Like the abysmal Tracker series, the covers for this series mislead you into thinking it’s a sci-fi, “near future” sort of thing. In reality, Cybernarc takes place in the year it was published, 1991. It details the adventures of Rod, a human-looking robot created over the past two decades under CIA funding, a two billion-dollar construct that is the one and only output of the RAMROD initiative (“Rod” getting his name from the last three letters of the program’s name).

The idea was to create an army of android soldiers, but the project was so complicated and costly that Rod is the only prototype. He appears like a normal white male, with sandy brown hair and a “regular guy” sort of look. However he is capable of feats beyond normal humans, especially when he’s placed in “Combat Mod,” when Rod’s “Civilian Mod” body is replaced by a larger one of black titanium steel; in this mode he is basically a tank on legs.

Rod’s “teacher” is Chris Drake, a Navy SEAL and the co-protagonist of the series; like the Destroyer books, Cybernarc is built on a dynamic and rapport between two entertaining protagonists. In another divergence from the publisher’s original plotline, Drake isn’t a ‘Nam vet; instead, he’s only been a SEAL since ’79 and has racked up his extensive experience in covert ops. He has been chosen to be Rod’s combat instructor; the robot learns things through PARET, a cybernetic sort of mind-meld which allows him to learn directly from a teacher’s brainwaves.

This first volume details Rod and Drake’s entry into the war on drugs; true to the era in which it was published, Cybernarc is very concerned with drug barons and the increasing cocaine and crack pandemic, with the oft-stated fear that “within a few years” the streets of the US would become centers of open warfare among rival gangs. (As seen in such 1990 “near future” films as Predator 2 and Robocop 2; see the compelling but controversial book Freakonomics for a compelling but controversial reason why this future never happened. It has to do with the Roe vs. Wade decision…)

But again, this first volume takes place in 1991 and taps into two then-popular items in pop culture: action movies with drug lords as the villains (practically any Steven Seagal film of the time), and, of course, The Terminator. In fact I’m sure it’s not just a coincidence that this book was published around the same time that Terminator 2 came into theaters. Rod though is much more “human” than the Terminator, and a compelling theme of the novel is how, due to his PARET interactions with Drake, the robot is becoming more and more human.

This really comes to bear when Drake suffers a horrible tragedy in his personal life. The novel’s first action sequence has Drake in Columbia, where he’s to exfiltrate a DEA agent who’s gone undercover among the Salazars, a powerful drug-running family. The mission goes to hell when one of the DEA agents on Drake’s team, a bastard named Delgado, turns out to be a Salazar employee. Drake’s the only person able to escape the ambush and massacre. But the drug lords send Delgado and a team to Drake’s home and rape and murder Drake’s wife and daughter.

This harrowing scene sticks with you, as Drake arrives home just as it’s going down, and though he’s able to fight off his attackers, it’s too late to save his family. But since Drake is the only person to have seen the turncoat Delgado, the idea arises that via PARET feed Rod can see into Drake’s memory and print out a scan of Delgado’s face. This gripping scene has the outcome that Rod picks up not only on Drake’s memories but his emotions as well, something supposedly impossible for a robot, and comes out with feelings of loss, remorse, and hatred.

More action ensues as the drug barons continue to try to kill Drake. A great sequence has Drake and Rod attacked on the busy highways of DC, and this turns out to be Rod’s first taste of combat. Keith stays “realistic” with the action scenes, but when Rod goes into combat he’s free to veer into fantasy; simply put, Rod is a damn monster in battle, tearing off heads, pulling wheels off cars and hurling them with such force that they cause heads to explode, and gunning down people with unnering accuracy. It’s at this point you see how promising this series will be, as Keith delivers exactly the sort of stuff you want.

Just as importantly, Keith knows how to trade off between action and plot/character development. The novel is perfectly rendered in this regard…and hell, Keith doesn’t even POV-hop. He shows special skill with the scenes from Rod’s point of view; though you (and the characters) begin to think of Rod as a human, Keith will show how he’s so inherently different, capable of things beyond us but unable to grasp basic things like emotions or social dynamics. This of course leads to several humorous incidents, like when Rod blabs freely to two reporters that he’s a “top secret” robot because he’s never been specifically instructed not to say such things, and also his numerous attempts to learn how to tell a joke (this in particular elicits several action movie-esque one liners).

The biggest action scene has Drake, Rod, and a new team of SEALS head into Columbia, storming the Salazar fortress in an attempt to abduct Delgado. Here Rod is in Combat Mod, and we have such great moments as his ripping a .50 caliber machine gun from an armored car and firing it as a normal person would fire an assault rifle; he also tears apart another armored car with just his titanium-steel hands.

Drake also gets in on the action, doling out gory death with his Uzi (due to the PARET sessions, Rod too now favors an Uzi) and a Heckler and Koch automatic shotgun. The action scenes are nice and violent, by the way; in fact the only thing the novel’s missing in the pulp area is sex, but then what could you expect in a novel in which one of the protagonists suffers the loss of his wife and daughter. I guess the sex stuff will come up in a future volume…

I could rave on and on about this book. It was easily one of the best action novels I’ve yet read, and I’m super excited I lucked into the entire series for a pittance. The novel ends with Rod and Drake pledging to wage their own war against the drug lords of the world, and I can’t wait to read more about it.