Book Review: 'The Secret Soldier'

The Company He Keeps

By TODD PRUZAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
February 25, 2011

THE SECRET SOLDIER

By Alex Berenson

401 pp. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. $25.95

Ask not what John Wells can do for your country. Seriously, don’t ask. Even if you found this former C.I.A. operative in a chatty mood, his answers might leave you feeling uneasy. He’s the sort of guy who borrows civilians’ cars with all the hesitation of a teenage shoplifter, who’ll club the skull of a useful drug dealer who’s already comfortably trussed in the back of an Econoline. When a beefy thug on a pier in Cyprus dismisses him with an ostentatious yawn, Wells quickly takes him to task, dumping him into Zygi's oily harbor. And these are just the tales he could actually tell. The ones he couldn’t — now those are scary.

A 210-pound, Montana-raised, one-man Team America, Wells has already completed four missions dreamed up by the novelist Alex Berenson. In his fifth, “The Secret Soldier,” Wells and an intrepid former Special Ops soldier take on a freelance assignment financed by steady streams of million-dollar Saudi paychecks. Wells must defuse an impending war on Arabian soil between the United States and the House of Saud, instigated by a terrorist group so shadowy that its attacks on soft targets around the Persian Gulf perplex even Al Qaeda.

Given this year of riot and revolution in Cairo, Tunis and Sana, it’s frighteningly easy to believe Berenson’s terrifying chain of events in Riyadh, Jeddah and Mecca. But Berenson, a former reporter for The New York Times, confounds traditional fantasies of patriotism and vengeance. His hero has an unfortunate knack for arriving at the scene just after the nick of time. Wells is also a conflicted Islamic convert (although Berenson uses this detail mostly as a narrative ornament — we don’t even see Wells pray until halfway through the book).

“The Secret Soldier” luxuriates in violence, positively raging with Tarantino-style carnage. It’s rare to go more than a few pages without encountering a sickening passage like this: “Shrapnel tore open his face and neck, and one jagged piece chopped through his skull and cut into the arteries around his brain, causing massive internal bleeding. He died, but not soon enough.” But in the spirit of his lapsed C.I.A. spook, Berenson doesn’t fully trust his readers; he habitually litters his prose with research notes. When a victim of a terrorist attack in Bahrain screams, “Call 119,” the narrator helpfully explains: “The Bahraini equivalent of 911.” By the time a Montego Bay hoodlum mentions Kingston, and the narrator adds, “the Jamaican capital,” you feel as if you’re stuck in a movie theater next to a whisperer you’d love to throttle.

Thankfully, these intrusions soon vanish, letting Berenson’s confidence with forensics, scenery and storytelling bloom. He’s equally convincing as he guides us into the backseat of King Abdullah’s speeding Maybach and places us in the hotel room (not to mention the mind) of a cross-dressing suicide bomber. From the first page of the prologue, Berenson’s most innocuous settings (11 p.m. in an Irish bar, Manama, Bahrain) reliably fill us with dread. His characters are all adept with entertaining, rat-a-tat zingers, and whenever tension mounts, Berenson ends his paragraphs with dashes —

But one of the most provocative passages in “The Secret Soldier” is one many readers won’t notice. Set in tiny type on the copyright page is a long, unorthodox disclaimer, reaching far beyond the “any persons living or dead” boilerplate to detail how this novel turns Saudi Arabia’s very real (and very much alive) King Abdullah into a central character, locked in an invented power struggle with invented brothers and invented sons. If the story doesn’t send you racing to Wikipedia to catch up on the House of Saud and Mecca, this mind-bending footnote will.

Plunking one of the world’s wealthiest, most powerful men into a terrifying thriller? That’s a twist even John Wells might not have seen coming.


Todd Pruzan is the editor of GetCurrency.com and the author of “The Clumsiest People in Europe.”