Dexter McGuilicutty Slaghoople

Once again Phoenix Force proves why it is the premeir action team of Stony Man Farm. Previously, the Force saved entire nations from such menaces as crop-destroying viruses and a killer version of the flu developed in a Soviet biowar lab. Now, against a truly planetary threat level force, Phoenix Force proved itself capable of not only saving the leaders of the most important nations on the planet, but preventing an international conflagration. Mack Bolan and Able Team seem best left to smaller than world-threatening menaces.

This is what Bolan is all about. 1) He's given a mission and some setup, but from the very first chapter he's on the ground, he's thinking on his feet and working his own angles. 2) The conspiracy and mystery in this one actually made sense, and wasn't some "deus ex machina" plot device. The relationships of the conspirators came naturally. 3) Fists or guns, the Executioner proves as deadly as he's ever been, and yet is not some invulnerable Superman - he's actually pressured and distracted by an enemy armed with a sword. 4) I'd have knocked some stars off this book for silenced revolvers... but... 5) Bolan at the end actually acts like a human being and offers the hand of redemption to one of the supporting cast. That blew apart the formula, and made Guenther, once again, the voice to beat in the original flavor Executioner stylings.

There were not few enough stars in this rating system to properly display my disapproval of this steaming rich pile of contradictory fecal matter collectively known as War Load. In all my years of reading the adventures of Don Pendleton's Executioner, only the foul illiteracy of "Jim Thompson's" "Sicilian Slaughter" ever matched the wrongness of characterization for this character. I have read short stories where Nero Wolf has skateboarded and has been more in character than this particular novel. How many ways can I express my disdain on this particular novel? Let me count them. 1) Constant use of the phrase "the Feds." Which "Feds?" FBI? NSA? DEA? Marshals Service? Secret Service? National Reconnaissance Office? Clearly the author had no capacity to actually bother himself to research which branch of the United States Government's law enforcement and intelligence arms were responsible for which section of the world. Plus, how many Federal agencies would truly support an assassination attempt across the boarder to Canada? 2) The utter pointlessness of Bolan's mission to assassinate the alleged Canadian smuggler at the beginning of the novel, when at the end, it coincidentally happened that he was involved in smuggling a missile to America and harboring the main villain's chief accomplice. This smacks of a lazy writer, letting all of the thinking work be done by these nebulous "Feds" referred to every other page, while the Executioner himself just wanders from point to point like a child's toy robot, bouncing whenever something is placed in its path. 3) The turning of Mack Bolan from a hero of morals and standards to someone who only goes that extra few inches to save your life if you happen to be white. In one instance, Bolan recklessly engages in a firefight on a crowded Japanese road and his gunshot is directly responsible for the death of an elderly woman and at the very least the maiming of her husband. In another instance, Bolan subdues and leaves unconscious a driver, and after a quick look around, murders the unconscious and unarmed man with a bullet to the head. 4) The utter removal of Mack Bolan's natural leadership ability. Bolan in the past has been a man capable of commanding forces of men of great will and determination. And yet, when the Executioner finds himself having to keep a Japanese police officer described as a "mama's boy" (I have never heard the Executioner ever use that phrase before), out of harms way by the simple use of command phrases like "The people we are going against have deadly weapons and destructive helicopter gunships - stay hidden in the woods." Due to Bolan's incapacity to tap his previous potential as a natural leader, the Japanese police officer was gunned down by superior firepower, and Tanaka found herself in harms way on several occasions. 5) Utterly undemonstrable or unusable technology as the "plasma drive" rockets on the PPSH-1 missile, and the use of 25 nuclear warheads to totally black out the United States of America - not taking into account the US Military's designing of equipment since the 1970's to survive EMP pulses. Also, the ability to travel 1,000 miles in 15 seconds would be impossible in an atmosphere as the missiles would need to be strong enough to survive a nuclear explosion to be able to withstand the heat and friction of moving at 240,000 miles per hour. We also should take into account that this weapon would leave sonic booms and seismic evidence of its passage across the globe as it travelled at such a velocity. 6) The character of Abigail Harkness. A thinly disguised, much-loved supporting character from the Fantastic Four comic, here recycled to be a haughty, arrogant, and contemptuous snob. Also, if you remember her son Nicholas Scratch, you've already figured within moments her relationship with the main villain of the novel. 7) I have trouble deciding who was stupider - Mack Bolan for trying to shoot the lock out of a door he just bounced off of, instead of just pulling his detonator and blowing up the warehouses he mined, or the 200 Chinese soldiers who watched Bolan bounce off a door, TURN HIS BACK TO THEM, WASTE AMMUNITION, and then scuffle through the door without attempting to physically apprehend him through superior 200-to-1 numbers. Either way, neither the Executioner nor the Chinese Military were demonstrated as having the sharpest-honed edges in the tool shed. 8) The author being inconsistent about his appraisal of his very own characters. One moment he describes Kerri Tanaka as a talented and skilled operative at one point, someone inexperienced in combat (despite having gone through no less than four firefights alongside the Executioner, and killing two armed terrorists with her bare hands which attracted Brognola to her in the first place), and a complete whiner who needed a time-out, when an entire castle was exploding around her, to discuss how her feelings felt betrayed. All while surrounded by a battalion of panicking, angry, heavily armed Chinese soldiers. 9) I am not certain, but I think Sun Tzu might have written somewhere "Do not gloat over your enemy, because this usually means you're the bad guy of the novel/movie/cartoon, and you will end up having your stupid ass kicked for it." This was a trained tactician and a master of dirty tricks - I for one was disappointed that he didn't just pump a 9mm slug into Bolan's gut and start kicking his head off. 10) And could someone please explain to me why a trained soldier would confiscate a firearm from an intruder, and not drop the magazine and empty the chamber of said firearm, in case the intruder somehow managed to wrest control of the weapon back again - making it that much easier for your fellow soldiers to gun him down with his empty phalluses in his hands. I'd go on citing more flaws in this piece of tripe, but then I'd have to write a tome as prodigious as the 500 page manuscript for this particular stink-job.