Book picks similar to
Firebreak by Richard Herman


fiction
military
thriller
herman-richard

Remote Control


Andy McNab - 1997
    A member of the crack elite force the Special Air Service for seventeen years, McNab saw duty all over the world--and was the British Army's most highly decorated serving soldier when he resigned in 1993.Now, in Remote Control, his explosive fiction debut, McNab has drawn on his personal experience and unique knowledge to create a thriller of gripping authenticity, high-stakes intrigue, and unstoppable action. After his mission is suddenly terminated in Washington, D.C., British Intelligence agent Nick Stone decides to visit an old colleague, Kev Brown. But when Stone arrives at his friend's eerily quiet suburban home, he discovers a chilling scene of carnage. Every member of the Brown family has been brutally slaughtered except one: seven-year-old Kelly Brown. His instincts on red alert and adrenaline in overdrive, Stone grabs the girl and runs--with anonymous assassins in hot pursuit. But whom do they wish to silence: Stone, the innocent child, or both? During a heart-pounding chase that takes the resourceful, sometimes ruthless seasoned pro and his frightened young charge from Washington to Florida, and across the Atlantic to England, Stone begins to piece together a shocking global conspiracy. Thrust into a lethal game of cat-and-mouse, Stone is certain of two things: He and Kelly are on their own. No one can be trusted. And his darkest fears about the shadowy link between politics, money, and terrorism are about to be realized.Combining relentless action, daring escapes, and breathless plotting with chillingly authentic operational detail rarely seen in thrillers, Remote Control is a novel so real and so suspenseful it sets a new standard for the genre.From the Hardcover edition.

Net Force


Steve Perry - 1998
    Those who control them, control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the FBI: Net Force.When the director of Net Force is assassinated, Deputy Director Alex Michaels is thrust into one of the most powerful and dangerous positions in the world. At the same time, cyber-terrorists sabotage mainframe computers across the country, causing famine, chaos, and death.Now Michaels and his team must find out who is responsible—and what they have to gain. But there is another problem. If they assassinated one Net Force director, what will stop them from assassinating another?A powerful examination of America's defense and intelligence systems of the future, Tom Clancy's Net Force is the creation of Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik, inspiring this novel as well as the explosive ABC Television miniseries.

Dauntless


Jack Campbell - 2006
    Now its fleet is crippled and stranded in enemy territory. Their only hope is a man who's emerged from a century-long hibernation to find he has been heroically idealized, beyond belief...Captain John "Black Jack" Geary's legendary exploits are known to every schoolchild. Revered for his heroic "last stand" in the early days of the war, he was presumed dead. But a century later, Geary miraculously returns from survival hibernation and reluctantly takes command of the Alliance fleet as it faces annihilation by the Syndics.Appalled by the hero-worship around him, Geary is nevertheless a man who will do his duty. And he knows that bringing the stolen Syndic hypernet key safely home is the Alliance's one chance to win the war. But to do that, Geary will have to live up to the impossibly heroic "Black Jack" legend...

By Order of the President


W.E.B. Griffin - 2004
    Griffin's stories of the military and police, told with crackling realism and rich characters, have won him millions of fans and acclaim as "the dean of the American war adventure" ("Publishers Weekly"). Now he vaults into the present day with a series as exciting as anything he has ever written. At an airfield in Angola, two men board a leased Boeing 727; then, once it is in the air, slit the pilot's throat and fly to parts unknown. The consternation is immediate, as the CIA, FBI, FAA, and other agencies race to find out what has happened, in the process elbowing each other in the sides a little too vigorously.Fed up, the President of the United States turns to an outside investigator to determine the truth, an Army intelligence officer serving as special assistant to the Director of Homeland Security. Major Carlos Guillermo Castillo, known as Charley, is the son of a German mother and a Tex-Mex father, a Medal of Honor winner who died in Vietnam. A pilot, West Point graduate, and veteran of Desert Storm and the Special Forces, Castillo has a sharp eye for the facts-and the reality behind the facts. Traveling undercover, he flies to Africa, and there, helped and hindered by unexpected allies and determined enemies, begins to untangle a story of frightening dimensions-a story that, unless he can do something about it, will end very, very badly.

Firefox


Craig Thomas - 1977
    A thought-controlled, terrifyingly lethal warplane capable of ruling the Western skies.THE MAN: His name is Gant, an obsessed renegade American pilot. His Control: Kenneth Aubrey of Great Britain. His plan: infiltrate the shadowy worldwide KGB network and make his way into the Soviet Union. His job: steal Firefox.

The Terminal List


Jack Carr - 2018
    But when those dearest to him are murdered on the day of his homecoming, Reece discovers that this was not an act of war by a foreign enemy but a conspiracy that runs to the highest levels of government.Now, with no family and free from the military’s command structure, Reece applies the lessons that he’s learned in over a decade of constant warfare toward avenging the deaths of his family and teammates. With breathless pacing and relentless suspense, Reece ruthlessly targets his enemies in the upper echelons of power without regard for the laws of combat or the rule of law.An intoxicating thriller that cautions against the seduction of absolute power and those who would do anything to achieve it, The Terminal List is perfect for fans of Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Stephen Hunter, and Nelson DeMille.

Ghost


John Ringo - 2005
    Instead, Ghost (named for his uncanny ability to "blend") likes to stalk unknowing coeds and speculate on the carnal possibilities. But when a van-load of men suddenly abduct a blonde that Ghost had been following, he gives chase and follows the van to a deserted warehouse, where he uncovers a terrorist plot to kidnap and brutalize dozens of innocent American women. Ghost's military training kicks in, and after killing most of the jihadists within the warehouse, he tracks a truckload of sedated abductees to a 727 at an Atlanta airport and hitches a ride to Syria. In the action that ensues, Ghost unearths plots involving WMD production, rogue nukes, sexual slavery, and the assassination of world leaders -- all of which culminates in a breathtaking showdown at (where else?) a strip joint in Amsterdam, in the champagne room!

Extinction Horizon


Nicholas Sansbury Smith - 2014
    When a top secret Medical Corps research facility goes dark, Team Ghost is called in to face their deadliest enemy yet--a variant strain of Ebola that turns men into monsters.After barely escaping with his life, Beckham returns to Fort Bragg in the midst of a new type of war. The virus is already spreading... As cities fall, Team Ghost is ordered to keep CDC virologist Dr. Kate Lovato alive long enough to find a cure. What she uncovers will change everything.Total extinction is just on the horizon, but will the cure be worse than the virus?

Strike Back


Chris Ryan - 2007
    Their paths last crossed nearly twenty years ago. Now, amidst a hostage crisis in the Middle East, their lives are about to collide again. And the Strike Back is about to begin.John Porter was involved in a hostage raid in Lebanon in 1989. The raid went disastrously wrong; several Regiment men died. John spared the life of a Lebanese fighter and blames himself for the deaths. Struggling to come to terms with the past, John has hit the bottle and is sleeping rough.Colonel Peregrine Collinson was involved in the same raid. Unbeknownst to his colleagues, it was Peregrine’s fault that the mission went wrong. He was awarded a Military Cross and is heralded as a military hero for something he didn’t do.After the disastrous raid, the lives of the two men couldn’t have been further apart. Until now. A hostage crisis in the Middle East draws the enemies back together again. Who will be the hero this time?

Rage


Jonathan Maberry - 2019
    The people behind that attack want Korea united or destroyed. No middle ground. No mercy. And they are willing to punish any country that stands in the way—the United States, China, and Japan could all be consumed by a plague of pure destructive slaughter.Joe Ledger leads his newly formed band of international troubleshooters in their first mission to stop the terror cell, fighting alongside agents from North and South Korea. With the lives of billions at stake, Ledger is willing to bring his own brand of terror to this frightening new war.Rage is the first of the new adventures of Joe Ledger and Rogue Team International.

The Athena Project


Brad Thor - 2010
    And not a moment too soon . . .From behind the rows of razor wire, a new breed of counterterrorism operator has emerged.Just as skilled, just as fearsome, and just as deadly as their colleagues, Delta Force’s newest members have only one thing setting them apart—their gender. Part of a top-secret, all-female program codenamed The Athena Project, four of Delta’s best and brightest women are about to undertake one of the nation’s deadliest assignments.When a terrorist attack in Rome kills more than twenty Americans, Athena Team members Gretchen Casey, Julie Ericsson, Megan Rhodes, and Alex Cooper are tasked with hunting down the Venetian arms dealer responsible for providing the explosives. But there is more to the story than anyone knows.In the jungles of South America, a young U.S. intelligence officer has made a grisly discovery. Surrounded by monoliths covered with Runic symbols, one of America’s greatest fears appears to have come true. Simultaneously in Colorado, a foreign spy is close to penetrating the mysterious secret the U.S. government has hidden beneath Denver International Airport.As the women close in on their target, they will soon learn that another attack—one of unimaginable proportions—has already been set in motion, and the greatest threat they face may be the secrets kept by their own government.

SEAL Team Seven


Keith Douglass - 1994
    Their cargo includes two tons of weapons-grade plutonium. And now, with enough nuke fuel to arm a superpower, an alliance of fanatics threatens to poison a continent. In a daring mission of high-seas heroism, Lt. Blake Murdock leads his seven-man unit from Team Seven's Red Squad into bulkhead-to-bulkhead battle -- with high-tech buccaneers who've got nothing left to lose...

Death's Head


David Gunn - 2007
    David Gunn is loaded–and he shoots to kill.At the top of the galactic pecking order is the United Free, a civilization of awe-inspiring technological prowess so far in advance of other space-faring powers as to seem untouchable gods. Most of the known universe has fallen under their inscrutable sway. The rest is squabbled over by two empires: one ruled with an iron fist by OctoV, a tyrant who appears to his followers as a teenage boy but is in reality something very different, the other administered by the Uplifted, bizarre machinelike intelligences, and their no-longer-quite-human servants, cyborgs known as the Enlightened.Sven Tveskoeg, an ex-sergeant demoted for insubordination and sentenced to death, is a vicious killer with a stubborn streak of loyalty. Sven possesses a fierce if untutored intelligence and a genetic makeup that is 98.2 percent human and 1.8 percent . . . something else. Perhaps that “something else” explains how quickly he heals from even the worst injuries or how he can communicate telepathically with the ferox, fearsome alien savages whose natural fighting abilities regularly outperform the advanced technology of their human enemies. Perhaps it is these unique abilities that bring Sven to the attention of OctoV.Drafted into the Death’s Head, the elite enforcers of OctoV’s imperial will, Sven is given a new lease on life. Armed with a SIG diabolo–an intelligent gun–and an illegal symbiont called a kyp, Sven is sent to a faraway planet, the latest battleground between the Uplifted and OctoV. There he finds himself in the midst of a military disaster, one that will take all his courage–and all his firepower–to survive. But an even deadlier struggle is taking place, a struggle that will draw the attention of the United Free. Sven knows he is a pawn, and pawns have a bad habit of being sacrificed.But Sven is nobody’s sacrifice. And even a pawn can checkmate a king.From the Hardcover edition.

Control Point


Myke Cole - 2012
    Fugitive. Sorcerer.Across the country and in every nation, people are waking up with magical talents. Untrained and panicked, they summon storms, raise the dead, and set everything they touch ablaze. Army officer Oscar Britton sees the worst of it. A lieutenant attached to the military's Supernatural Operations Corps, his mission is to bring order to a world gone mad. Then he abruptly manifests a rare and prohibited magical power, transforming him overnight from government agent to public enemy number one. The SOC knows how to handle this kind of situation: hunt him down--and take him out. Driven into an underground shadow world, Britton is about to learn that magic has changed all the rules he's ever known, and that his life isn't the only thing he's fighting for.

North SAR: A Novel of Navy Combat Pilots in Vietnam


Gerry Carroll - 1991
    . . chock full of the real stuff (Stephen Coonts)--as seen through the eyes of the Navy Combat SAR (Search and Rescue) helicopter pilots who flew many of the most dangerous missions of the war. Tom Clancy, who provides the introduction, calls North S.A.R. the best novel I have ever read.