Book picks similar to
The Third World War by Humphrey Hawksley
fiction
thriller
war
military-fiction
Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises
Max Velocity - 2013
The storm was rising for some time, a Resistance in the hearts of American Patriots to the strangulation of liberty by creeping authoritarianism. The scene was set. It just took a little push. A terrorist attack on the United States leads to war with Iran, followed by collapse, as the economy goes over the cliff. The final blow is a widespread opportunistic Chinese cyber attack, taking down the North American Power Grid. From the ashes, the Regime emerges. Liberty is dead. What remains of the United States of America is polarized. The Resistance Rises. Jack Berenger is a former Army Ranger Captain, living in northern Virginia with his family. Following the collapse, they fall foul of Regime violence and evacuate to the farm of an old Army friend. Jack is recruited into the resistance, to train the fledgling forces in the Shenandoah Valley. The fight begins. Live Hard, Die Free. Resist.
Bitter Seeds
Ian Tregillis - 2010
The Nazis have supermen, the British have demons, and one perfectly normal man gets caught in betweenRaybould Marsh is a British secret agent in the early days of the Second World War, haunted by something strange he saw on a mission during the Spanish Civil War: a German woman with wires going into her head who looked at him as if she knew him.When the Nazis start running missions with people who have unnatural abilities--a woman who can turn invisible, a man who can walk through walls, and the woman Marsh saw in Spain who can use her knowledge of the future to twist the present--Marsh is the man who has to face them. He rallies the secret warlocks of Britain to hold the impending invasion at bay. But magic always exacts a price. Eventually, the sacrifice necessary to defeat the enemy will be as terrible as outright loss would be.Alan Furst meets Alan Moore in the opening of an epic of supernatural alternate history, the tale of a twentieth century like ours and also profoundly different.
Murder Team
Chris Ryan - 2015
Danny Black is a lone wolf on an unofficial mission.He is in the deserts of East Africa looking for his old comrade in arms Spud, wounded in their last mission and now missing.A wounded British solder is a commodity in these parts...Danny recruits a grizzled ex-Blade to help him, encounters an ex-Mossad mercenary, who is part of the supply chain, and heads for a showdown with a small Somali army, led by most-wanted Islamist militant Abu Bakr.In the heat of battle Danny discovers, he is not the lone wolf he thought he was.He begins to wonder, as so many soldiers have before him, is he just a pawn in a greater game?
Get Off My Lawn
Perry Kivolowitz - 2013
Together they fight to survive the apocalypse with a unique technologist's perspective. Zombies are massing in hordes numbering in the millions. The Government has an agenda. Ruth Ann has stone cold hunter's skills and Doug has a data center. Containing a number of twists and observations possibly not seen in the genre before, Get Off My L@wn takes you through more than 40 days post breakout and tells a complete story.We all know that one zombie's bellowing will attract others. What happens when this process continues indefinitely? How can a military mount an effective defense of humanity without nuclear weapons? Would you have to sign a waiver of liability in order to receive help from the Government?Where's the best place to form a refugee camp to house hundreds of thousands? How do you keep those people happy? What will happen to the nature of Congress as a result of the Zombie Apocalypse?All these questions and much much more are answered in this thoughtful book.Thank you to the many hundreds who downloaded my book during its first free promotion. Please consider writing a review of this, my first effort.
World War 1990: Operation Arctic Storm
William Stroock - 2015
But with the communist advance halted tough decisions lie ahead for NATO. Prime Minister Thatcher and Chancellor Kohl want to counterattack, while the Bush Administration worries about the effects of further war. As NATO deliberates, the United States and Royal Navies gather in the North Sea for a massive offensive against Soviet occupied Norway. In the Soviet Union the Politburo is split between the hawks and doves, and contemplates the unthinkable nuclear option. Its two minutes to midnight in Operation Arctic Storm.
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.
The Red Line
Walt Gragg - 2017
"Delta-Two, I've got tanks through the wire! They're everywhere!"World War III explodes in seconds when a resurgent Russian Empire launches a deadly armored thrust into the heart of Germany. With a powerful blizzard providing cover, Russian tanks thunder down the autobahns while undercover Spetsnaz teams strike at vulnerable command points.Standing against them are the woefully undermanned American forces. What they lack in numbers they make up for in superior weapons and training. But before the sun rises they are on the run across a smoking battlefield crowded with corpses.Any slim hope for victory rests with one unlikely hero. Army Staff Sergeant George O'Neill, a communications specialist, may be able to reestablish links that have been severed by hostile forces, but that will take time. While he works, it's up to hundreds of individual American soldiers to hold back the enemy flood.There's one thing that's certain. The thin line between victory and defeat is also the red line between life and death.
The Mirage
Matt Ruff - 2012
They fly two into the Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad, and a third into the Arab Defense Ministry in Riyadh. The fourth plane, believed to be bound for Mecca, is brought down by its passengers.The United Arab States declares a War on Terror. Arabian and Persian troops invade the Eastern Seaboard and establish a Green Zone in Washington, D.C. . . .Summer, 2009: Arab Homeland Security agent Mustafa al Baghdadi interrogates a captured suicide bomber. The prisoner claims that the world they are living in is a mirage--in the real world, America is a superpower, and the Arab states are just a collection of "backward third-world countries." A search of the bomber's apartment turns up a copy of "The New York Times," dated September 12, 2001, that appears to support his claim. Other captured terrorists have been telling the same story. The president wants answers, but Mustafa soon discovers he's not the only interested party.The gangster Saddam Hussein is conducting his own investigation. And the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee--a war hero named Osama bin Laden--will stop at nothing to hide the truth. As Mustafa and his colleagues venture deeper into the unsettling world of terrorism, politics, and espionage, they are confronted with questions without any rational answers, and the terrifying possibility that their world is not what it seems.Acclaimed novelist Matt Ruff has created a shadow world that is eerily recognizable but, at the same time, almost unimaginable. Gripping, subversive, and unexpectedly moving, "The Mirage" probes our deepest convictions and most arresting fears.
The Last Centurion
John Ringo - 2008
Rising out of the disaster is the character known to history as “Bandit Six” an American Army officer caught up in the struggle to rebuild the world and prevent the fall of his homeland—despite the best efforts of politicians both elected and military. The Last Centurion is a memoir of one possible future, a world that is a darkling mirror of our own. Written “blog-style,” it pulls no punches in its descriptions of junk science, bad strategy and organic farming not to mention all three at once
Nam-A-Rama
Phillip Jennings - 2003
Only the Few and the Proud know what fun Hell can be.Here it is, folks: "How the cow ate the cabbage" in the CLASSIFIED words of the President hisself [sic]. TOP SECRET stuff. EYES ONLY. If you want to know the real story (and you know you do)-Nam-A-Rama is Catch 22 meets "Apocalypse Now." It's the wildest, wackiest, saddest and truest war story ever told, because it's all made-up, which means it's all real-from the oatmeal dropped on the VC (the Marines won't eat it) to the naked movie star parachuting into Hanoi; from the jarhead who calls in air strikes from a Bangkok brothel to the "Sky-Kyke" who fills out the Marine Corps' diversity quota; from the businessmen demanding a long inventory-reducing war to the Pentagon brass hoping for a glorious medal-worthy one; from the locals who'll do anything for a Yankee dollar to the grunts nobody ever asked and never will. It starts and ends, like all the best adventures, in the air. Almost-Captain Gearheardt and his buddy, Almost-Captain Armstrong, are ferrying bodies (live in, dead out) for the CIA's Air America, but they have never forgotten their TOP SECRET orders, given when Gearheardt was delivering pizzas to the Oval Office for the CIA: Chopper into Hanoi and buy Uncle Ho a beer. Then either shoot his ass or shake his hand (the instructions get vague at this point). And so they do, Semper Fi, pausing only to get an aircraft carrier black-flagged for bubonic plague, have an affair with Mickey Mouse, cleverly decode the message sewn into a lusty spy's black panties, commandeer a Russian truck complete with a midget Chinese 'Uncle Sam,' avenge themselves on a Cuban torturer, and dutifully experience all the Honor and Glory of the next-to-the-next-to-last war that never (God forbid) made the Nightly News.And they do it all for laughs. Because if they were to stop laughing, where would the heartache end?Phillip Jennings' unpredictable novel of Vietnam is an American classic in the making, a not-so-longing look at the absurdity of a war in which the damned and the innocent share the same hootch, the same Commander-in-Chief, and sometimes even the same body-bag. You won't stop laughing, or thinking.
A Lonely Kind of War: Forward Air Controller, Vietnam
Marshall Harrison - 1989
It was a dangerous life as they flew low and slow, always a prime target for enemy small arms fire.
The Infection
Craig DiLouie - 2011
Three days later, its victims awake with a single purpose: spread the Infection. As the world lurches toward the apocalypse, some of the Infected continue to change, transforming into horrific monsters.In one American city, a small group struggles to survive. Sarge, a tank commander hardened by years of fighting in Afghanistan. Wendy, a cop still fighting for law and order in a lawless land. Ethan, a teacher searching for his lost family. Todd, a high school student who sees second chances in the end of the world. Paul, a minister who wonders why God has forsaken his children. And Anne, their mysterious leader, who holds an almost fanatical hatred for the Infected. Together, they fight their way to a massive refugee camp where thousands have made a stand. There, what's left of the government will ask them to accept a mission that will determine the survival of them all—a dangerous journey back onto the open road and into the very heart of Infection.
People's Republic
Kurt Schlichter - 2016
Now, as the former blue states begin to collapse under the dead weight of their politically correct tyranny, a lethal operative haunted by his violent past undertakes one last mission to infiltrate and take out his target in the nightmarish city of Los Angeles, deep in the heart of the People’s Republic of North America. National Review’s Jim Geraghty calls Kurt Schlichter’s “People’s Republic” “a surreal, fast-paced journey through a dramatically different America but less than a generation away. … Violent, imaginative, full of mordant humor and dark, gritty details, you won’t want to live in this People’s Republic…but you’ll feel a chill as you wonder how different our real future will be.” Author and television host Cam Edwards says “Kurt Schlichter's ‘People's Republic’ is a roller coaster ride through a post-election Hellscape that will leave you wanting more.” Radio host Hugh Hewitt say “Schlichter puts a whole flight of Black Swans in the air --each of them plausible-- and the result is a riveting, page-turner, and a demand from Schlichter for...more.” “People’s Republic” is the first novel by Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army infantry colonel, a conservative radio and television commentator on the Fox networks and elsewhere, a Senior Columnist at Townhall,com, and a popular and hilarious Twitter raconteur. He's also a trial lawyer, so he has an intimate understanding of evil and deception. Radio host and commentator Ben Shapiro calls “People’s Republic “chilling,” and author and columnist David Limbaugh calls it “a thought-provoking action thriller set against the backdrop of a shattered America.” Fox News contributor and author Katie Pavlich says, “They say conservatives are terrible story tellers, but Kurt Schlichter destroys that stereotype in his new novel People's Republic and issues a dire warning about the future of America.” As with his prior book “Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2013-2041,” “People’s Republic” takes today’s news and projects the trends out into the future. Funny, frightening and action-packed, “People’s Republic” is a thriller that will make you think as well as keep you turning the pages.
Secret Sanction
Brian Haig - 2001
When the legal maverick is assigned by the top brass to investigate a Bosnian massacre in which a Green Beret A-team and the Kosovo Liberation Army detachment they were "advising" got trapped behind Serbian lines, he gets the subtext that's part of his orders. What the Army doesn't need are headlines about the cold-blooded execution of 35 Serbian soldiers, and they're counting on Drummond to clean things up fast, before a public scandal blows dirt all over their medals. Drummond is provided with two associates to help with the investigation: an attractive young woman captain who's a Harvard Law School graduate, and an equally illustrious Judge Army General's Corps lawyer whose reputation precedes him.Once Drummond and his team get to Bosnia, it's clear that the accused Green Berets have their own cover-up going, and they're not going to make it easy for the lawyers to figure out what happened. Drummond has a few tricks up his own sleeve, and when he finds out that his CO has put a spy on his team, he's even more determined to get to the bottom of what really went on, even if he has to bully his way out of a murder frame-up to do it. The moral dilemma Drummond faces when he learns the real story (and understands why the Army is so desperate to keep the cover-up going) reveals the man behind the maverick, and lifts Brian Haig's novel a cut above the genre. Haig might have spent more time making his secondary characters as interesting as his protagonist and tightened up his narrative. Still, fans of military thrillers will find this a good enough read.
Empire
Orson Scott Card - 2006
The war of words between Right and Left has collapsed into a shooting war, though most people just want to be left alone. The battle rages between the high-technology weapons on one side, and militia foot-soldiers on the other, devastating the cities, and overrunning the countryside. But the vast majority, who only want the killing to stop and the nation to return to more peaceful days, have technology, weapons and strategic geniuses of their own. When the American dream shatters into violence, who can hold the people and the government together? And which side will you be on?Orson Scott Card is a master storyteller, who has earned millions of fans and reams of praise for his previous science fiction and fantasy novels. Now he steps a little closer to the present day with this chilling look at a near future scenario of a new American Civil War.