Terrorists Take Over the Thrillers

By Michael Demarest

Also, a Queen, a President, Manhattan and the North Sea

In real life, hostage taking, airliner hijackings and political assassinations are all too true to be good; but they make splendid fiction. Indeed, with a big assist from the headlines, the terrorist saga has become one of thriller literature's most prolific genres. This spring has exploded with more than a dozen heist-and-ransom adventures whose plots range from setting the North Sea oilfields afire to capturing U.S. nuclear plants. In one, a team of thugs heists Manhattan, no less; in another, Muslim-backed bullyboys hold Queen Elizabeth II hostage. The authors tend to go in for archetype casting: scheming Arabs, for example, are now as thick as No. 2 crude, and several new novels are based on the machinations of Carlos, a.k.a. Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, the shadowy, ubiquitous terrorist mastermind whom the free world's police have been trying to nab for a decade.

The latest epic by Robert Ludlum (The Matarese Circle) manages to top, if not topple, Carlos. The central character of his The Bourne Identity (Marek; 523 pages; $12.95) is an amnesiac, the result of a botched attempt on his life. From a microphotograph surgically implanted in his body, he finds the address of a bank in Zurich, an account that yields him more than $5 million, and a name: Jason Charles Bourne. As bloody memories and deadly skills return, Bourne discovers that he is a trained and instinctive killer, code-named Cain, quite possibly the match of Carlos.

Gradually, with the help of Marie St. Jacques, a Canadian economist whom he abducts and then saves from a brutal rape, Bourne-Cain learns that he is a tender, brave man as well. But Carlos is determined to destroy his reputed rival. So are Cain's former masters in the Washington intelligence establishment, who had originally set him up to trap Carlos and are now persuaded that he has turned. Bourne's deadliest enemy, however, is his former self. The only credentials he can recover from his past are those of a sadistic executioner in Viet Nam, and he is all but convinced he was that man. It takes the tendresse of Marie and the cunning of Carlos to impel Cain toward his moment of truth, a shattering set piece that takes place on Manhattan's East Side.

The Bourne Identity is the most absorbing of Ludlum's nine novels to date. His characters are complex and credible, his sleight of plot as cunning as any terrorist conspiracy. And his minutiae, from the rituals of Swiss banking to the workings of a damaged brain, are always absorbing. It is a Bourne from which no traveler returns unsatisfied.

A man Carlos might have enlisted is Dieter Koenig, a.k.a. Bruno Schilling. Like the real-life Venezuelan terrorist, German-born Bruno is a ferrety connoisseur of chaos: And, like Carlos, Schilling is a vain, insatiable womanizer who has honed boudoir and Beretta skills in North Africa, France and Switzerland. In Paul Henissart's Margin of Error (Simon & Schuster; 334 pages; $10.95), the swaggering former Foreign Legionnaire is assigned to an operation called Grand Slam. Its aim is to assassinate Anwar Sadat and pave the way for a Soviet-managed coup in Cairo. The action takes Bruno, in the footsteps of Cain and Carlos, to Zurich, where the Egyptian President has secretly arranged to undergo surgery.

Schilling is a compulsive and accomplished killer, but not a very tidy one. En route to Zurich he stops over in Paris to knock off the Jordanian Ambassador. There he makes the mistake of killing a CIA operative. A doughty, Swiss-based CIA man known only as Guthrie sets out to avenge his colleague. The task might be insuperable, save for the superable Marie-Christine Lemarchand, an elegant young Parisienne who had been the hit man's sometime mistress. She provides Guthrie with a psychological profile of the killer and some cryptic notes he has left in the safe of her boutique. The author polishes plots and plans until they shine. Guthrie follows the assassin's trail to Zurich. There he learns that Grand Slam is controlled by a pillar of the Swiss banking establishmenta Soviet spy for 40 years. Surprise follows revelation, and it detracts nothing from the novel to note that Sadat survives the savage denouement at the Zurich clinic. In case of real medical emergency, the Egyptian President might be better advised to go to the Cairo hospital used by the Shah.

Operation QEII is not code-named for the passenger liner but for Her Britannic Majesty. In The Siege of Buckingham Palace by Walter Nelson (Little, Brown; 239 pages; $10.95), a fanatic Baghdad-based group named Bloody Christmas sets out to kidnap the Queen and "strike at the heart of the Western world." In return for her freedom, the guerrillas demand the release of all 156 terrorists held in British, West German and Israeli prisonsplus -L-5 million sterling and a jet to Libya. Arabs being all too visible in England, the royal heist is conducted by I.R.A. Provos, members of Germany's Red Army Faction and a karate expert from the Japanese Red Army. With some inside help, the terrorists penetrate Buckingham Palace in a captured Fortnum & Mason delivery van. God save the Queen!

The problem is that everyone wants to do that: the Household Cavalry, Special Air Service, New Scotland Yard, as well as antiterrorist experts flown in from Israel, West Germany and Japan. While the new Prime Minister dithers, responsibility for the rescue is divided between the S.A.S. and the admirable Jack Lash, head of the Yard's antiterrorist squad and holder of the George Cross, the highest decoration for gallantry awarded by the Crown to a civilian. Meanwhile, the invaders have imprisoned Her Majesty and a young lady-in-waiting in the palace's royal apartments. Almost as pressing as the need to save the Queen is the absolute necessity of keeping the siege secret. Otherwise, more than 100,000 enraged Britons might storm the palace and ensure her death. Walter Nelson, a London-based American writer, builds his picaresque story to a touching denouement, with some time out for farce. Siege is his first novel, and it will be a hard one to follow.

The same problem undoubtedly troubles Lewis Orde and Bill Michaels, co-authors of The Night They Stole Manhattan (Putnam; 334 pages; $11.95). After all, as they note, this is "the most audacious hijacking of all time." (British readers might disagree.) It also involves "the biggest ransom in history": a cool billion plus a jumbo jet for the surviving perpetrators. In fact, heisting Manhattan turns out to be less farfetched than it sounds. A few well-planted bombs all too easily close train and subway access; destruction of six major bridges and four tunnels completes the island's separation from the mainland. Meanwhile, a smoothly engineered blackout in the South Bronx results in looting and arson, distracting police from the citynapers' main operation.

The caper, like QEII, is carried out by a mixed band of Irish, German and Arab thugs. Far from aiming to bring capitalist society to its knees, the attackers just want the capital. There is an ideological twist to the scheme, however. As envisioned by Harlan Stone Huckleby, an embittered retired major general and wealthy industrialist who finances the siege, the island's capture is intended to drive home the message to all Americans that the nation is woefully unprepared to resist enemy attack. The dotty general's Goetterdammerung is orchestrated by Peter Stiehl, an engaging mercenary from South Africa. Manhattan outlasts the holdup, but, after all, it is a city of survivors. Stiehl, with a $1 million fee from the general and the man's beautiful daughter in tow, also survives. . . perhaps. In any event, it's time for him to switch to martinis.

Back to the Brits. The Queen having recovered nicely from the recent unpleasantness, another Arab-directed group now plans to pinch a property of inestimably greater material value to the scepter'd isle. In The Samson Strike by Tony Williamson (Atheneum; 250 pages; $9.95), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine sets out to capture a vast oil platform in the North Sea that can pump 400,000 bbl. a day from its undersea wells. Unless the terrorists win the release of all political prisoners in Europeplus -L-57 millionthey will waste the $400 million platform and set fire to the huge gushers of oil under the so-called Samson rig. The flames, engulfing other oilfields, will burn across the North Sea, destroying the economy of Europe for the rest of the century. As the P.F.L.P. leader crows, "It will be in our power . . . to create a disaster unparalleled in history."

To handle the job, the terrorists pick Walter Grant, a brilliant, disgruntled mercenary who has been dismissed from the Special Air Service for torturing an Irish prisoner. Samson seems impregnable, but Grant knows otherwise. Captain Jonathon Stagg, Grant's sometime S.A.S. subordinate, sniffs something rotten in the North Sea wind but cannot pinpoint the terrorists' targetor persuade the mandarins of Whitehall that a catastrophe is gathering offshore. The battle of Samson (Stagg suggests that it be code-named Delilah) winds up as a duel of wits and weaponry between the two men.

Tony Williamson, an accomplished British thriller writer (The Doomsday Contract), laces a Buchanesque suspense story with fine technological detail. Going beyond the vulnerability of those North Sea oilfields, he also makes some timely comments about the people who run his country: "The grand British malaise, that curious blend of apathy and optimism that led otherwise intelligent men to the assumption that, in the end, they would muddle through." They always do, of course.

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