Black Site

My undergraduate honors thesis back in 1987 followed the cultural and historical line linking the archetypal Kentucky frontiersman Simon Kenton with special operations forces of the 20^th Century, most specifically Delta Force.

(Yes, I’ve been obsessed with this stuff my whole life. My folks have pictures of me in a coonskin cap when I was five).

There was nothing ground-breaking about the work; the connections are fairly obvious. I was just doing what I did through my whole academic “career” — sought ways to make the stories I loved “relevant.” Musta worked. I got my degree with honors of some sort that I don’t remember.

Anyway…

I concluded back in ’87, still in the era of the Cold War and an era of state-sponsored terrorism, that the scope of action for the heirs of Kenton, Al Sieber and Major P.J. Pretorius was narrowing. The “frontier partisan” would remain a potent cultural icon, but his modern counterpart would be less and less of a major factor in contemporary warfare. I really thought that, the odd hostage rescue situation or maybe some shenanigans in the banana republics aside, his day was just about done.

Wrong.

September 11 happened and all of a sudden it was Corps of Guides and Malakand Field Force 21^st Century style. Special operations forces took on an unprecedented level of work, conducting raids to capture or kill high-value targets at a mind-boggling pace sustained for over a decade.

History doesn’t repeat itself, exactly, but it sure does cycle in patterns…

All that is by way of introduction to a contemporary military thriller by a former Delta Force operator who goes by the nom de plume Dalton Fury. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t read a whole lot of that sort of thing; it takes something special to pull me out of the 18th-early 20^th centuries and keep me reading.

Fury’s first novel, “Black Site” did that in spades.

The hero of the tale is Kolt Raynor, a country boy who grew up rambling the Smokies. Raynor’s impetuosity (a trait his creator says he shares) led him to overstretch and blow a mission on the Af/Pak frontier. Men died and Raynor was bounced from the Unit. And out of the Army. He landed hard and ugly.

No plot synopsis here: Suffice it to say he is pulled back in to the shadow war.

The main job of a thriller writer is to keep the reader turning pages to find out what happens next, how the hell the hero is going to get out of this one. Fury does that just fine and in a manner that feels authentic — as it should, given his credentials. The writing is fluid, at the high end of serviceable. It ain’t Cormac McCarthy, or James Carlos Blake, but it’s solid.

That’s all well and good. For me, the real strength of “Black Site” is the depiction of Raynor. He is no super-soldier. He’s tough, trained to a high pitch of capability and he’s aggressive, maybe to a fault. But he also feels fear, exhaustion, pain and acute shame. He’s real.

And he’s real in a way that resonates with the qualities of his ancestors.

I’ve emphasized before that the frontier partisan was not superhuman. Some, like Sam Brady, Simon Kenton and Lewis Wetzel were clearly exceptional athletes. Wild Bill Hickock was reportedly an impressive specimen before alcohol and glaucoma slowed him down.

But many operated at far less than optimal physical capacity due to injury, poor diet and or disease (P.J. Pretorius suffered repeated bouts of malaria). There is nothing to indicate that Al Sieber was a great athlete, but man could he take punishment. He was reputed to have absorbed 27 different wounds. Even if that’s an exaggeration, we know for sure that he was sorely wounded in the Civil War and ended his Apache Wars scouting career with a crippling wound to his ankle courtesy of the Apache Kid breakout.

It was mental toughness that kept the frontier partisan going, a never-quit attitude and probably a good dose of pure cussedness.

That’s Kolt Raynor. He’s pretty banged up, but he just won’t lie down and quit, even when there’s a part of him that yearns to. The oblivion of whisky is a siren’s call for Raynor, just as it was for so many of his ancestors, who, like Robert Rogers, died broke and alcoholic. But no matter his flaws, no matter his injuries, no matter the burdens of past actions, he keeps going.

And that kept me rooting for him, all the way through “Black Site.” And I’ll be there again for “Tier One Wild.”