But before Alan can continue the secret unofficial part of his mission in Mombasa, the town and USNS Harker are bombed.  (www.navy.mil.com defines USNS as a public ship that is in the custody of the Navy.)  Alan is filmed by French newscaster defending the ship from a sniper.

Rose is at NASA astronaut training in Houston.  After Alan’s caught on film, Rose is attacked while driving her kids to school.  Rose defends her children and herself and kills the attackers.  Then another bomb goes off in Cairo at an AID office.  (AID is an U.S. agency devoted to international development.)  The Navy thinks all three attacks are related.  But what is the connection and why?

Gordon Kent is a pseudonym for Ken and Christian Cameron, a father-son team, who according to their website, write “novels with emphasis on authenticity, as both are former intelligence professionals and military.”  Their former experience with military is obvious in the jargon used throughout the book.  Unfortunately for the reader, the authors assume the general public knows more about military (U.S. and foreign) than they actually do.  Most of the military terms and acronyms go undefined.  For example, the tile of the book is based on the hero’s job in the U.S. Force Protection division, yet what the Force Protection division does is never defined. 

I Googled force protection and found the U.S. Navy Antiterrorism and Force Protection Ashore Program website (http://atfp.nfesc.navy.mil/).  Thank goodness for the Internet or I still wouldn’t know what the hero’s job is or what the title of book means.  By the way, force protection is “Security program developed to protect service members, civilian employees, family members, facilities and equipment, in all locations and situations, through the planned and integrated application of combating terrorism, physical security, operations security, personal protective services supported by intelligence, counterintelligence, and other security programs.”  I also Googled USNS (above).  Eventually, I got tired of looking up undefined acronyms and stopped.

Force Protection starts out with an exciting fast paced bang.  But the pace is not kept up making the plot long and drawn out.  The authors introduce minor characters with lots of detail.  I don’t need to know the personal and military history of the guy flying a fighter plane for a few pages.  Details on little things are too involved, like the mental book review a military person has while waiting for his shore leave.  Characters are introduced or dropped.  The over 500 pages spans only five days, but the level of detail and slow pacing made it feel longer.

This book was easy to put down and very hard to pick up.  Anyone who decides to take it on should have a military dictionary near by.

--Terry Lawrence