Books |
Window of Exposure
Roccie Hill
By
Published: Aug 11, 2015
Category:
Fiction
A few years ago, I reviewed Roccie Hill’s novel, Three Minutes on Love. It had rock music and rock photography and rock drugs, and it had them down cold. “You don’t have to care about rock music to be excited about this novel,” I concluded. “You just have to care about good writing.
“Window of Exposure” offers more writing that is both terse and emotional, but this time the stakes are higher. The main character here, like the female photographer of “Three Minutes,” is a woman-and-a-half. She’s Kate Cardenas, a graduate of the Air Force Academy, an F-16 pilot, a onetime candidate for test pilot school. Then she gave it all up. Now she’s an operative for the Defense Intelligence Agency, flying an “asset” — a captured al Qaeda fighter — to an airport in the Azores. Once she hands him over to the CIA, she’ll zip back to her home in the South of France. Not the biggest challenge, and the landing and handover are flawless.
Then the transfer vehicle blows up. Everyone dies. Everyone but Kate.
End of chapter one.
In chapter two, James Cullen — you know, head of Cullen Industries, a major defense contractor — is about to be sworn in as Secretary of Commerce.
Cullen has children by several marriages. One is a businessman. One is a drunk and womanizer. And one knows Kate: “Neither of them had been able to shake off the memories of the years they had loved each other.”
In the way of the world, the drunk picks up a waitress in a bar outside Paris. She smiles when he offers her a ride home. She allows him to slip his hand under her skirt. And when the driver spots a burning car on the road and skids to a stop with a bullet in his head, she drags Cullen to a getaway car. The inevitable hostage video will follow: “The United States is a fascist aggressor….”
Kate will lead the rescue team. Ben Cullen, her lost lover, will be on it. As will a priest who’s no longer a priest — now he’s a Captain in French Special Ops, specializing in combat rescue and recon. As he explains, “We are not a monastery anymore. We have all become soldiers of one kind or another. Like the apostles of Jesus, who were warriors before the history of Christ was rewritten by fat popes and greedy kings.” These are not Stallones or Schwarzeneggers; these characters have depth. They can kill and talk. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
This team has no illusions about the kind of people they’re dealing with. “In 2002, we were chasing haji across Italy. They had the daughter of the American Consul in Milan. By the time we got to Brindisi it was too late. They had murdered her. Know what they left us? A pair of dice they’d carved from her femur.”
The rescue is, blessedly, in the south of France, so there’s at least some nice scenery to cut the tension. And you believe all of it. The language is crisp and precise. “Time hack.” “Comp.” In a black sheath over her thigh, Kate slips her “special Applegate-Fairburn knife that opened and locked with the touch of one finger.”
Roccie Hill, who lived and taught in France, has one child. She’s a pilot — a Major in the Air Force. These two biographical facts explain a great deal about a novel that is a movie waiting to happen.
