Able Team #5: Cairo Countdown

Able Team #5: Cairo Countdown, by Dick Stivers
April, 1983  Gold Eagle Books

Man, it’s been forever since I read a volume of Able Team. And I’m not even sure what the holdup’s been, as I have a bunch of them, mostly the ones that were written by early series mastermind GH Frost. But as any Gold Eagle veteran knows, if you read the copyright page you’ll see who the real author was, receiving a special acknowledgement in tiny print. While Cairo Countdown is clearly the work of G.H. Frost – same as the previous one was, even though it was credited to “C.J. Shiao” – the copyright page acknowledges Paul Hofrichter!

But folks there’s no way in hell this book was written by the guy who gave us Roadblaster. To make it all even more perplexing, back in 2011 G.H. Frost himself left a comment on my review of Army Of Devils (one of the best damn men’s adventure novels ever published – and then some!!), where he specifically mentioned this very novel:

In Cairo Countdown, I had written the closing scene as summary justice. The Muslim Brotherhood government infiltrator who had choregraphed the missile-assassinations of pilots, then the kidnapping and torture of an American serviceman, the Egyptian had kicked the American close to death -- so I had Lyons do a justice scene on him. 

When Lyons captured the Egyptian, he shot off his feet. “He'll never kick an American again.” 

More or less. I can't find my typescript of the novel. 

( Just now, I looked for my copy of the book. It's in a box somewhere. If I remember correctly, the published last page cuts off, as if the editor simply crossed out paragraphs. Look at the book, I think that's it. ) 

So the editor had decided to not renew my contract. At that time, there were many wars in the world. I wanted to go somewhere interesting, I wanted to finish my contract, take the payoff, and go – 

I wanted to finish the last books on the contract and take off for another country. So ... I hyped up with coffee, wrote hyped until I passed out, woke, wrote.

So I’d love to know how Hofrichter could’ve gotten the credit for Cairo Countdown. Either it was a publisher snafu or he did some “polishing” of Frost’s manuscript – but still, for the most part this book reads like Frost. I mean there’s a world of difference between the writing styles of GH Frost and Paul Hofrichter. Perhaps Frost’s mention of Gold Eagle wanting to fire him factors into this (even though he went on to write many more installments of the series), and Hofrichter was given credit for the book in some passive-aggressive scheme to keep Frost from getting any royalty payments – as I understand it, early in the Gold Eagle days the ghostwriters got a certain cut of this.

But as I say, this definitely is the work of Frost, or at the very least the majority of it is – there are even a few flashbacks to the previous volume, in an effort to develop some continuity. But this being Gold Eagle and all, “continuity” is mostly relegated to subplots concerning guns and stuff; last time Carl “Ironman” Lyons, the leader of Able Team, had a lot of trouble with his Beretta 93R when the 9mm bullets failed to take out his targets with the first shot. So now Stony Man – ie the government compound in which Mack Bolan, Phoenix Force, and Able Team operate out of – armorer Konzaki has developed a modified .45 that has a three-shot burst feature, same as the 93R did, but with the stopping power of a .45. Plus it’s also nearly silent. This is all shown, rather than told, in a fun scene where Lyons and Konzaki go out into the woods to test out a bunch of guns, sort of like the Gold Eagle version of a picnic.

From here though it’s straight into the action, and ultimately Cairo Countdown is an endless sequence of action scenes. Lyons’ pager goes off while he’s out testing his guns, and next we see him he’s arrived in Egypt with his Able Team comrades Gadgets Schwartz and Pol Balancales. And guys I still can’t figure it out, but Gadgets is the one with the moustache on the covers and Pol’s the one with the gray hair, right? We don’t get much description at all, nor any reminder of the series setup, but we do at least learn that Gadgets and Pol are Vietnam vets – first introduced way back in The Executioner #2 – and Lyons isn’t, thus there are a few parts where they appraise his performance in the field, saying he’s doing pretty good for a non-vet. (Lyons for his part also first appeared in the The Executioner #2, but he was a cop and had a wife and a kid at the time, and I’ve never seen them mentioned in this series, so that’s another mystery for me.)

There’s a Very Special Guest Star this time: Yakov Katzenlenbogen, leader of Phoenix Force, who acts as an intermediary between the CIA and Egyptian officials and Able Team out on the field. There’s not too much interraction between Katz and Able Team, and honestly the parts with him could be courtesy a different author, ie Paul Hofrichter, but they still read like the rest of the book for the most part. I was surprised though that not too much was really made of Katz’s presence, but seeing his name in print took me back to my childhood in the ‘80s when I was obsessed with Phoenix Force. For the most part though he just handles the dumb officials who try to prevent the guys in Able Team from getting too violent in their quest to crush the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been blowing up US spy planes that run out of a secret base on Cairo’s airport.

But this ain’t no Robert Ludlum suspense yarn; within moments of arriving in Cairo our heroes are already on the move, getting in a protracted chase on the busy streets of the city, riding in separate taxis and following various terrorists. They’ve also got some local help, one of whom talks in outrageous slang and has more personality than the heroes themselves. Actually the Able Team guys are pretty cool – Frost capabably captures the easy-going banter the series would be known for – but they’re a bit lost amid the endless barrage of action. But it must be mentioned that the endless barrage of action isn’t nearly as ultra-gory as in the later Army Of Devils, even though Able Team again employs their Atchisson auto-shotguns; it’s just that more detail was made of the ensuing guts and gore in Army Of Devils.

Overall it’s kind of hard to review Cairo Countdown, because it’s just an endless action scene for the most part. Able Team hits various Muslim Brotherhood strongholds, running roughshod over Cairo within hours of their arrival. A fun part in the book occurs after one of these strikes; an exhausted Able Team enjoys a sort of catered lunch, with boxes of burgers, fries, and etc delivered to them on the street so they can grab a quick bite before kicking more terrorist ass! Late in the game a subplot develops that the terrorists have abducted a CIA operative, and the team is desperate to track him down and get him back before he can be tortured and killed. This entails at one point a nicely-done sequence where Able Team descends into the sewers beneath Cairo to assault an underground stronghold. But the agent is moved out of Cairo, to the remote village of El-Minya, where he’s held hostage within a heavily-fortified compound.

The novel climaxes with a big action scene, as Able Team manages to infiltrate the compound by cunning and by craft. The bit Frost mentioned in his comment occurs here; the main terrorist leader in this compound is blown up, and Lyons ties a tourniquet on the stumps of his legs to keep him from bleeding out. There’s no “He’ll never kick another American” line, and overall the vibe is more that the Team is happy the dude’s still alive so he can give them the needed info. This could be indication that someone did indeed edit Frost’s original manuscript, that person being Paul Hofrichter. But as I say, the majority of the book just reads more like Frost, so I guess it will have to remain a mystery. 

Overall though there was a bit of a bland feeling to Cairo Countdown, too much of it in the generic “terrorist of the week” vibe of many of these Gold Eagle publications. But then given that this one was published in 1983, perhaps it seemed more so “new” than generic at the time. It’s no Army Of Devils, though, which only indicates that Frost would get better and better. It’s certainly well-written, with a nice focus on the personalities of the main characters – Gadgets and Pol have a realistic banter that clearly identifies them as vets – but it’s just not as over the top as I prefer my men’s adventure to be. But then that could be because Frost’s manuscript was tinkered with, who knows.