The Protector #3: Hit Parade

The Protector #3: Hit Parade, by Rich Rainey

December, 1983  Pinnacle Books

It’s the ICE squad versus the Commies in this third volume of The Protector, Rich Rainey turning in what is basically a Cold War thriller with only a few action scenes. The best part about Hit Parade is its wholly unexpected detour into rock novel territory, as one of the Commies poses as the member of a popular music group. Otherwise the novel wasn’t my cup of tea, and seemed overlong and sluggish at 200+ pages. 

One new thing this time is that cipher-like series protagonist, Alex Dartanian, gets lucky; curiously he didn’t in the previous volume, even though he spent the narrative hanging out with a porn queen. Rainey is not one to exploit violence or sex, though, meaning that Dartanian’s bedroom shenanigans occur off-page. Same too goes for the musician-slash-KGB-assassin mentioned above, Mikhail Dragovia, who at one point in the novel satiates himself with a pair of young groupies. Speaking of which, Dragovia’s fame in the rock world is what I’m assuming inspired the title of the book, a play on the then-popular music magazine Hit Parader. 

Well anyway, the story is pretty simple. A KGB official in Vienna named Esenkov is in danger of losing his position and, to curry favor with Moscow, decides to wipe out all the CIA agents and undercover agents in the city. To this end he employs top assassin Mikhail Dragovia, who plays “synthesizer strings” for famous “electronic/classical quartet” Exechequer. Known as “The Monk,” Dragovia is a sadist who enjoys wiping out the agents – cue several scenes in the novel in which one-off characters are killed off by the Monk and his hit teams. 

Meanwhile Dartanian, when we meet him, is taking a page from a concurrent (but vastly superior) Pinnacle offering: The Hitman. Posing as a drunk in New York, Dartanian has been trailing a guy who managed to beat the rap on a few murders. Our hero dispenses his own personal law and order via his customary Skorpion submachine gun, shooting the guy down in cold blood. This will prove to be Dartanian’s most memorable moment in the novel. Otherwise there’s nothing that really sticks about him and he’s one of the more forgettable men’s adventure protagonists. 

That said, we’re informed that Dartanian quit the CIA and started up ICE because he intended it to have the “heart and soul” that the Agency itself didn’t. Uh, okay. Last time I theorized that Rich Rainey might’ve been another pseudonym of David Alexander, and I still detect at least a little Alexander-esque vibe in Hit Parade. I mean the title alone might be a giveaway; wasn’t “hit parader” one of the descriptive phrases Alexander would use for random gun-toting thugs in Phoenix? Not only that, but the plot of Hit Parade is similar to the second installment of Alexander’s later Nomad series (which I started reading months ago but never finished for some reason), with random CIA agents being gunned down. 

Dartanian takes the job from a former CIA colleague who is desperate to stave off the assassinations in Prague. He puts the army of ICE on the job, but as ever it comes down to Dartanian’s two erstwhile sidekicks: Sin Simara (the Asian one) and Mick Porter (the muscular one). This time we also meet the Smurfette of the group, Val Wagner, “the sole female ICE operative.” Dartanian and Val are a former item, but romance hasn’t fully bloomed ‘cause they could each get killed at any moment, yadda yadda. Regardless, Dartanian puts the moves on her when he arrives in Vienna, but the extent of the sex scene is a lame, “The naked clash of their fine-tuned bodies was long and gentle.” 

So yeah, this probably isn’t David Alexander under a pseudonym. Even the violence is minimal, with simple declarative sentences like, “He shot him in the head,” with no ensuing description of the fountaining gore. But then, Alexander showed the same restraint in Nomad, so who knows. I haven’t spent much time researching Rainey, and just know his name was attributed to the last two volumes of The Warlord, which he wrote as “Jason Frost.” 

The novel soon becomes repetitive, with Dragovia and his squads wiping out one-off CIA agents, and then Dartanian and team sending out retaliatory hit squads. More focus is placed on the Cold War thriller angle, with lots of dithering among various agents and information peddlers as Dartanian tries to figure out who is behind the sudden attack on the CIA in Vienna. Meanwhile we readers know who it is, and also that Dragovia the Monk is the key assassin. Midway through the novel things really pick up when Rainey focuses on Dragovia’s day job in Exechequer, and we learn the group is like an ‘80s take on the prog pomposity of Emerson, Lake and Palmer: 

Stuff like this isn’t enough to bring the novel out of its lethargy, though. The action scenes just fail to be spectacular, mostly because they lack much momentum: 

The suspense angle continues to take precedence even into the homestretch, with plotting between Dragovia and KGB boss Esenkov, mostly centered around Esenkov’s mistress, whom Dragovia wants for himself. In fact this plotting takes away the promise of a big action finale, with the Monk’s comeuppance dealt with in what I considered an altogether anticlimactic fashion. 

Who knows if ensuing volumes picked up the pace, as The Porn Tapes and Hit Parade are currently the only two volumes of The Protector that I have.