Gerald Seymour’s `Condition Black’ a satisfying thriller

CONDITION BLACK, by Gerald Seymour, Morrow, 336 pages, $20.

The menacing figure of Saddam Hussein hovers darkly over this taut, timely and terrifying thriller whose action takes place shortly before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The author, a former television news reporter, tells the suspenseful tale in spare, hard-hitting prose that beats like a hammer on the anvil of the reader’s mind. The book’s format further heightens the sense of excitement. Each of its 18 chapters is divided into from five or six to 10 or 11 segments, with each segment complete in that it deals with a plot step or character insight. And because Seymour employs the omniscient point of view — which is to say that the reader is privy to the private thoughts of the story’s characters — there are no secrets or surprises (with the exception of the powerful and unexpected ending). It is the author’s skillful use of these literary devices that generates the narrative’s flow of suspense.

Bill Erlich, FBI special agent attached to the U.S. Embassy in Rome with the rank of assistant legal attache, comes on like gangbusters. Young, ambitious, determined to get ahead, he is, nevertheless, loyal to his friends. When he learns that a good friend, a CIA operative, has been gunned down by an Iraqi terrorist on a quiet suburban street in Athens, Erlich promises the murdered friend’s widow that no matter how long it takes he will track down the assassin. His resolve deepens when he learns that the terrorist’s real target was the Iraqi dissident with whom his friend was conferring, and that the second killing was incidental to the primary murder. Wasting no time, Erlich collects a number of interesting clues: a small boy had heard the assassin’s driver call him “Colt”; and from this slim lead it had been established that he was in his 20s, had short, blond hair, and was a renegade Englishman.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq at the Tuwaithah Atomic Energy headquarters, the small, slim Dr. Tariq, director of the Atomic Energy Commission, was nervously speculating how to break the news to his master, Saddam Hussein, that Mossad agents had liquidated Iraq’s most recent scientific recruit, Dr. Zulfiqar Khan, nuclear implosion expert without whose expertise their nuclear research would come to a grinding halt. They were everywhere, those Zionists. Tariq recalled how 10 years ago a Zionist air attack had dumped 16 tons of explosive ordnance into Iraq’s Osirak reactor, reducing to rubble the effort that had cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lost working hours. The nuclear program, put on hold during the years of the war with Iran, was now reactivated by order of the chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, Saddam Hussein. How would Saddam take this latest news? Tariq felt a thrill of fear. He had been told that merely because a general had offered an opinion Saddam did not share, the madman had shot the general dead.

Over in England, at the British Atomic Establishment in Aldermaston, the brilliant Senior Scientific Officer Frederick Bissett, an implosion physics expert, was also in a stew. His concerns were personal. He was fretting over his meager salary and the dissatisfaction of his attractive wife who tired of trying to make ends meet; and he resented the indifference of his superiors to the excellent job he was doing at work.

Spurred on by desperation and fear, Dr. Tariq summons the colonel, ruthless director of Iraq’s military intelligence department of terrorism, torture and interrogation. In essence he tells him to use any means to recruit a scientist who specializes in the physics of implosion. And to do so at once. Quickly the colonel contacts his killing machine, Colt, who is tailing his latest target in London, and gives him explicit orders. Unknown to Colt, Bill Erlich is also in London conferring with British intelligence, and he now knows that his quarry’s name is Colin Olivier Louis Tuck whose parents live in the small English village of Warminster, and that he is wanted by Scotland Yard for murder. Relentlessly, the parallel plot lines move ever closer until they converge in a collision of action.

“Condition Black” — FBI nomenclature for “lethal assault in progress” — holds the reader enthralled. This is not a thriller one can take or leave. Once aboard, one is bound to stay the course.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a regular feature in the monthly Books in Review section. Goodrich also writes a review column, and is the author of the award-winning nature story series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”