The Intruders is the sequel to Flight of the Intruder, by Stephen Coonts – one of the best flight combat aviation novels from the Vietnam War, which stayed on the New York Times hardcover bestseller lists for 28 weeks. Flight of the Intruder was published in 1986, and The Intruders was published in 1994 following the publishing of four other Jake Grafton books: Final Flight (1988), The Minotaur (1989), Under Siege (1990) and The Red Horseman (1993).
The Intruders
For Lieutenant Jake Grafton, USN, fresh from two combat cruises and a harrowing shoot-down over Laos, the personal battle is just beginning. He, like many others, finds that his country has not welcomed him home with open arms, but with closed minds and closed fists. When his girlfriend’s father called him a murderer, Jake walked away. But when a stranger in a bar challenged his honor, the man was not so lucky – he landed in the hospital, and Jake in jail.
Grafton’s shore-duty commander, who bailed him out, has devised the perfect punishment for his ace flight instructor: an eight-month cruise on the aircraft carrier Columbia teaching jarheads – Marines – the nuances of carrier aviation. Flying missions over Vietnam was a living hell; now Grafton’s about to discover another world of fresh hell.
The Marines may be made of tempered steel and brass balls, but taking off and landing from a slippery flight deck, on a choppy sea in a pitch-black night, there is no margin for error or for animosity. And men like Marine Captain Flap Le Beau, his bombardier and navigator, have a real gift for pushing Jake’s buttons. They belong to the same society of warriors, they fought in the same war, and they drink the same whiskey to toast fallen comrades. Now they must fly together in the same cockpit, must lock into each other and into their million-dollar machine, and make the split-second decisions which will insure that, tonight, their fellow pilots won’t raise a glass to them.
The Intruders is a good book, and interesting for readers of the Jake Grafton series. But the plot is weak. We follow Jake Grafton through a set of isolated episodes spanning an eight-month period, rather than a single continuous plot. The strengths of the book lie in its excellent descriptions of how naval aviation works, and Stephen Coonts’ writing, full of wit and intelligence. It is even so one of the weaker novels in this series.
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