Afterburn Read online

  Afterburn

  Colin Harrison

  Picador (1999)

  * * *

  Rating: ★★★☆☆

  Tags: Organized Crime, Ex-Convicts, Contemporary, Fiction, Suspense, Thriller Fiction, General, Thriller

  Organized Crimettt Ex-Convictsttt Contemporaryttt Fictionttt Suspensettt Thriller Fictionttt Generalttt Thrillerttt

  * * *

  Our Review

  Be Forewarned

  Colin Harrison's fourth novel, Afterburn, recounts the violent convergence of three desperate, very damaged people, all of whom are searching for the missing element -- love, personal safety, an end to guilt, a sense of genetic continuity -- whose absence dominates their lives. It is a powerful -- and powerfully written -- thriller, but it is also a dark, graphic, and occasionally desolate one. Readers in search of a light, suspenseful diversion should consider themselves warned and look for something else.

  Afterburn opens with an extended prologue set in Southeast Asia in 1972. With great narrative immediacy, Harrison shows us the dark heart of the American experience in Vietnam by zeroing in on a single character: Charlie Ravich, an American pilot who has flown nearly 100 bombing missions over enemy territory. On his final mission, Charlie is shot down and captured by North Vietnamese troops. For an unspecified period that has the timeless quality of a nightmare, Charlie is imprisoned, questioned, and tortured, before being accidentally rescued and very nearly killed by a roving company of marines. These early scenes of extreme cruelty set the tone for much of the rest of the book.

  The second section moves the action forward to the fall of 1999. Charlie Ravich, scarred and battered but still a survivor, is once again in the Far East, this time in Hong Kong. Charlie is now the founder and CEO of a telecommunications development company called Technetrix and has come to China to negotiate a loan that will enable him to build a state-of-the-art factory on Chinese soil. By bizarre coincidence, Charlie finds himself first on the scene when billionaire industrialist Henry Lai suffers a fatal heart attack. Within minutes of Lai's death, Charlie parlays his insider's knowledge of that death into a stock market transaction that nets him an instant $16 million profit. Here, and everywhere else in Afterburn, blood and money are inextricably connected.

  Windfall profits aside, the Charlie Ravich of these later years has fallen on hard times. On a professional level, he is engaged in a constant struggle to keep his company alive and viable in a fiercely competitive market. On a personal level, he has suffered an irreversible series of losses. His wife, Ellie, is behaving erratically and appears to be entering the early stages of Alzheimer's. His son, Ben, is dead, killed by leukemia at the age of 19. His daughter, Julia, is incapable of bearing children. Unable to face the prospect of his bloodline dying out, Charlie decides that, one way or another, he will father a new child, and he initiates a clandestine search for a suitable surrogate mother.

  Charlie's story is one of three primary narratives that alternate and, eventually, intersect. One of these concerns Christina Welles, a 27-year-old Columbia dropout with a head for numbers and a complicated past. As the novel opens, she is serving a seven-year sentence for her part in a series of truck thefts performed under the auspices of local Mob boss Tony Verducci. When her sentence is suddenly commuted after four years, she goes underground in New York City, believing, with good reason, that the vengeful, unpredictable Verducci has unpleasant plans for her.

  The third major protagonist is Rick Bocca, a former bodybuilder who was once Christina's lover, as well as her partner in the truck theft ring. Rick has spent four years brooding over Christina's incarceration, believing that she received the punishment that should have been reserved for him. Before the novel is over, he will receive more than his fair share of extreme, and belated, punishment.

  The driving force behind the plot is Tony Verducci's conviction that Rick will lead him to Christina, who will lead him, in turn, to a cache of money he believes was stolen from him years before. When Charlie Ravich meets Christina in a New York City bar, he enters into a brief, unplanned relationship with her, then finds himself trapped in someone else's nightmare, victimized by forces he can neither understand nor control. By the end of the novel, all of the players have come together in a single room, a modern-day torture chamber in which the rules of the civilized world are suspended, in which everything -- without exception -- is permitted.

  In the end, Afterburn is a novel about many things: fate, guilt, grief, greed, and the blind human struggle to survive under the most appalling conditions and to establish some connection with the bleak, uncertain future. It is also, at bottom, a novel about cruelty: the unconscious cruelty of the universe and the deliberate, studied cruelty of men who will do anything in the name of money. With a directness and a clarity of expression that is reminiscent -- and worthy -- of Robert Stone, Colin Harrison stares into the abyss of human misery and does not flinch. In Afterburn he has created a grim, graphic, darkly memorable thriller that is difficult to put down and even more difficult to forget.

  --Bill Sheehan

  Afterburn

  Colin Harrison

  Picador (1999)

  * * *

  Rating: ★★★☆☆

  Tags: Organized Crime, Ex-Convicts, Contemporary, Fiction, Suspense, Thriller Fiction, General, Thriller

  Organized Crimettt Ex-Convictsttt Contemporaryttt Fictionttt Suspensettt Thriller Fictionttt Generalttt Thrillerttt

  * * *

  Our Review

  Be Forewarned

  Colin Harrison's fourth novel, Afterburn, recounts the violent convergence of three desperate, very damaged people, all of whom are searching for the missing element -- love, personal safety, an end to guilt, a sense of genetic continuity -- whose absence dominates their lives. It is a powerful -- and powerfully written -- thriller, but it is also a dark, graphic, and occasionally desolate one. Readers in search of a light, suspenseful diversion should consider themselves warned and look for something else.

  Afterburn opens with an extended prologue set in Southeast Asia in 1972. With great narrative immediacy, Harrison shows us the dark heart of the American experience in Vietnam by zeroing in on a single character: Charlie Ravich, an American pilot who has flown nearly 100 bombing missions over enemy territory. On his final mission, Charlie is shot down and captured by North Vietnamese troops. For an unspecified period that has the timeless quality of a nightmare, Charlie is imprisoned, questioned, and tortured, before being accidentally rescued and very nearly killed by a roving company of marines. These early scenes of extreme cruelty set the tone for much of the rest of the book.

  The second section moves the action forward to the fall of 1999. Charlie Ravich, scarred and battered but still a survivor, is once again in the Far East, this time in Hong Kong. Charlie is now the founder and CEO of a telecommunications development company called Technetrix and has come to China to negotiate a loan that will enable him to build a state-of-the-art factory on Chinese soil. By bizarre coincidence, Charlie finds himself first on the scene when billionaire industrialist Henry Lai suffers a fatal heart attack. Within minutes of Lai's death, Charlie parlays his insider's knowledge of that death into a stock market transaction that nets him an instant $16 million profit. Here, and everywhere else in Afterburn, blood and money are inextricably connected.

  Windfall profits aside, the Charlie Ravich of these later years has fallen on hard times. On a professional level, he is engaged in a constant struggle to keep his company alive and viable in a fiercely competitive market. On a personal level, he has suffered an irreversible series of losses. His wife, Ellie, is behaving erratically and appears to be entering the early stages of Alzheimer's. His son, Ben, is dead, killed by leukemia at the age of 19. His daughter, Julia, is incap
able of bearing children. Unable to face the prospect of his bloodline dying out, Charlie decides that, one way or another, he will father a new child, and he initiates a clandestine search for a suitable surrogate mother.

  Charlie's story is one of three primary narratives that alternate and, eventually, intersect. One of these concerns Christina Welles, a 27-year-old Columbia dropout with a head for numbers and a complicated past. As the novel opens, she is serving a seven-year sentence for her part in a series of truck thefts performed under the auspices of local Mob boss Tony Verducci. When her sentence is suddenly commuted after four years, she goes underground in New York City, believing, with good reason, that the vengeful, unpredictable Verducci has unpleasant plans for her.

  The third major protagonist is Rick Bocca, a former bodybuilder who was once Christina's lover, as well as her partner in the truck theft ring. Rick has spent four years brooding over Christina's incarceration, believing that she received the punishment that should have been reserved for him. Before the novel is over, he will receive more than his fair share of extreme, and belated, punishment.

  The driving force behind the plot is Tony Verducci's conviction that Rick will lead him to Christina, who will lead him, in turn, to a cache of money he believes was stolen from him years before. When Charlie Ravich meets Christina in a New York City bar, he enters into a brief, unplanned relationship with her, then finds himself trapped in someone else's nightmare, victimized by forces he can neither understand nor control. By the end of the novel, all of the players have come together in a single room, a modern-day torture chamber in which the rules of the civilized world are suspended, in which everything -- without exception -- is permitted.

  In the end, Afterburn is a novel about many things: fate, guilt, grief, greed, and the blind human struggle to survive under the most appalling conditions and to establish some connection with the bleak, uncertain future. It is also, at bottom, a novel about cruelty: the unconscious cruelty of the universe and the deliberate, studied cruelty of men who will do anything in the name of money. With a directness and a clarity of expression that is reminiscent -- and worthy -- of Robert Stone, Colin Harrison stares into the abyss of human misery and does not flinch. In Afterburn he has created a grim, graphic, darkly memorable thriller that is difficult to put down and even more difficult to forget.

  --Bill Sheehan

  Afterburn

  ALSO BY COLIN HARRISON

  Manhattan Nocturne

  Bodies Electric

  Break and Enter

  COLIN HARRISON

  Afterburn

  FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

  * * *

  New York

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  19 Union Square West, New York 10003

  Copyright © 2000 by Colin Harrison

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  Published in association with St. Martin's Press, Incorporated

  Printed in the United States of America

  Designed by Abby Kagan

  First edition, 2000

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harrison, Colin, 1960-

  Afterburn / Colin Harrison.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-374-70019-2

  I. Title.

  PS3558.A6655A69 1999

  813'.54—dc21 99-13660

  For my father

  Contents

  Prologue: Takhli Air Force Base, Thailand

  • May 1972

  China Club, Hong Kong

  • September 7, 1999

  Women's Correctional Facility, Bedford Hills, New York

  • September 7, 1999

  Orient Point, Long Island, New York

  • September 7, 1999

  817 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan

  • September 9, 1999

  215 East Fourth Street, Manhattan

  • September 9, 1999

  604 Carroll Street, Brooklyn

  • September 11, 1999

  Park Avenue Partners Fertility Clinic,

  Forty-eighth Street and Park Avenue, Manhattan

  • September 14, 1999

  Staten Island Ferry, New York Harbor

  • September 14, 1999

  Jim-Jack Bar & Restaurant,

  Broadway and Bleecker, Manhattan

  • September 15, 1999

  Snyder, Wainwright, Lovell & Passaro,

  Fiftieth Street and Lexington Avenue, Manhattan

  • September 20, 1999

  Bar, Pierre Hotel,

  Sixty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, Manhattan

  • September 20, 1999

  Near Thirteenth Street and Tenth Avenue, Manhattan

  • September 21, 1999

  Room 527, Pierre Hotel,

  Sixty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, Manhattan

  • September 21, 1999

  Emergency Room, Bellevue Hospital,

  East Twenty-seventh Street and First Avenue, Manhattan

  • September 22, 1999

  Peace Hotel, Shanghai, China

  • September 24, 1999

  Pioneer Hotel, 341 Broome Street, Chinatown, Manhattan

  • September 27, 1999

  Vista del Mar Retirement Village, Princeton, New Jersey

  • September 27, 1999

  Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Brooklyn

  • September 28, 1999

  M&R Bar-Dining Room, 264 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan

  • September 28, 1999

  Near Thirteenth Street and Tenth Avenue, Manhattan

  • September 28, 1999

  Edwards Air Force Base, California

  • Spring, 1966

  106th Street and Columbus Avenue,Manhattan

  • November 2, 1999

  Torture is senseless violence, born of fear. The purpose of it is to force from one tongue, amid its screams and its vomiting up of blood, the secret of everything . . . Whether the victim talks or whether he dies under his agony, the secret that he cannot tell is always somewhere else and out of reach.

  —Sartre

  Afterburn

  Prologue: Takhli Air Force Base, Thailand

  May 1972

  HE SLEPT ON EARTH but woke in the sky, he remembered years in order to forget seconds, he lived so that others might die.

  In his cement-block quarters an air conditioner chunked night to dawn. The Thai housegirls disappeared when he stirred. At the pre-flight briefing he listened as the frag order—the incomplete target list direct from Saigon or Pentagon Far East—was announced. Then marched stiff-legged to the cockpit of the F-4. Later, beer and darts in the officers' club. And repeat. Bolt breakfast, get the weather report, brief the mission, figure the day's ordnance, run the pre-flight instrument check, line the birds up, boom off the ground, dash in across the jungle, clouds piled against the mountains—hard to ignore the beauty—deliver the load, dash out. Shower, write up the flight, do it again the next day. Count your missions. No sleep, but the food was excellent. He and the other pilots built a dirt basketball court near the airfield, and at the age of thirty-one, he could still get his palm above the rim. All the pilots were good guys and most were real bastards, too. They argued about everything. Nixon. Football teams. How to eat a monkey. The deep structure of the CIA. Hunting rifles. Conflicting theories regarding the locus of the female orgasm. Techniques for inducing same. Then back to it.

  The squadrons competed to see how many missions they could score. The targets ranged from railway depots south of Hanoi, bridges, truck camps, and factories to North Vietnamese troop positions, surface-to-air missile sites, and even empty hilltops needing to be flattened for use as helicopter landing zones. On R&R he flew to Saigon, riding in from Tan Son Nhut Airfield along Duong Tu Do, the blue Air Force bus fitted with wire mesh instead of windows, the better to make grenades bounce away. A city of boulevards and streetlamps. Battered French-made sedans, motorbikes flitting through traffic. Al
ways the air was hot, seeping, boys tugging his arm. The best place to drink was the roof of the Rex Hotel. Everywhere Vietnamese stood selling black-market cigarettes, radios, and chocolate. Everywhere U.S. servicemen were walking, standing, talking with prostitutes in miniskirts. It was ten dollars and yes he thought about it. Little smiling girls you put your cock into. What a monster he was—or might someday be.

  He went to other places, too—Bangkok or Hong Kong to shop. Toys for the children, a watch for Ellie, get a suit made. He wandered the neon streets removed twice from himself—first from America, second from the war. A day later, he was back to the game. There was some paperwork, since he was in a supervisory position, but against the adrenaline moments of flying, it was routine, time passing, tick-tick goes the red trigger on the stick. He felt clean. He knew why he was there. He knew the score. Daily intelligence reports. Troop movements, pontoon bridges being repaired. Rail lines, Chinese-made trucks. Bombing winds, altimeter settings. You lived by a code, you maintained your duties, you knew who you were. And then the plane itself—you had to be clean to fly the machine.