BOOK REVIEW: ‘Warning Light’ by David Ricciardi

OPINION:

WARNING LIGHT

By David Ricciardi

Berkley $24.30, 366 pages

Zachary (Zac) Miller is not a likely heroic protagonist. Not at all like Brad Thor’s Scot Harvath or Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp. He is CIA — but he works behind a desk not in field operations.

No great warrior skills. No experience or special training in in-field espionage.

Under the cover of working for a technology consulting company, he is a 28-year-old geek working with the agency’s London group. And he is just about the last person any intelligence agency would want to send on a risky top-secret one-man mission of critical importance to U.S. national security.

But the analyst is great at spotting opportunities and he sees one when the world’s attention is focused on a devastating earthquake near the small city of Sirjan in southeastern Iran that leaves behind more than 12,000 dead.

Offers to assist pour into Iran from throughout the world. What the world hears from Iran is thanks, but we’ve been dealing with earthquakes for ages and have all the resources we need to handle this one.

What analyst Zac Miller and his CIA colleagues know is that the last thing the Iranians want is to have any foreigners anywhere near earthquake-torn Sirjan. They believe it is the site of Iran’s most secret facility in the ever-increasing nuclear complex of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and that it’s possible that the quake has moved things around enough to afford viewing of what Iran wants to keep hidden.

Thus is born Operation SNAPSHOT, a bold plan for U.S. intelligence to get an up-close look and obtain images of the mountainside where the CIA believes the Iranians have this secret nuclear site. The plan is to place a highly skilled covert agent aboard a British Airways Airbus London-to-Singapore flight that crosses over Iran and arrange for it to develop well-staged mechanical failures in the perfect area so that the Iranians will have to permit an emergency landing at the military base adjacent to the site the CIA wants its agent to observe and photograph.

The mission is go and agent Miller is in Paris having lunch with a beautiful young French woman he knows from their mutual spy business contacts when his superiors telephone to inform him they’re scrapping Operation SNAPSHOT. The agent tasked for the mission turns out to be known to the Iranians so his cover and background story and documentation might not hold up.

Zac Miller refuses to accept letting the possibility of such a great intelligence success slip away. But he knows his bosses are right in saying there is no time to find and prepare some other covert agent and get his cover and background in place.

And they all know that his own analysis indicates that the remaining window of opportunity is only about 72 hours before the Iranians will be able to put everything back together after the earthquake. Missing this opportunity, he suggests, might result in his boss one day having to explain to a congressional committee how the CIA missed another one,

“Send me,” he argues. He knows the mission better than anyone else. He trained the agent they just had to pull back. So what if he doesn’t have the tradecraft and language skills of the man he would be replacing?

“I’ll only be on the ground for six hours, surrounded by Westerners and watched over by the pilots. I won’t need all those skills. Hell, I’m supposed to look like a Westerner, wandering around taking pictures. I know how to use the camera and I know better than anyone what to look for.”

The CIA decides that with this great opportunity not likely to come again, sending him is worth the risk. Zac Miller is thrilled — right up until he finds himself being drilled by a cruel colonel of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who doesn’t believe he was innocently just using his cellphone camera to snap photos of the sunset against the mountains.

What follows is an unusually imaginative tale, an exceptionally well-plotted, highly plausible superb thriller that moves at an exciting pace. “Warning Light” will keep you flipping the pages, anxious to learn what surprise next awaits you as Zac Miller copes with torture but manages to escape and dodges pursuers in Iran, in Dubai and Europe in a cat-and-mouse constant chase while unknown to him clever Iranian disinformation has his own former CIA colleagues also out to take him down.

Making “Warning Light” a standout from most other thrillers is that it raises concerns about the scary Iran nuclear deal rather than just one terrorist group, and the remarkably skillful way David Ricciardi has the experience change Zac Miller from just about the last person you’d expect to survive such an ordeal into the person you’d pick for the next such crucial mission.

• Fred J. Eckert, a former Republican congressman from New York, served as U.S. ambassador to Fiji and to the U.N. Agencies for Food and Agriculture under President Ronald Reagan.