OLDOGS

The CIA, beset with draconian budget cuts and increasing problems, decides on an unprecedented strategy. Every week, the agency gets requests from older people, who want to volunteer their services — often to fill lives made barren by the loss of their partners. In the past, these requests have always been ignored and filed. Now, some will be addressed.

A class of fifty “OLDOGS” volunteers is recruited and trained at the agency's secluded site at Camp Peary, VA. From here, they'll be sent to reinvigorate local networks that have been abandoned due to agent and funding shortages. Their training is followed from the first day to a low-key graduation dinner — including a harrowing “escape and evasion” exerise. Eight teams leave on their worldwide first assignments.

In the meantime, an ambitious Kazakh bureaucrat has orchestrated the theft of nuclear devices from a storage facility in nearby Omsk. He has sold these “initiators” to an international organization run by a would-be world builder. He has assigned his best agent to smuggle these devices into Chiapas — a restive part of Mexico. Here one will be used to destroy part of the tourist conclave of Cancun. The other will travel further north, and devastate Miami. Every step of the terribly destructive “package” — from its arrival in Cyprus, through its flight to eastern Colombia, and finally its journey by narco-sub to the southern shores of Mexico, is described.

OLDOGS Team Two — a grieving widower and a retired Air Force colonel — arrive in Mexico in time to discover and prevent disaster in Cancun. Alerted to the identity of the culprits, they follow them to a cruise ship headed for Miami. In a last-minute confrontation, they defeat the agents of destruction — only hours before the ship was to dock in south Florida.

Action and characters at CIA headquarters at Langley provides a good part of the background for what's going on in Cancun and other places. The total result is a believable look at crisis in the current age. Government caution, intertwining ambitions, and personal bravery all play a part in OLDOGS,