Rogue Warrior: Dictator's Ransom by Richard Marcinko and Jim De Felice

Richard Marcinko is an ex-Navy SEAL turned author, and if we are to believe his books, runs a international security company where he is still used by the US government on various missions against hostile foreign countries, powers and organizations. But as this book is marketed as fiction rather than non-fiction, you do the math.

In the story, Marcinko is approached by Kim Jong Il to come to North Korea to meet him for dinner, as the "Glorious Leader" is a big fan of Richard Marcinko and his Rogue Warrior books. But Richard Marcinko isn't a big fan of Kim Jong Il and he declines forcefully, twice.

When the CIA wants him to take the job, he declines again. He's not interested. But when his friend, a former CIA man who now runs the agency, asks him personally, he reconsiders, especially when he learns that instead of the two nukes North Korea is reputed to have, they actually have six, and that in addition to having dinner with Glorious Leader, the CIA wants Dick Marcinko to find out where Kim Jong Il has stashed the nukes and put a radio beacon on them so that their hiding place can be found and bombed by the military. Marcinko relents and decides to go.

He takes only one other person woman, his second in command, Trace Dahlgren, the woman who usually trains recruits for Red Cell, Marcinko's security company. She goes in hopes of meeting her lover, a flight instructor named Polorski, in Japan after the dinner with Kim Jong Il in North Korea. But the Glorious Leader has other ideas for Mr. Marcinko. In addition to wining and dining him, he wants Marcinko to find one of his many children, in this case, one of his illegitimate sons, Yong Shin Jong. He doesn't say why, but Marcinko has the idea that Yong Shin Jong is currently the favorite to succeed the Glorious Leader when King Jong Il finally kicks the bucket and goes the way of the dodo.

Marcinko is kicked out of the country and given two weeks to find Yong Shin Jong by General Sun, one of Kim Jong Il's people, and told that Yong Shin Jong is in China at last report. Surely the great Rogue Warrior can find him from there? He does, but is followed by one of King Jong Il's people, a woman named Lim Cho who has a history with Yong Shin Jong.

Marcinko eventually tracks down the young Korean man to a house in China where he seems to be imprisoned. As he and Trace make plans to free and rescue him, they bring in operators from Red Cell who are currently in the area to help, including Doc Tremblay and Trace's lover Polorski, who can fly almost everything. But during the rescue, they find out that the Chinese are protecting Yong Shin Jong, not imprisoning him, that Lim Cho wants to kill him, and that Polorski isn't the kind of straight shooter that everyone, including Trace Dahlgren, thought he was, and that he works for the Russian Mafiya. He steals Yong Shin Jong away for the Mafiya and wants to set up a trade with various elements in Korea to trade Yong for a nuke.

Needless to say, nobody wants such a trade to happen, and now Dick must find Polorski and his Russian Mafiya friends and get Yong Shin Jong back before the trade can happen. And he and trace would also like to deliver a "Fuck You Very Much" message to Polarski, and he must deliver on his promise to find the North Korean Nukes for his friend before he can finally head home to Rogue Manor. But knowing Dick Marcinko, it isn't going to be that easy. It never is.

I have enjoyed reading past Rogue Warrior books, and this one was no exception. Dick Marcinko is dirty-minded, with a talent for guns, intrigue and sneakiness. Kim Jong Il thinks he can out-Marcinko Marcinko, only to find it is much, much harder than it looks. We don't learn at the end if Glorious Leader no longer finds Marcinko so much to his liking, but it's very probable.

In addition to the usual canvassing, shooting and scooting, Marcinko must deal with a betrayal among his forces, and a betrayer he must track down before something worse can happen. By the end, though, there is a happy ending. The nukes are found (and eventually destroyed), Polarski is dead, and while Kim Jong Il is alive, the loss of the nukes he'd constructed and held in reserve sends him to the bargaining table in earnest.

But as this story is about fathers and sons, in addition to Kim Jong Il and his own father, and his illegitimate son Yong Shin Jong, Dick Marcinko must come to terms with the fact that one of his new employees may just be his own son. But while Dick is oblivious to the fact that this may be his son for 99% of the novel, his son may not be as ignorant. At one point, the putative son calls Marcinko "Dad", although it may have been meant sarcastically, so in the end, we are left not knowing.

I haven't read a great deal of the so-called "Men's Adventure"-type stories in a long time. I was really into them in the 1980's, when I was into Mack Bolan and the Stony Man spinoff series Able Team and Phoenix Force, along with the S.O.B.'s (Soldiers of Barrabbas), and then later on Blade and the Endworld series by David Robbins. But I still like them. I say so-called "Men's Adventure" because I happen to be female and I like reading them. The Rogue Warrior books are all in that style, and if you read and enjoy these kinds of books, you will too.