by Robert Baxter (Nicholas Cain)
Published in Heroes Book I
The final Vietnam: Groud Zero installment has two story lines. One involves a prisoner exchange in the latter days of the war, with the Special Forces team having to contend with a rogue South Vietnamese general as well as the NVA. The titular Zebra Cube is a mobile cage that imprisons notorious General Tran in a series of underground prisons. The action is good, more of a larger scale than the blow by blow description of other men's adventure.
The other story involves one of the team's members, Cross, who was sent back to the States for his mother's burial. He hangs out in GI bars and gets involved with a trouble Cambodian stripper. No action for this plot, but it's definitely the stronger half. Literary, almost poetic, and unrelentingly bleak and miserable. Just how I like it.
The composition of the story is unusual. The standard men's adventure parts weren't long enough to fill out the already short 150 page, and I'm assuming the subplot was a departure for the series. I've also read that the characters were different from the rest of the series, but I haven't read the others.
I don't know why this wasn't just a straight out regular men's adventure tale - Cain was certainly capable of them. It's like he was more interested in writing the Cross story (I was certainly more interested reading it). There's even a sub-sub-plot of an M.P. turned writer which sniffs of autobiography, with a lengthy section of that character's writing that feels like a fragment from an unfinished work.
I look forward to reading more Cain, but I have the suspicion that this piece maybe gave him more freedom than his other series work.
Paperback from AbeBooks
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