Track 01 - The Ninety-Nine by Jerry Ahern

The Ninety -Nine
Track 01
by Jerry Ahern
1984 by Gold Eagle Books

Ahern ruined my joke about Track's hair bouncing and behaving...



...with a scene of Daniel Track using shampoo twice and conditioner once in his hair care routine, and everyone knows Pert is shampoo and conditioner in one.  There was a very slim window of the early eighties in which men actually had a hair care routine, and Track is very much a man of that era.

Daniel Track is 36.  He grew up as an orphan among the Chicago gangs, served in the CID of the US Army, and begins the series as a weapons trainer.  He is an expert in firearms and has a fourth degree black belt in Tae Kwon Doe.

We open with an action sequence fighting Bedouins in the desert with weapon dealer Desiree Goth and her black bodyguard Zulu (groan).  He sets Goth up as a love interest for later in the series.

Another unrelated action sequence of Track rescuing hostages from IRA terrorists and we're introduced to the series premise.  Nazi terrorist and master of disguise Johannes Krieger seeks to steal a hundred defective warheads from a convoy.  A convoy which is being guarded by Track's nephew George.  A convoy which is attacked literally in Track's backyard.

Track and his nephew agree to work for the Consortium, a cartel of insurance companies that has a financial interest in the world not being blown up.  They go after Krieger, enlisting the help of Track's childhood friend and gang leader Rafe Minor.

Ahern is definitely an expert in weaponry and he gets a titch indulgent here, spending a full page here and there to describe a character's loadout.  If the Survivalist has a fetish for scabbards and sheaths, here we have way too many brand names of shotgun slings.

This has been my favorite Ahern book so far, maybe because he seems not to take it too seriously.  The usual Ahern pros and cons are here.  Excellent plotting and pacing, but not as over the top as I like my stuff and kind of meh action sequences.

I haven't read the others, but it looks like each book is him tracking down one of the other 99 warheads, which is pretty ambitious.  There were 13 Track novels.  Ahern wrote the first 10, with Patrick Andrews wrapping up the last three.

I need to read #3 next - the nuclear detonator can only be defused by beating a video game, and luckily Track has the help of a 12 year old whiz kid.

Available in used paperback from Amazon.

Jerry Ahern

Jerry Ahern (1946-2012) was a Men's Adventure author best known for the Survivalist series.  His fiction was workmanlike - well plotted with well crafted action scenes, but he was just too restrained for my taste.  He excelled in plotting stories over a series - each book worked when read individually as they carried out a long term story.

Some characteristics:

Not too much gun porn, but a ton of holster porn.  Holsters, sheaths, and scabbards mentioned by brand and described in detail every time a weapon went in or out.

Ahern mentioned Detonics weapons like he had stock in the company.  Which, seeing as he was their president for several years, he probably did.

Ahern is a great example of writing right-wing fantasies without being a bigot.  If anything his books had a forced multi-racialism, with every color of the rainbow being represented.

When making up names of tertiary characters, Ahern usually went Polish.  There are like five "-ski"s in the Defender series alone.

Ahern had strong female characters, at least for the genre.  I assume the credit goes to the influence of his wife and co-author Sharon Ahern.  A lot of little female touches, mainly having to do with periods or bra straps and stuff.

• They Call Me the Mercenary (as Axel Kilgor, 18 books, 1980-4)
• The Survivalist (34ish books, 1981-1993,2013-)
• Track (10 books, 1984-5)
• Takers (3 books, with Sharon Ahern, 1984-2001)
• Defender (12 books, 1988-90)
• Surgical Strike (3 books, 1988-90)

The following non-series books were all co-authored with Sharon Ahern:

• The Freeman (1986) 
• Miamigrad (1987) 
• Brandywine (1988)
• The Yakusa Tattoo (1988)
• WerewolveSS (1990)
• The Kamikaze Legacy (1990)
• The Golden Shield of the IBF (1999) 
• The Illegal Man (2004) 
• Written in Time (2010) 

Non-fiction:

• CCW: Carrying Concealed Weapons: How to Carry Concealed Weapons and Know When Others Are (1996)
• Survive!: The Disaster, Crisis and Emergency Handbook (2010)
• Armed for Personal Defense (2010)
• Gun Digest Buyer's Guide to Concealed-Carry Handguns (2010)
• Defend Your Home (2011)

Additionally, Ahern was a columnist for several firearm magazines.

Learn more at http://www.jerryahern.com/, still updated by Sharon Ahern.

They Call Me the Mercenary 2: The Slaughter Run

They Call Me the Mercenary 2: The Slaughter Run
Axel Kilgore (aka Jerry Ahern)
Zebra Books 1980

"Assassination in the Swiss Alps...terrorism in the Central Americana jungle...treachery in Washington...and Hank Frost right in the middle! The wise-cracking mercenary captain is up to his eyepatch in brutal violence, torture, and betrayal. There's the presidential bodyguard force he'd be a fool to trust; the fighting right-wing general whose republic is aflame with revolt; his seductive wife who'll have Frost as her lover—or have Frost dead; and the Communist Terrorist Army that's out for a final bloodbath!"

"THIS IS THE SECOND EXCITING EPISODE IN THE GUT-WRENCHING, ACTION-PACKED NEW SERIES"

Hank Frost is the mercenary that they call the mercenary. The second volume opens straight into the action with Frost fleeing from assassins in the Swiss Alps. From there he's coerced by the State Department to protect the military dictator of the fictional Central American country of Monte Azul. The dictator is one of the good guys.

Monte Azul is overrun by communist terrorists, and the US won't give them arms unless they restore civil rights. This is a bad thing. Frost protects the dictator because he believes he is necessary in the fight against international communism. He also has strong feelings of personal loyalty to the man, going so far as to say he may love him, in a totally not gay way. He expresses this devotion by banging the dictator's wife and young daughter, giving him a heart attack. This is what the good guy does.

Frost protects the dictator as he goes around dictating, and does a horrible job trying to make us believe that he's a good guy at heart. In one scene he is shocked to find that the children of a village are starving, and that his close friend and military underling has not been distributing supplies. Imagine that, in a military junta with no accountability. The dictator swiftly creates a civil buearcracy to handle the job with a system of checks and balances and begins the process of free elections.

Of course not. He executes the traitors without trial and the children are promptly forgotten about. Remember, we are somehow supposed to like this man and not sympathize with the rebels who are trying to overthrow him.

Pretty soon the inevitable happens and Frost is forced to flee the country with the dictator, all of his family members that he's porking, and members of the US embassy. The second half of the book is a chase across the country in an antique steam train. There is a brief detour involving big corporations who want world peace at any price, that price being handing Mexico over to Russia and having homosexuals touch Frost's testicles. It's really not as weird or cool as it sounds, and just seems to be shoe-horned in to give us a reason to dislike the government beuracrats who otherwise seem completely reasonable.

This is a Jerry Ahern book, his second as far as I can tell. Solid, well written action that never really pushes the WTF barrier enough to be really fruitful. The characterizations are more blah here than in the Defender or Survivalist series, with the closest thing to a personality being that Frost makes jokes about his eyepatch. Jerry Ahern is a man who writes entire books about handgun holsters. He is not known for his wit, and Frost's quips regularly fall flat.

The dedication is to Death Merchant author Joseph Rosenberger. "The Professor's Been Paid, My Friend"