Don Bendell, Broken Borders

Broken Borders

Don Bendell

Berkley, December 2006, $6.99

ISBN: 0425212572

Though he drank a few at a stop-off at the Denver airport, Army's Criminal Investigation Detachment (CID) Major Bobby Samuels remains alert, noticing a Mexican passenger acting slightly strange. He informs his subordinate Captain Bo Devore, and soon afterward a flight attendant, as he realizes the person is not Mexican, but Middle Eastern. The plain clothes military police investigators thwart a hijacking, but the plane crashes in the Rockies; they insure everyone, except the hijacker, survives until help arrives.

However, the two CID agents also learned from the information the deceased terrorist carried of an Al-Qaeda plot to sneak into the country from the porous Mexican border, two backpack nuclear bombs to detonate at the same time in two American cities. Thus, their mission has changed from investigating a potential Iranian agent at the Monterrey, California Defense Language School, to uncovering the whereabouts of the dirty bombs and their holders before the terrorist acts occur.

BROKEN BORDERS, the sequel to the exhilarating CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DETACHMENT, is a superb thriller that provides the audience with a deep look at the work of the CID as part of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). This time the fight is stateside (as opposed to the first tale whose setting is in Iraq). The storyline is non-stop action, from the Colorado crash until the final confrontation, as heroic Major Samuels and Captain Devore try to avert a 9/11 repeat, as Don Bendell makes a strong case to plug the leak at the Mexican border; not because of the vast majority of illegal entrants seeking economic opportunity, but to prevent a monstrous atrocity on American soil.