Nik Venture has been a
professional writer and editor for a variety of national magazines for more than a quarter century. Helming seven different magazines he has both won, and
judged, numerous writing awards, and his words have reached millions of
readers. His travels have taken him around the world on various assignments. When
he's not writing fiction under his pen name, he can be found either running, or
playing keyboard in various clubs with his rockin' blues band.
Description of The ISIS Lone Wolf Trigger
Many fanatics believe the End Times are coming . . . a few can’t wait.
For them, the prophecies for Armageddon are clear, if only they could trigger the war that starts it all by blaming Iran for a horrendous act of terrorism. American retaliation would start the dominoes falling. The final battles would begin.
Enter Jack Kant and his girlfriend Angela Bow. They don’t have a lot, but they do have each other. Jack’s a muckraker journalist with an unhealthy compulsion for poking in places where he shouldn’t. Angela is a resourceful documentary researcher and not above kicking a wiseguy where it hurts.
When Kant visits a sketchy source to return a package of illegally-obtained materials and back out of a story he’s considering, he confronts a long-haired deliveryman who slaughters the whistle-blower, his wife, and nearly Kant, to obtain said materials. Kant escapes with the package, but before he can get home, Angela’s six-year-old niece, Kiley, is abducted.
Should he go to the police, even though he’s soon framed as a suspect in the murders? Would they even follow up on one of the odd items in the package -- a brochure about the dangers of natural gas storage facilities with the phrase “55 Hiroshima bombs” circled?
He is drawn into the scariest story of his life, and his obsession with learning secrets demands that he follow up, but what about Kiley? His choices are grim and the world is pressing down on them, more so than he knows, if he doesn’t act there may be no world.
On the run, he and Angela must use all of their ingenuity to outwit unknown adversaries while trying to determine who their friends are, and who would make them patsies in an international conspiracy.
Well, according to
surveys, 31 percent of Americans believe the “end times” are approaching. With
Evangelicals, the numbers rise to 77 percent, and, among Protestants, 54
percent agreed that "the world is currently living in the 'end times' as
described by prophecies in the Bible." At least half, or more, Muslims
believe they will live to see the return of the Mahdi, a messianic figure they
believe will begin the final events of the Muslim calendar.
Like terrorism in
general, what if there were just some tiny fraction of those people who are
unwilling to wait?
How
dangerous is ISIS?
The fact that ISIS
exists at all is a black eye for civilization. And it is civilization that will
eventually grind down ISIS so that it relinquishes itself to the bottom shelf
of ideas and movements, like Nazism, the Spanish Inquisition, the Khmer Rouge .
. . whatever. The damage and horror they are promulgating on an entire, already
broken, region, will fade away. After too much pain, unfortunately. However,
the fact that so many of these indoctrinates are teenagers tells the wider
problem. A baby born today, in those few short years to becoming a teenager,
can be twisted into a monster. There’s always babies being born, so the only
inoculation are those things civilization does best: education, rule of law . .
. continuity. Anarchists with dreams are still anarchists. But their dreams
keep popping up no matter how much military hardware you throw at them. So,
better to go with civilization. Only problem is that so much failed states
become uncivilized. And countries that have things like Sharia law create the
seeds of extremism that will always come back to bite them. Western bred
recruits are a different matter.
Maybe as many as 3,400
westerners have joined ISIS and at least 250 Americans have tried to join, not
sure how many have succeeded. It needs to be countered at the root level, at
the local level. Changing hearts and minds, or at least controlling the message,
is never easy. Or quick. But not impossible. On a smaller scale there is the
example of the IRA, or better still, how many of you even know about the Red
Brigades? (In the 70s and 80s they perpetrated14,000 acts of violence in the
first ten years of the group's existence. Now, not so much.)
However, the ability
to counter the lone wolf disenchanted losers out there, that is going to be a
problem (as it perhaps always was) for the foreseeable future. If all it takes
is the right propaganda, then the questions become who controls the propaganda
and how do you counteract it? If you’ve got essentially a walking, talking
smart bomb, then all sorts of people might be able to manipulate those levers.
And therein hangs a tale, don’t you think?
What’s
the attraction of Armageddon?
I suppose if you put a
million philosophers in a room with typewriters and give them a million years .
. . Anyway, people above my pay grade
have been trying to get a handle on that for millennia, but the bottom line is
how can you make people feel that this life is somehow better than the End of
the Freaking Entire World?
Tell
us about your bad guys.
Well, this was the
most important thing really. Interesting antagonists make or break a thriller.
I’ve got two. Three technically, but I can’t say any more without revealing the
plot. However, I think I’ve got villains who believe in what they are doing,
and you learn why quite clearly, and so they are not stock bad guys, which is
just boring to me. I’ve created one villain, not the ISIS guy, that I think not
too many authors have tried before. You may be surprised. Maybe I’m wrong,
there are a lot of books out there. The thing is, he needs to be believable and
you see why as he goes through his motions.
What
made you write about the military’s airborne laser program?
The Airborne Laser was
an awesome, but flawed, attempt at producing a lethal leapfrog in ballistic
missile defense. It featured a chemical laser mounted in the hollowed-out body
of a brand new 747-400F freighter. Its mission, if it was ever to be
successfully deployed, was to be dispatched to a hot zone where rogue missiles
might be launched and intercept them with its laser from as far away as 350
miles, depending on whether it was a more vulnerable liquid-fueled booster, or
a more hard-to-destroy solid-fueled one.
The heart of the
system is the megawatt Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) which uses a
combination of hydrogen peroxide, potassium, sodium, and lithium hydroxide. It
is a highly toxic, Draino-like concoction. In the back of the 747, the chilled
laser fuel, through a complex mixing mechanism, comes in contact with chlorine
and helium to produce a form of oxygen. This brew gets injected with iodine
gas, the resulting excitation produces photons that are amplified to create the
infrared laser beam. This invisible beam zig-zags and exits through an optics
package better than the Hubble Telescope’s, and featuring a 50-inch-diameter
mirror – known as the “wall of fire” –
to produce a basketball-sized beam out of the nose turret and onto its target.
When operational, it
would fly a figure eight in a theater of operations within range of the launch
site, at 40,000 feet, and could be refueled mid-air from a standard refueling
tanker. The COIL laser could be fired a dozen or so times before it would have
to undergo a major service overhaul.
At least this was the
plan. Ballistic missile defense, the idea of “hitting a bullet with a bullet,”
began at the dawn of the missile age and received a steady stream of research
dollars ever since. And using lasers for ballistic missile defense has been
dreamed about since the beginning. However, making lasers powerful enough to
the task has always been considered the more futuristic option of all the ways
one might shoot down a missile. But dreams have a way of becoming reality, just
as surely as the future must eventually become the present, and in 1996, a few
of the top aerospace companies believed that enough of the technologies had
come together to take a shot at finally, actually, building a working Buck
Rogers death ray weapon. There are numerous technical leaps that need to be
hurtled to make it happen: acquisition, tracking, optics, battle management
software – and most importantly, a powerful enough laser.
Nevertheless, in 2001,
the program was moved out of research status and put under the umbrella of the
Missile Defense Agency, and seven working planes were ordered. Eventually,
those orders were canceled and it went back to being a one plane research
platform which did shoot down a couple of test missiles, but not at the range
that could make the whole enterprise actually feasible. And so, after spending
$5 billion on the program over 16 years, it was cancelled.
I resurrected it here,
but for all I know, maybe it is being reborn right now, if someone put together
the right tweaks to make it hit the firing distance that they need, for it to
be viable. Or they come up with some modified version and a new mission. For
example, a so called “diode pumped” laser able to ramp up the wattage and
configured on a smaller platform than a 747.
How
does so called “junk DNA” play into all of this?
First of all, junk DNA
is a misnomer, ultraconserved strings is what they are more appropriately
called. You see, the whole human genome consists of 2.9 billion letters, that
ACTG stuff that they taught you in high school. Now, that’s about 750 megabytes
of data taken as a whole, but only about three percent of that is involved in
making up the 22,000 genes that make us who we are, the remaining 97 percent is
this so-called junk DNA. It seemed like an awful lot of information to be doing
nothing at all, particularly when we suspect the half-life of this material is
about twelve million years for a house fly and, for the precursors to mammals,
we trace it back about eight-hundred million years. That’s a long time between
genetic house cleanings. So, it turns out that if the RNA portion is non-coding
– that is, protein making – and it still has some critical command and control
functions, then it stays put. For a very long time. Japanese researchers have
already shown that they can manipulate these strings and insert a message right
into the DNA that would last, well, if not forever, a very long time.
What if someone
already did?
As to how it all plays
into the plot, well, I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you before you
unleashed that particular spoiler.
Did
you find it difficult to write about technical topics?
Well, there really
isn’t that much, just enough so that it all makes sense. Once upon a time,
before I got my journalism degree, I got one in electronics technology. I
didn’t like the math, so I took a left turn and I’ve been making money writing
and editing ever since. I’ve been the editor numerous national magazines
dealing with a variety of business and technical topics. In this line of work,
you need to become an industry expert real quick or you’ll soon be treading
water. So, long story short, any area of interest I plan to go into doesn’t
intimidate me. Well, maybe a little. That’s where being a quick study and, more
importantly, perseverance comes in. But the key is showing a technology’s
interesting elements in an entertaining fashion. I feel like I’ve been training
my whole life for this. If readers learn a thing or two along the way, that’s
not a bad thing.
What
other books do you have out there?
I also have
a comic novel, Office
of the Apes. This is for the advanced class of crazy gonzo readers. I guess
you might say it’s not politically correct. You have been issued fair warning!
More at nikventure.com
Champion Standing is Mark Gardner’s tour-de-force tale of a battle
royale set in China’s Han Dynasty. Liao is a warrior of the Rong Clan from the
kingdom of Kush who sets off for the island of Hainan to fight in the
prestigious invitation-only Dao Tournament. Part cage match, part Hunger Games,
the Dao had become an allegory for the epic struggle for status and honor. Liao
will face off against several challengers before he finally has the opportunity
to face off against the Champion Standing for his opportunity to attain the
title and earn the rewards that title brings to his kinsmen. 
