Product Description

Just prior to the invasion of Kuwait, Bill Erlich, a young FBI operative, is hard on the heels of a terrorist. As he blunders in to the lines by which the Iraqi puppet-masters control their undercover agents in England, Bill realises he has gone beyond the point of recall. He is engaged in Condition Black - lethal assault in progress.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #242600 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 444 pages

From the Publisher
A thrilling classic from a master of the genre.

From the Back Cover
It is only months before Saddam Hussein instructs his troops to invade Kuwait, and the Iraqis will stop at nothing to achieve nuclear capability. They are actively targeting scientists from the West who can help them acquire the intelligence they need.

When Bill Erlich, a young FBI agent, learns that one of his closest friends has been murdered in Athens, he vows that he will find the killer, even if it means breaking the rules. The man he suspects is a British mercenary known as Colt, who has been working for the Iraqi government, and is as elusive as he is dangerous.

Erlich follows Colt to England, where he has been dispatched to recruit a disaffected nuclear scientist. Determined to bring Colt to justice at whatever cost, Erlich crosses an invisible line beyond which there is no return...

About the Author
Once a reporter for Independent Television News, Gerald Seymour has lived in the West Country for several years. His bestselling novels include Harry’s Game, The Glory Boys, Field of Blood, Killing Ground, A Line in the Sand, Holding the Zero, The Untouchable, Traitor’s Kiss, The Unknown Soldier, and Rat Run.

Customer Reviews

Hardball executive recruiting
Author Gerald Seymour defines CONDITION BLACK as "a lethal assault in progress".

This novel superficially resembles another of Seymour's books, LINE IN THE SAND. In the latter, the Iranians send their master assassin onto English soil to do a wet job. On his trail are representatives from a ragtag bunch of British security and law enforcement agencies, plus an expert Scottish tracker and his dogs. In CONDITION BLACK, the villain is a young English mercenary in Iraq's employ, Colt. He's already killed an Iraqi dissident and his CIA contact in Athens. Now, he's going back to his island home to do another hit — and visit his dying Mum.

There's the usual posse of pursuers and kibitzers: MI6, MI5, Scotland Yard, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Mossad. Chief among them is FBI agent Bill Erlich, out to avenge the murder of his good friend, the CIA agent in Athens. Erlich is young and ambitious. He sees a successful outcome to the chase as a step up the rung of the advancement ladder. To his principle British minder, James Rutherford of MI5, Erlich is "Buffalo Bill", a cowboy with a quick draw mentality.

What could be a simple storyline is made more complex by another task assigned Colt by his Iraqi handlers once he's on home soil. By the way, Colt, how about stopping by Her Majesty's Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston and recruit one of it's scientists to turn traitor and work for the Iraqi nuclear weapons program? Why sure, chief, no problem.

Gerald Seymour is my very favorite creator of spy/conspiracy potboilers. However, I can't quite award five stars for CONDITION BLACK. It seemed the author was overreaching when he assigned two very different roles to Colt. Though not impossible — and what do I know? — it would seem more plausible that assassination and agent recruitment are two very disparate talents not likely resident in a single operative, much less one as unsophisticated as Colt. And the ending was vaguely unsatisfying, though it was consistent with Seymour's first class strength, which is crafting his plots consistent with grubby, unheroic real life, in which the winners and losers are rarely clear cut.

A Gripping Read
Gerald Seymour knows how to hold a reader's attention. I do find the characters in the early chapters difficult to keep up with as he introduces so many of them but it is well worth perservering. This is the story of an FBI agent, Bill Erlich, who is following the trail of a paid killer. The killer is in the employ of the Iraq government and his targets are Iraquis who have upset the regime but a CIA agent gets in the way of a bullet and he is Erlich's friend. The bureaucracit blunders that occur in this book would be laughable if they weren't so realistic and tragic. The British, the Americans and the Iraqi governments make so many one wonders how their Security Services survive.

Standard and solid fare from Seymour
Condition black is the zoned-out state of mind one has when you are holding an armed weapon with the option of shoot and kill, or be killed. The novel follows Elrich, a CIA agent revenging the death of his friend. His foe named Colt, is a British rebel working as a mercenary hit-man for Iraq. These 2 characters spar well for most of the book, inter-linked by a plot where Iraq attempts to defect a disillusioned British Nuclear scientist/ civil servant. This is a solid and standard fare from Seymour, not his best, but recommended.