In the second book of Don Pendleton's long-running "Executioner" series, entitled "Death Squad," Mack Bolan enlisted the help of ten of his old Vietnam War buddies to help him take down a Mafia family in California. More than ten years later, after Pendleton had stopped writing the series and ghostwriters had taken over, the only two surviving characters from Bolan's death squad, Herman "Gadgets" Schwarz and Rosario "Politician" Blancanales, were teamed up with another character from "The Executioner #2: Death Squad" -- Carl Lyons, the LAPD detective who pursued Bolan -- for this spin-off series. All three characters are Vietnam veterans, and as "Able Team," they function as an invisible arm of the N.S.A. Or something."Tower of Terror" is a book so unsubtle that Lyons, "Pol," and "Gadgets" are code-named "Hardman One," "Hardman Two," and "Hardman Three" during their mission to rescue hostages in a high-rise office building in Lower Manhattan.L.R. Payne (writing under the house name "Dick Stivers") crafted an entertaining, quick read here. There's wall-to-wall action, which is sometimes ridiculous, but it all moves at a nice clip. The bloody finale on the helipad of the tower was especially well-done.I needed something quick to read on the subway, and this book definitely fit the bill.
