A badass "standard format" paperback from 1993, when the genre was already all but killed-off, entirely by it's own faults. You thought Pheonix Force was bland, samey, contractually-obliged action, at least that was a page turner! This is just boring.

Basically the Iranians, Iraqis and Afghans (who, as we all know, just love each other - Iran and Iraq hadn't just fought a years-long bitter war against each other or anything) want to revive The French Connection, an old drug-trafficking route. This is organised by Carlos the Jackal, a Cuban communist (who loves money) who is a sort of elite terrorist mercenary, who had fought for Black September, the PLO and a number of other organisations (oh yeah, this book mentions real-world terrorist organisations a lot, not made-up ones). Never mind if they actually beleive in the same causes or anything.

Anyway, the Pentagon "get word of" this rather easily, because who cares about plot, we want to get to the shooting. They send in SLAM, which means Search Locate Anniahlate Mission. IE the author thought of a cool name then bashed some words in to fit. SLAM has THREE members (yeah, you read that right), so basically a guy who gets a lucky drop with an UZI can end the whole operation. They rather easily take out drug warehouses in France and Belgium, Carlos sends an elite Hezbollah hit-squad after them, who fail pathetically. One of the drug warehouses sent out a shipment, so SLAM intercept the ship it's on. Only this time, Carlos has planted three elite former-East-German-Spetsnaz operators aboard to take SLAM out. These also fail and get defeated rather easily, one in a contractually-obliged knife fight... and so it goes on.

While Phoenix Force wasted time on intricate descriptions of guns, SLAM wastes time on intricate descriptions of their entire loadouts. We don't need to know what kind of radio they have, or where it is on their webbing, dude. You want to get to writing the violence and we want to read it, just get on with it!