China Lake - Hardcover

the brightest, freshest new voices to appear in the international thriller business in a long time."
USA TODAY
Jack Tannis ended his day like any other. Then the phone rang. The caller, who would not give his name, teased him with another: David Harper.
Suddenly, Tannis was thrust back to his days as security director at China Lake, the U.S. Naval Weapons Center. In 1961, duplicates of the first heat-seeking air-to-air missile, the Sidewinder, began appearing on Soviet MiG fighters. British scientist David Harper was accused of revealing its design to the Russians. Jack Tannis cleared his name. The case was never solved.
With dizzying speed the past comes back to life...a body found in the night desert...a special navy team rushed in to investigte the murder...a beautiful woman's mysterious outpost in the desert...and David Harper, the key to everything, joining Tannis to ferret out the force behind the secret that started it all....
From the Pap

A long-thought-out espionage tale, about a dense and tangled search into the past that means to reveal something about the dense and tangled nature of man himself. Hyde (The Red Fox, 1985) again echoes le Carr‚'s bathysphere style and bottomless paragraphs, those shining flakes of analysis that lead into ever deeper analysis. Here, someone is out to kill retired naval security officer Jack Tannis, who lives near the China Lake Weapons Center in California's Mojave Desert. It was at China Lake that the air-to-air, heat-seeking Sidewinder missile, which gave total air superiority to US jet fighters, was invented and developed in the 50's. Somehow the Russians came up with an identical missile. China Lake scientist David Harper was set up to take the fall as the sellout spy. But intelligence officer Jack Tannis stood up for Harper, proved his innocence. Even so, Harper, discredited, lost all hope of pursuing a scientific career, went home to England, and became a nature photographer for public television. His wife Diana divorced him. Now, in 1985, Tannis finds himself almost assassinated in the desert; and then in the Welsh countryside, while hanging from a cliff-face and filming a rare eagle in flight, Harper too is the victim of an attempted murder. But...was he saved by a rope thrown to him by Tannis, whom he's not seen in 25 years? Tannis is gifted with somewhat magical powers of deduction, whose unleavings we follow inward leaf by leaf--a kind of parallel power to Harper's gift for semimagical infrared guidance systems. Harper's ex-wife Diana commits suicide but leaves behind a letter that eventually drives Harper into East Berlin and a search through the German rocket museum at Dorn, then to a cave on the rim of China Lake--where Tannis unknots the great mystery of Harper's life. Though its final unravelings become quite thin, and whether Hyde's endless deductive style really holds is questionable, this is a winner. Anyone reading to the end is presold on the genre and knows its shortfall. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.