Review: Not memorable
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 11 20, 2012
According to Brad Taylor, "The Callsign" is intended to fill in background, giving readers a look at the creation of the Taskforce featured in Taylor's Pike Logan novels. It is obviously also intended as a promotional vehicle for Taylor's upcoming novel,Enemy of Mine. A "preview" of the novel follows the story. Attaching a short story to a preview of an upcoming novel is a recent trend, a way to make a couple of extra bucks from series fans while generating buzz for the novel. Because the stories rarely serve any other purpose, they usually aren't memorable. "The Callsign" is no exception. This review pertains to the story, not the preview.  (Update:  The new novel is quite good, much better than this short story.)As "The Callsign" begins, Pike's Taskforce, having been assembled four months earlier, is on a training exercise in Charleston. The training involves committing a burglary and avoiding arrest. Sanctioning the commission of domestic crimes by military personnel seems like an odd training exercise, but then the very existence of an "off the books" clandestine organization that evades congressional oversight is illegal, so I suppose breaking into a privately owned building in Charleston isn't so bad by comparison. The exercise ends with the kidnapping of an individual who is presumably expecting to be kidnapped. All of this consumes most of the story, and the training's completion is a good place to pause for a yawn.The first mission is to steal data in the computer used by al-Qaeda's passport forger in Yemen. It doesn't go well, thanks to a CIA operative who, according to Pike, should not have been part of the team. The mission is more interesting than the training exercise, but it's over too quickly to create any sense of excitement.Taylor's biases shine through in the story. The military members of the Taskforce are elite professionals while the CIA addition is an undisciplined, overweight blowhard. I don't care one way or the other about Taylor's biases, but their impact on his storytelling is heavy-handed. The simplistic "military good, civilian bad" outlook makes it difficult to take the story seriously, particularly when it leads to a predictable (and not particularly credible) ending.Brad Taylor writes jargon-heavy prose that is competent but unpolished. His action scenes are the only reason to read the story -- unlike the rest of the story, they seem very real. If you enjoy action and are prepared to switch off your nonsense detector before reading the story, you'll probably enjoy it, but series fans won't miss much if they decide to skip it.