For some or other recently I recalled this book and decided I'd like to read it again after a gap of more than 20 years. It's set before the end of the Soviet Union and it could be thought of as the aviation version of "Red October". I loved reading this book way back when and loved it just as much again.

I could have skipped some of the personal home life stuff but it was fine. The action parts of the book and the mammoth epical raid are still just as spectacular as my first read. It helps if one knows something about aircraft and how that works as the book gets pretty deep into that.

A great, great read if one likes that sort of stuff. Thanks @AuthorDaleBrown ( )

Always interesting to read slightly old books that try to predict the future. This book is written in the mid 80s and have the story take place some five years later.

In the book the old B 52 bombers are obsolete which makes it spectacular that they are still in active duty 30 years later. In the book one of them is turned into a missile platform for testing purposes. This is the old dog which suddenly finds itself in an active situation.

The genre military thrillers is not abundant with good books but this is a fair entry. Of course it's dated but I want to start from the beginning of the series. ( )

This was a Cold War novel I started but didn’t finish in the late 1980s. Too many things were going on in my life and I always meant to get back to this book. I did this week with the audio version from Audible.com. I listened through the six and a half hours straight though.

The Old Dog was a B-52 that had been upgraded with all the best technology of the late 1980s and some that were imagined like like the X-ray laser Star Wars project. The twist in this book is that the Soviets had gotten ahead of the US in laser technology and created a huge ground based radar and orbiting mirror to use in defense. An American spy plane gets caught in the beam “accidentally” and all hands are lost. Indecision by the American president and lack of preparedness leads to this 35 year old plane picking up the slack.

Lots of Cold War nostalgia and cheesiness as seen from today. Some amazing stuff and some pretty unbelievable stuff. ( )

B-52, Cold War becomes hot.

Patrick McLanahan leads a crew of engineers aboard the "Old Dog" to destroy a Soviet ground-based laser site.

Characters
Patrick McLanahan ( )