Hunt the Wolf by Don Mann with Ralph Pezzullo
Reviewed by David Ingram for Suspense Magazine
In the new battle order against terrorists, the forward forces are special ops groups, especially the Navy’s Sea, Air and Land (SEAL) teams. Don Mann knows that world intimately. As a Chief Warrant Officer 3—a specialist rank above sergeant—he was an advanced training officer for SEAL Team 6. Along with is co-author Ralph Pezzullo, Mann wrote the bestselling non-fiction memoir “Inside Seal Team 6,” and this summer they’ll publish a second non-fiction volume, “The Navy SEAL Survival Handbook.”
Mr. Mann brings that expertise to fiction with “Hunt the Wolf.” To CWO Thomas Crocker, a SEAL Team 6 unit leader, people are either sheep or wolves. His purpose is to protect the sheep by hunting the wolves. His unit is assigned to get Abu Rasul Zaman, a high-ranking al-Qaeda terrorist who’s responsible for a deadly car bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in Morocco. Zaman has been traced to an apartment building in Karachi, Pakistan. The team enters Pakistan under the guise of mountain climbers attempting to climb K2. When they attack the apartment, Zaman manages to escape, but the SEALs do capture computers that provide a lead that sends them off in an unexpected direction.
A young woman named Malie Tingvoll has been kidnapped in Norway. As a representative of Norwegian Intelligence explains to Crocker, it is the latest in a string of abductions that are tied to a Middle-Eastern man by the name of Cyrus. The intelligence his team recovered provides a link between Zaman and Cyrus.
To save Malie and take out Zaman and Cyrus, Crocker and his team must race from the slopes of K2 to a farmhouse outside Marseille and on through Pakistan and Oman. They also discover and must stop a terrorist plot that could cripple the world economy.
Mann’s sparse prose keeps the story crackling and he imbues the novel with authenticity thanks to his thirty years of service. His is a new voice in the genre that I’m sure we’ll hear from again.
