Kirkus Reviews

A supersonic air adventure which describes night patrols from a U.S. carrier off the Red Chinese mainland in 1958. John Foster Dulles and Eisenhower are not giving the Reds an inch of air space while the mainland keeps up a 44-day shelling of Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist stronghold on Quemoy. The job of Squadron Commander MacCafferty's Black Knights is to keep the Red radar aware that "we are up there" on patrol with new missiles and nuclear devices reader to repel an island invasion. Man by man, the Black Knights die on night flights, until half the squadron is lost at sea by errors of reckoning or electronic failure. This story is told via naval junior officer Charly Rohr, who survives disasters John Wayne never dreamed off. Every horror is penned with graphic detail and reveals the real human beings within the wire-tense pilots. On the brink, all the way.