Robbie Bach. The Wilkes Insurrection. Greenleaf, 2021.

The Wilkes Insurrection begins as a formulaic terrorist thriller. Think Tom Clancy, Brad Thor, or even Robert Ludlum. However, there is something else going on as well.

Captain Tamika Smith USAFR is on extended active duty at an Air Force base in the Midwest. A terrorist bomb goes off on a commercial passenger airliner, so it has to make an emergency landing at the base. Capt. Smith is in the thick of things because her specialty is Combat Search and Rescue. She and her team rescue a majority of the crew and passengers on the crashed plane. A photo of her carrying an obviously much larger male passenger to safety goes viral on the Internet.

A hitherto unknown terrorist who calls himself Obaid bin Laitif claims credit for the bomb on the plane and tells people in a carefully scrubbed Internet video that America can expect more. The name obviously has echoes of Osama bin Laden.

The novel then tells us of the retiring Air Force colonel who joins the FBI in tracking down leads to Bin Laitif and the organization he claims to represent, the IBF or Islamic Brotherhood Front.

We also meet several of the survivors including a retired couple rescued by Capt. Smith. They have a married daughter with two children and son whom they have not heard from in several years. The son and daughter play into the story as the son makes a living on the Dark Web acting as a middleman selling products that may not be entirely legal.

The man in the photo turns out to be a co-founder of a Silicon Valley startup that is in the process of being bought for millions in a bidding war between venture capitalists.

We also get glimpses of Ford Wilkes, who gives his name to the title of the book. He is some kind of anarchist. It is a little vague. Other characters compare him to white supremacists, but he sounds a lot like Antifa in terms of what doctrine he expresses. The politics of the bombers may be the weakest or most puzzling part of the tale. Even at the end the reader is not really sure who they are or what they represent. One guesses his name is derived from John Wilkes Booth and the Ford Theater. Bin Laitif is a cipher.

Still, the adventure does spin pretty well. As Capt. Smith reflects on the airliner rescue, she flashes back to a tour in Afghanistan when she was rescuing downed pilots and aircraft under Taliban fire. And that, in turn, takes her back to a terrifying night when she was gang raped by three Air Force officers when she was a newly minted Second Lieutenant.

When I look back on my own experience as a military officer, it is hard to imagine anyone I knew stooping to something like that. We were certainly drilled on the Code of Military Justice and told that officers were gentlemen. Still, I have to admit that all human beings can be tempted by moral shortcuts, so we have to accept that it did happen. I am not that naïve, either; where there is a will, there is a way. The reader has good reason to hate the Air Force Captain who set Tamika up.

At least three more bombs go off. Bin Laitif remains deeply underground. The FBI does get some help, especially as the retired colonel begins to connect some dots. In many ways this is an entertaining and exciting novel.

At the beginning, as mentioned earlier, we are reminded of other techno-thrillers like those of Tom Clancy. Some of the back story gets a little bogged down, but it comes together pretty nicely. The author’s Silicon Valley background comes through both with some of the computer hacking episodes and the high-stakes business proceedings.

But towards the end, we begin to realize that we are reading another kind of novel as well. I used to teach Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It is generally classified as a propaganda novel. Though it does entertain, its main purpose is to present a political position and make a case for its adoption.

Without going into great detail about The Jungle, its main character, Jurgis Rudkus is a Lithuanian immigrant to the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. He has numerous setbacks and more or less ends up on the streets. He encounters some Communists and converts to Communism. The last part of the novel tries to persuade the reader that Communism and Socialism ought to be adopted in America.

The Wilkes Insurrection is neither Communist or Socialist. Indeed, it even uses the word patriotic in a positive sense. However, we do begin to realize that there are a number of politically correct boxes being checked.

The main character is biracial and identifies as African American. She has her #Metoo story. A very sympathetic character is a Latina in a gay relationship. Since we know very little about who Bin Laitif really is or what he really believes, the other Muslim character is a moderate and an American immigrant success story.

Now other thrillers have these things, too. But here there is a sense throughout the novel that these things are leading to something, and they are. How do we deal with radicals like Bin Laitif? Like The Jungle, The Wilkes Insurrection has a political solution. Indeed, the story ends with a nine point political platform.

The points are presented as things that most American can agree on. I confess skepticism on that, but they remind us of President Clinton and the now-defunct Democratic Leadership Council. Readers may remember that Clinton advocated a center-leaning party. He was able to work with a Republican-led Congress to accomplish a number of things. Although President Obama was really a disciple of Saul Alinsky, he campaigned under the shadow of the DLC as a centrist.

Non-Progressive Democrats would be willing to accept most of the nine points, and most Republicans would likely accept a few. Would they work? The author would like us to think so, but there may be a point that his own book makes that he is missing. He suggests that “civic engineering” by government experts is the way to go (261).

Nevertheless, the two really bad guys in the story are the Air Force captain who raped Tamika and Ford Wilkes who is behind the bombings. Both do what they do because they can. They have the power. That is the problem, or at least a problem, of looking to government to solve our problems. Once people get power, they are often tempted to misuse it or overuse it to the detriment of others. Bach notes that even small-government types have favorite programs, and progressives just think we can print money all we want. (248-249) Let the people take care of themselves with as little interference from government as possible. That is true freedom.

The novel is set in 2020 and 2021. Trump is president at the beginning until Biden is elected. Most similar thrillers have fictional presidents like Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Sr. Neither president has much of anything to do with the story, but it is very clear whose side the author is on. Mr. Bach was a long-time Microsoft executive. At least he does not go as far as Facebook; after all, he still considers patriotism a positive ideal. I wonder if Facebook will restrict him as they have others who appeal to American patriotism.