Storming Heaven

Storming Heaven is Dale Brown’s 1994 fifth Patrick McLanahan novel and a sharp tonal shift for the series: instead of an external Air Battle Force opponent (the Soviets, the Iranians, the Lithuanians), the threat is a domestic-adjacent terrorist named Henri Cazaux, a French Foreign Legion pilot turned mercenary, who decides to use commercial aircraft and stolen ATC frequencies to attack American air-traffic-control infrastructure. McLanahan, recently retired into the Border Security Force, is pulled back in.

Brown got the procedural texture exactly right for 1994. The civil aviation material (FAA hierarchy, controller workload at SoCal Approach, the realistic limits of fighter intercept response time over densely populated airspace) is more carefully sourced than his usual hardware-porn passages. Cazaux is the best antagonist of the early McLanahan novels, with a credible operational doctrine and an actually scary endgame. The novel anticipates several uncomfortable post-9/11 concerns that no one outside Brown was thinking about in 1994. The McLanahan-Jon Masters subplot drags the middle third.

Recommended for Dale Brown readers who want the underrated middle-period McLanahan entries, and for anyone interested in books like Storming Heaven as pre-9/11 American aviation-terror fiction. Four stars, with the Cazaux POV chapters earning the rating on their own.