My Cultural Diet

When I was in high school and filled with Cold War anxiety, I became a fan of technothrillers like Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October and Payne Harrison’s Storming Intrepid. So when I saw a copy of Dale Brown’s Day of the Cheetah sitting in a bookstore’s “Free” box, I figured it might be a nice little nostalgia trip. As a former Air Force officer, Brown’s verisimilitude is unassailable; the very first thing you see upon opening Day of the Cheetah is an extensive glossary of military terms and vehicles, and Brown lays on the jargon nice and thick right up until the last page. The plot — a deep cover KGB agent steals a top secret Air Force fighter jet that’s enhanced with artificial intelligence and the Air Force must scramble to prevent him from delivering it to the Soviet Union — borders on sci-fi at times, and even promises to get really weird in places when Brown explores the effects of AI on his character’s psyche. However, Day of the Cheetah remains pretty fly-by-numbers, and definitely brought back some Cold War-era nostalgia, which is all I was really looking for. Unfortunately, the novel also feels like it’s about a hundred pages too long and its ending — climactic dogfight included — is surprisingly anticlimactic. Furthermore, the novel’s epilogue seems intended to lay the foundation for future novels, but at the same time, feels like Brown ran out of ideas and wanted to wrap everything up as quickly and cleanly as possible.

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