Ebook Date: Jul. 2012
"For two years The Zone has been alive with death, ravaged by war beyond sanity, raped with fire and poison."
So goes the blurb on the back of Hard Target: The Zone #1 by James Rouch. An alternative timeline novel where the fall of the Berlin Wall never happened and a Third World War has developed between NATO and the Soviet Union.
There isn't a lot of information available about the author. His is (was?) British, lives in the west of England. The Zone series and three other war fiction novels appear to be his only books to date. He became a literary agent and had his own company website at one time, but that no longer exists and I can't find anything else.
Written in 1980 at the height of the late era Cold War when President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - best of chums across the Atlantic - were battling tooth and nail with Leonid Brezhnev, the Russian leader. The 'Ruskies' had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. There was even a videogame issued by Atari called 'Missile Command' in which you could play at thermonuclear war. Nuclear warfare was just the twitch of a finger on a big red button away from reality.
Playing on this atmosphere, Rouch's series of books, running up to ten installments by 1990 I believe, pit the combined NATO forces of a group of American and British soldiers together into numerous missions in the ravaged wasteland now called The Zone.
Hard Target takes place two years after the outbreak of WWIII. There isn't any supporting history to explain the current fictional political situation, or the evolution of the contaminated land that most of the action takes place in. Rouch relies upon segments of the book that take the form of reports to HQ, or messages to the Team, to give a little back-story. However, he does cheekily recommend that the reader might want to locate some reference sources such as, "Pawns of Politics; A study of the refugee problem inside The Zone."
