Word: checkpoints
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Before dawn on Sunday morning, four battalions of South Vietnamese troops moved up the road toward Saigon from the Mekong Delta. Spearheaded by armored cars and Jeeps carrying heavy machine guns, they first disarmed a police checkpoint on the outskirts of the capital, then set guards to forbid the movement of traffic in or out of the city. Without a fight, the rebels occupied communication centers in the capital, burst into the office of Premier Nguyen Khanh, and arrested several duty officers but found no trace of the Premier. It was the coup d'etat that many had dreaded...
Once through the Friedrichstrasse border checkpoint, Peter collected his girl friend's West German identity card to "keep her from losing it," parked her in a gloomy cafe on Karl Marx Alice with a kiss and a promise to return, and took off. Still starry-eyed, Dorothea waited and waited, but her Peter did not come back. Alone, and without her ID card, she could only go to the Volkspolizei for help. But the Vopos were in no mood to give courteous assistance to the lost traveler. Instead they tossed the sobbing Dorothea into jail on charges of complicity...
...Abdul Rahman refused to talk as long as fighting continued, Sukarno once again promised to withdraw his guerrillas and to have the operation supervised by neutral Thai observers. Finally last week a group of 32 ragged Indonesians marched out of northern Borneo through a Thai-supervised border checkpoint. Shouted the departing Indonesian warriors: "Long live Thailand, long live Malaya, long live Sukarno...
...Checkpoint reeks of authenticity. Some of it is just that of a competent journalist rendering the sights and sounds of Berlin today-the nightmarish rumble of U.S. tanks massing at dawn along the border, the frustrated rage of West Berlin student rioters, the strange claustrophobia of the beleaguered city, which extends even to the press of boats cluttering the Wannsee of a Sunday afternoon. More rare is Diplomatic Insider Thayer's ability to convey with tape-recorder fidelity imaginary encounters between U.S. diplomats and the Russians in the kind of baleful restricted bargaining that still sometimes takes place...
Thriller writing, however, is a deceptively demanding craft. Checkpoint's dialogue sometimes creaks drably under a weight of exposition, and an attempt to rekindle ashes of the hero's old romance seems dusty indeed...