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Local author Bob Gore holds a copy of his new military thriller "Rhombus." He is planning a sequel to the book. Photo by Clint Karlsen.

Tuesday, January 02, 2001
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Las Vegan's military career inspires idea for novel

`Rhombus' tells the story of a pilot and his efforts to stop World War III

No agent of the U.S. Department of Defense has come knocking on novelist Bob Gore's door to complain about a divulging of military secrets. But there's a gleam in the Las Vegan's eye when he mentions that one Air Force veteran declined to read the manuscript of Gore's aviation thriller through.

"I have some familiarity with the subject matter. By my agreement with the U.S. government, I cannot read it," is how Gore says the veteran phrased his refusal.

The veteran never told Gore outright that he had been stationed at Area 51 -- a secret air base about 75 miles northwest of Las Vegas near Groom Lake believed to be used to test high-tech aircraft and a site of great interest among UFO enthusiasts. But that's what Gore gathered, so the rejection was a form of good news.

"The secret I've created is possible. Everything in the airplane is an extension of existing technology," Gore says proudly, referring to Rhombus, the visionary plane from which Gore's novel, "Rhombus," takes its name.

The story is set mainly in the early 1980s. Rhombus is a plane with first-strike nuclear capability, so revolutionary it threatens to end the world. As "Rhombus" puts it, "the countdown to World War Three begins from the moment we discover a gadget that can render Soviet defenses useless."

That gadget is Rhombus. At will, it can turn invisible, both to radar and to the naked eye. Nor does it have windows for pilots to look through. Beyond state-of-the-art computer technology cloaks the plane in nothingness at will, and renders windows obsolete.

"Rhombus" revolves around the crises faced by Mike Christum, a Navy pilot assigned to Groom Lake, who is one of only two trained to fly Rhombus. He must simultaneously deal with personal tragedy and defend the Western free world, while the Cold War against communism still rages.

Southern Nevada readers will likely enjoy the regular references to local landmarks and phenomena that are plausible, if not factually proven.

At one point, a civilian character in "Rhombus" who's trying to pierce the secrecy veil around Groom Lake by sneaking through the desert, notes that because of Nellis Air Force Base, the Nevada Test Site and Groom Lake, "Las Vegas had more Soviet KGB agents than anyplace this side of Moscow."

When that same character dies of heat exhaustion in the desert outside Groom Lake's perimeter and his body is left to decay, noticed, but untouched, by the hidden base's security force, the novel posits:

"In a few months, or maybe a few years, someone would find another John Doe buried in a shallow desert grave. The Nye County sheriff would log it as another victim of the mob days, and would note the time of death as `probably in the 1950s or 1960s.' It was as much a part of life in Nevada as the ringing of a slot machine."

Published by Las Vegas-based Huntington Press, "Rhombus" has a book jacket endorsement from Bill Branon, another local novelist in the Huntington Press, who described the book as "a techno-masterpiece."

There's no doubt Gore revels in the pseudo-science he has created for "Rhombus." The goal was to make the novel's science understandable to a novice, yet credible to aviation and communication pros. To make it ring true if futuristic, he ran his hypothetical theories by friends who hold advanced corporate positions in Silicon Valley's electronics industry, as well as fellow military pilots.

"I've never flown a fighter," admits Gore, 55, who was an Air Force pilot flying C-141 cargo planes during the Vietnam War. "I was in the pipeline for Southeast Asia. (The C-141) was an airborne hospital. We'd take over high-priority cargo and basically bring back the dead, the dying and the wounded."

Toward the end of that conflict, Gore was in training to become a rescue helicopter pilot, but then was grounded for medical reasons. He didn't know that his change in status would soon cause him to move to Nevada.

While working in public affairs at Myrtle Beach Air Force Base in South Carolina, Gore handled a visit by the Air Force Thunderbirds, and afterward was invited to apply for the demonstration team's own public affairs position.

He won the spot and was transferred to Nellis Air Force Base in 1973. Gore was one of about 76 people on the Thunderbirds crew, out of about 800,000 in the Air Force at the time. While assigned to the Thunderbirds, Gore says he never visited Area 51.

Gore left the Air Force in 1977. "I got out during a mass exodus," he recalls. Because of federal budget restrictions, "we had at the time a `hollow' Air Force. The American military was so weak, our only (defense) option was nuclear. I felt the country was in great peril. ...

"I was a 10-year captain at that point. I felt like my devotion to my country wasn't being returned."

Gore moved back to his home state of West Virginia. But after four years, an executive at the former Summa Corp., Fred Lewis, offered Gore a position, which he accepted. He returned to Las Vegas in 1981.

The following year, he decided to join the reserves. Because there wasn't much selection in Air Force Reserve units in Las Vegas, Gore chose to join a Navy Reserve unit based at Coronado Island near San Diego. Every month he spent a weekend on duty there, retiring from the reserves in 1995, for a total of 22 years of military service.

Writing fiction about military life was a natural, for the same reasons he served in the military, Gore says.

"It was the camaraderie. The sense of honor and duty. The selflessness. ... I am a man who is fortunate to know real heroes."

Gore, who is now a local commercial real estate broker, laughs when asked if he is the "Clancy of the air" -- an allusion to the writer who has been wildly successful for a string of technical military thrillers.

"You're describing a guy in a rowboat sitting next to the USS New Jersey," Gore protests. But he admits to taking heart from Tom Clancy's track record, during his own long search for a publisher. "We didn't lose faith because we learned Tom Clancy had been turned down over 80 times for `Hunt for Red October.' "

Gore lives in Desert Shores with his wife, Feona, who served informally as one of his editors. "He had this one novel (at least) in him," she recalls. "It had to be published."

But there's at least one more lurking as well, Gore discloses. His next book will be a "Rhombus" sequel that depicts hero Mike Christum at an older stage in his life. The sequel will start in the Nazi era and cover a future world threat.

In that upcoming adventure, Christum, Gore reminds in a teasing way, is the "only guy on the planet who has ever flown Rhombus in combat."