Inside the Mind of an Ideological Terrorist

This is a fast-moving tale of terrorism in America at the hands of a terrorist bred and born in a forgettable little town in southern Kansas near the Oklahoma border. Kurt Kurtovic is the son of a Bosnian Muslim father and a Croatian Catholic mother who immigrated to America after World War II.

Kurt grows up lonely and angry. He endures the rough training of a Ranger and goes to Panama on the mission to capture Gen. Manuel A. Noriega. Then he is in Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm.

“America’s wars, when I was in them, were waged like football games. . . . They were made for TV. Whatever conflict it was shouldn’t go on too long. People get bored and restless. And the violence should be visible without being too disgusting, too real.”

Dickey shows you, through Kurtovic’s eyes, violence that is both disgusting and real. A correspondent for Newsweek and formerly for the Washington Post, Dickey writes about war with authority.

Kurtovic’s reflections lead to a development in this novel that sets it apart from your ordinary hard-boiled tough-guy violence-filled thriller. Starting with the discovery of his father’s copy of the Koran, Kurtovic moves step by step toward his father’s religion.

By 1992 he is out of the Army and in Croatia, searching for his mother’s roots, and then in Bosnia, looking for his father’s just as Bosnia blows up with ferocious religious hatred.

In a pivotal turn of Dickey’s plot, Kurtovic meets Rashid, a shadowy Palestinian Arab whom Kurtovic had first encountered in the fiery end of the liberation of Kuwait.Rashid seduces him with the rhetoric of anger and justice.

Before long Kurtovic is using his Ranger skills to mount a one-man campaign to rescue Bosnian Muslims from the ethnic-cleansing clutches of Bosnian Serbs.

Dickey tries to get inside the head of an ideological terrorist. “Serenity and anger can work together,” Kurtovic thought. The serenity comes from perfect certainty in the faith you are serving; the anger is at the vast wrongs you wish to right.

His plot grows increasingly implausible as Kurtovic becomes involved with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, is with the people plotting to blow up the World Trade Center and with Rashid develops a fiendish plot to spread grief and terror throughout the United States.

At the end of the novel, Kurtovic states his menacing creed:

“Americans are an arrogant people, steeped in sin, and someday that arrogance is going to be taken from them. They are going to experience a power greater than themselves--and they will finally believe in a power greater than themselves--and if that happens, I do think they will be closer to God, and the whole world will be a better, safer place.”