Gray vs Gray Leads to Midnight Black
BOOK REVIEW: MIDNIGHT BLACK
By: Mark Greaney /Berkley
Reviewed by: Jay and Anne Gruner
The Reviewers — Jay Gruner served as CIA Station Chief in four countries and as an area division chief, later founding J.K. Gruner Associates, a business intelligence consultancy. His wife, Anne, a former career CIA analyst and Deputy Chief of WINPAC, is a previous Pushcart-nominee with fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and book reviews in over twenty print and online publications. The Gruners live in McLean, Virginia with their two golden retrievers.
REVIEW — Midnight Black is Mark Greaney’s 14th book in the Gray Man series, but the first of his work that we have read. In addition to the Gray Man series, Greaney collaborated with Tom Clancy in his final years on four books in the Jack Ryan series, then wrote four Jack Ryan novels on his own. Greaney’s first novel in the Gray Man series became a movie starring Ryan Gosling in 2022. Our comments reflect our having read only Midnight Black. Not having read the previous books was not an impediment to our enjoyment of this one, though it would have helped us understand the complex history and relationships on which the plot was built.
Piecing together the prior history that is alluded to early in Midnight Black, the reader learns that Courtland Gentry, aka the Gray Man, aka “6,” aka “Violator,” is a former CIA officer who had worked under nonofficial cover and then at some point, having been betrayed by CIA, fled from the Agency and became an assassin for hire, albeit one with a defensible moral and ethical code. During one of his more recent jobs in the Far East, he met and befriended Zoya Zakharova, a Russian SVR officer (and daughter of a past head of the GRU) with whom he developed a deep romantic relationship. Zakharova also had become a freelance agent after having killed an SVR officer who allegedly was trying to kill her. Codename Anthem, Zakharova worked with Gentry, both considered “deniable assets,” on CIA operations against the Chinese in Cuba and elsewhere. During the Cuban operation, she was caught and kidnapped by the Chinese who then traded her to the Russians in a spy swap. After spending a brief period in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, she was transferred to a penal colony in the Russian Republic of Mordovia, southeast of Moscow. There she sewed buttons on uniforms in a dull-as-dirt existence, but was spared the harassment, torture, and execution she had expected in Lefortovo.
This is the point in the Gray Man saga where Midnight Black begins. Gentry, again an independent operator, is compelled by his passion for Zakharova to reenter Russia to rescue her from the penal colony. Reports have leaked out of Moscow that a former female SVR official arrested for espionage was recently executed, but Gentry is convinced in his heart that Zakharova is still alive. As Gentry struggles to find a clandestine way back into Russia, developments on the world scene add to his challenges and the suspense of the plot. The Russian war with Ukraine continues, but the Russians have expanded their strategy to include extensive sabotage operations against targets in Central Europe which are aiding Ukraine. These “gray” operations rely on international mercenaries of various nationalities paid by a clandestine GRU unit based in Vienna. Conversely, a Russian government in exile, the New Russian Council, founded and led by a former Russian oligarch and located in Poland, is conducting provocative gray operations against the Kremlin. To further complicate the plot, Russia’s Military Intelligence organization, the GRU, and its domestic intelligence organization, the FSB, are not just bureaucratic rivals, but are at war with each other, making for interesting interplay.
CIA decides to send its highly skilled paramilitary officer Zack Hightower, formerly of Seal Team Six where he had been a close friend of Gentry’s, into Poland to help train Ukrainian and Russian freedom fighters of the New Russian Council in its struggle against Moscow and the unpopular Russian President Peskov. Gentry hooks up with Hightower and his group when it becomes clear that Gentry’s beloved Zakharova is held in the same penal colony as the wife of the imprisoned Russian politician and dissident Natan Yaravoy, who is in a nearby “special regime” prison. Gentry becomes part of The New Russian Council’s daring plan to rescue Yaravoy and his wife—who will not leave Russian without her husband. In return for Gentry’s help, they will also rescue Zakharova and take her out of Russia.
Midnight Black is not so much an espionage novel as a high-power action thriller highlighting paramilitary operations, both terrestrial and aerial. Exciting escapes, ambushes, car chases, and near misses keep the reader turning pages. While Mark Greaney never served in the military or the intelligence world, he clearly has extensively researched armaments, operational maneuvers, battlefield vehicles and tactics, small arms and explosives usage, hand-to-hand combat, and the like. The book almost serves as a “how to” manual on street assassination, avoiding CCTV, and breaking in and out of prison. He also appears to have visited the venues associated with many of the actions, particularly those in the Balkans and the Baltics, and has an exquisite, if horrifying, description of life in a women’s penal colony.
Greaney’s characterization of CIA operations is one of an evolved future of asymmetric warfare and use of “autonomous assets” with no restrictions on assassination and murder, which might give Agency officials, current and retired, a chuckle or two as they digest the plot. More flexible personnel policies allow ex-Deputy Director for Operations Hanley, formerly in charge of all clandestine operations, to be demoted to Deputy Chief of Station in Bogota, Columbia after displeasing his superiors. Still, the disgraced officer plays a key role in organizing international operations, including a daring incursion into Russia. Similarly, operations officer Zack Hightower, after killing someone in Cuba the Agency wished to keep alive, was held for six months confinement in an Agency safehouse near Charlottesville, Virginia “rather than going to jail.” He was finally released and dispatched to Europe for an off-the-books operation to eliminate the leader of GRU’s “direct action network” based in Vienna. Such elements suggest a more aggressive future CIA, and one perhaps needing an “illegal activities” division to run unconventional gray ops warfare. The plot seems less far-fetched, however, considering what in real life is being called a “shadow war” Russia now is conducting in Europe, to include bomb scares, severed undersea cables, factory explosions, assassinations, shopping mall arson attacks, cyberattacks, disinformation, and influence operations. Indeed, an unclassified memorandum by the National Intelligence Council in July 2024 (NIC-SG-2024-20319-A) predicted that “gray zone” activities—defined by DOD as “coercive means that may fall below perceived thresholds for US military action” —are “likely to increase in the coming years and become a dominant feature of great power competition and international relations more broadly because of eroding or nonexistent norms. . .” To this extent, Midnight Black imagines a difficult and violent future.
In sum, this is an action thriller that may be of particular interest to members of the military and those who have served in paramilitary operations in CIA’s Special Activities Division, now called the Special Activities Center. The operations in the book are fast-moving, exciting, and vividly portrayed, though the number of death and wounding descriptions, particularly at the beginning of the book, might be a bit much for some. Likewise, the final one hundred pages or so that comprise the military rescue operation could be a bit shorter for the benefit of non-military readers. Given the action in Midnight Black, we can envision it as a movie, but hope readers appreciate its fictional nature and do not conclude the CIA is full of killers.
Midnight Black earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
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