{"id":6249,"date":"2026-09-13T20:24:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T20:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/?p=6249"},"modified":"2026-09-13T20:24:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T20:24:36","slug":"cold-zero-by-brad-thor-with-ward-larsen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/cold-zero-by-brad-thor-with-ward-larsen\/","title":{"rendered":"<B>Cold Zero<\/B> by Brad Thor with Ward Larsen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a style=\"float: left; padding-right: 20px;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/236412719-cold-zero\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.gr-assets.com\/images\/S\/compressed.photo.goodreads.com\/books\/1755269226l\/236412719._SX98_.jpg\" alt=\"Cold Zero\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/236412719-cold-zero\">Cold Zero<\/a> by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/author\/show\/5088.Brad_Thor\">Brad Thor<\/a><br \/>\nMy rating: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/show\/8942960012\">4 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n<p>In this spy\/action thriller CIA operative Kasey exfiltrates a scientist from China along with his invention, but the Chinese bring down the plane in the arctic where it lands on sheet ice. The Chinese send an icebreaker to retrieve the scientist and his invention while a stray Russian sub senses an opportunity and heads there. The Americans send a sub and a seaplane that way to rescue the survivors. That&#8217;s the early set up and it&#8217;s played for all it&#8217;s worth with unexpected turns and plenty of action. All in all it&#8217;s a worthy high-tech thriller with plenty of military jargon and weapon knowledge on display. No, not all the good guys come out alive.<\/p>\n<p>Even so, there were a couple of significant gaps in the author&#8217;s knowledge that disappointed me. He made the all-too-common mistake of thriller writers, especially TV types, of confusing and conflating geosynchronous satellites, like weather satellites, with spy ones. At one point one military expert called for a satellite to &#8220;hover&#8221; over the crash site. <i>Satellites can&#8217;t hover; they orbit!<\/i> Spy satellites are in low orbit ~150-300 miles up and orbit the Earth every 90 minutes or so. They&#8217;re only in line of sight of a spot on the ground for maybe 5-10 minutes, then on the next few passes will not go over that same spot. The only satellites that can stay over one spot on the Earth are orbiting at around 22,000 miles (7 to 10 times higher than the spy ones) and right over the equator. They are much too high to get useful resolution of small surface features like ships or people, and in any event can never be in a polar orbit. Yet writers use this mistaken idea all the time. The TV show 24 was notorious for it. A drone can hover, but the crash site in this book was too far away for continuous drone coverage and weather would have prevented it anyway. Take a physics course before attempting to write a sciency novel, folks. I can forgive it, though; it was a fun enough read.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/list\/12975428-russell-atkinson\">View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cold Zero by Brad Thor My rating: 4 of 5 stars In this spy\/action thriller CIA operative Kasey exfiltrates a scientist from China along with his invention, but the Chinese bring down the plane in the arctic where it lands on sheet ice. The Chinese send an icebreaker to retrieve the scientist and his invention [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Cold Zero by Brad Thor with Ward Larsen - OnWords<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/cold-zero-by-brad-thor-with-ward-larsen\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cold Zero by Brad Thor with Ward Larsen - OnWords\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Cold Zero by Brad Thor My rating: 4 of 5 stars In this spy\/action thriller CIA operative Kasey exfiltrates a scientist from China along with his invention, but the Chinese bring down the plane in the arctic where it lands on sheet ice. 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