Red and Buried marks the "return" of The Red Menace, the number one enemy of anti-American forces in the 1950s! When his deadliest enemy surfaces in Cuba, decades later, The Red Menace takes the mothballs from his stealth cloak and strikes off to settle an old score — permanently, with the future of Democracy hanging in the balance. Jim Mullaney, co-author with Warren Murphy of Remo Williams: The Destroyer, delivers a tour de force of action-adventure and political satire.
WHO IS THE RED MENACE? Throughout the 1950s, this was the number one question from Moscow to Beijing and in every communist palace and malaria-ridden backwater in between. The mysterious masked figure was a shadow and a whisper. For the Kremlin and its fellow travelers, he was a damnable monkey wrench tossed into the gears of the not-so-glorious worldwide revolution. Wherever Reds schemed, the Menace was there to set things right. Then, 1960 came and the whisper grew silent.
Twelve years later, Podge Becket, computer tycoon and security expert, thinks he’s hung up his mask and cape for good. He escaped the spy game while still a young man, and none but a select few know about his long-dead secret identity. But into his restless retirement steps a ghost from his past, a bitter Russian colonel with nothing to lose and the means to wreak worldwide destruction.
Aided by his partner, inventor and physician Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright, the Red Menace is dragged back into the hero game. But it’s a whole new world out there, and if the Menace doesn’t watch his step, the swingin’ Seventies might just find him RED AND BURIED!
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New Pulp series set in the wild 1970s!
So who is The Red Menace? Well, he is Patrick "Podge" Becket, now a computer tycoon and security expert. We are told his company, Becket International, is IBM's main rival in the computer industry. Back in the 1950s, he decided to fight back against communism and its agents, creating the costumed persona of The Red Menace. His outfit of cape, hooded mask (described as like an executioner's hood) and gauntlets are made from a special dye that looks red close up, but black further away. He also has a special gun and other devices. However, in 1960, he stopped. Most likely he realized as he was getting older, he wouldn't be able to continue and live. Now in 1972, he reluctanely comes back in action. He is aided by Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright, doctor and inventive genius, who you will soon realize has a mysterious background. He gaves Becket a syrum that helps him physically, but it doesn't make him superhuman. His special devices come from Wainwright. The Red Menace works with (Patrick emphasises this) an agency known as MIC (Manpower and Intelligence Command), now headed by Simon Kirk, the son of the man who headed it in the 50s. These three are the only consistant characters in the series. This one kicks off in 1958, where the Red Menace is able to penetrate the headquarters of Motherland, the opposite group to MIC, where he embarrases its head, Col. Strankov, and does something to Lenin's corpse. Then we jump to 1972 where an MIC agent in Cuba discovers a secret Russian base, and finds Strankov there, when he had been sent to a gulag after what happened in '58. He is captured trying to get more info and is killed. This leads to Simon Kirk approaching a now long retired Red Menace to look into things, as the agent killed was a friend as well as Strankov being back. The only way to do this is to get Castro to invite Becket to Cuba. Becket's company does security, but not for dictators. So in a change, he does work for Idi Amin (ugh), which leads to being invited by Castro and off they go. We learn more about The Red Menace and Wainwright, and it seems he will get in on the action to a degree. They find out what Strankov is really doing, which would end the U.S., and put a stop to him. And take care of a few others who deserve it.
