Book Review: Righteous Might
Righteous Might. Keith Conrad. Eckhartz Press, June 22, 2020, Trade Paperback and E-book, 260 pages.
Reviewed by Andrew Reynolds.
Have you ever had one of those ideas that, when you looked back at it, you wish you'd kept to yourself? If you have, then you probably have a good idea of how Rebecca Lasky feels as the events in Righteous Might unfold.
Rebecca is the protagonist among an ensemble of characters the reader meets as the story progresses. She has an idea for a way to make an object the size of an aircraft carrier invisible to radar. The fact that she works for DARPA, the Defense Department’s in-house research arm, means she’s in a position to try her idea out in real life.
That’s how Rebecca, her boss, and a team of technicians end up on the Gerald R. Ford as it and its battle group steam out of Pearl Harbor. The equipment that she hopes will make her idea a reality has been installed on the Ford, but her task has expanded: it is now hoped that her experiment can hide the entire battle group from radar.
As far as the crew of the Ford is concerned, the test is nothing but an annoyance. They're on their way to the continental U.S. and their home port after a long deployment, and all the tests are little more than a delay to them. What none of them know is that their delay is going to be much longer than they thought.
The experiment works, but as the equipment is being shut down, things go terribly wrong. Everyone is rendered unconscious, but once they wake up, they find things have gotten much stranger. None of their satellite-based systems, from GPS to communications, is working. Even their normal communications channels are silent. It’s only when they dispatch a reconnaissance flight to Pearl Harbor that the magnitude of how much trouble they’re in becomes clear: Battleship Row is no longer an empty memorial—it’s filled with the ships that will be sunk on December 7, 1941.
Righteous Might delves into one of the most fundamental problems such a situation would present to its protagonists: What do you do when you can literally rewrite the future you know? Do you try to change history, or do you stand back and let the timeline develop as you remember it? Keith Conrad spins a good yarn, examining that problem through the eyes of his characters. He makes his main characters come alive, and it’s a story that’s easy to get lost in.
Maybe you have to be an aviation nerd like me to know—or even care—about the fact that no American fighter has been armed with machine guns since the F-86s built in the early 1950s. Yet Keith Conrad repeatedly speaks of the ultramodern F-35s that make up the majority of the Ford’s air wing firing their machine guns. There are a few other minor points that niggle at the writer in me, but in the end, the story has enough drive to carry it through those problems to a satisfying conclusion.