BOOK REVIEWS : Suppose We Invaded Nicaragua?

The Circus Master’s Mission by Joel Brinkley (Random House: $18.95; 394 pages).

“The Circus Master’s Mission,” a thriller by journalist Joel Brinkley that envisions a full-scale military invasion of Nicaragua by the United States, is set several years into the future. By now, the Gorbachev era of closer ties between Russia and the West has worn thin. We are, in essence, back in the pre- Gorbachev era when it would seem likely that a good deal of this 400-page book was written.

Brinkley directed the New York Times’ coverage of the Iran-Contra scandal and reported from Nicaragua for several years, and he offers a view of official and off-hours Washington so broadly cynical, and of Nicaragua on the Contra side so broadly sinister, that it seems immediately translatable into a movie-of-the-week or even an after-dinner board game, a sort of imperialist Monopoly for the jaded Georgetown set.

First we meet Major “Paz,” a red-haired killer--”Paz” in the eternal sense, it is explained--who heads a special “Death Penalty” Contra force and who is virtually inseparable from his Ray Ban sunglasses.

There is, of course, an Oliver North figure, the gung-ho Marine Col. Eric Gustafson, chief military attache at the United States embassy in Managua; and he and a wayward CIA station chief in Honduras, a disappointed Cuban named Rafael Mendoza, are the architects of a scheme to rouse and prod the slumbering giant to the north to flex his military muscles and set the Nicaraguan house in order--i.e., move out the Sandinistas and bring in the Contras.

As we proceed along these simple, not to say grossly oversimplified, lines, we meet as well the Washington side of the equation. Chief among these is the modest but sexually smoldering Chris Eaton, a reporter who is covering Nicaragua with extra effort for the little-heralded New World News Service. Eaton is recently divorced and, after becoming involved with the beautiful, unhappily married Leslie DeSalles--assistant to Gen. Dayton, who, as it happens, oversees the U.S. military presence in Nicaragua--dreams of a job on the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Then too, there is the pathetic, morally corrupt, Valium-addicted Terry Ascher, a career diplomat who is the son of a more prominent, retired career diplomat who makes a point of belittling and upbraiding him. It is Ascher who becomes head of the new White House office, created at the behest of the President himself, that manages the Contra program--a job everyone else prudently won’t touch; and it is Ascher who allows himself and his country to be duped by the manipulative duo of adventurists to the South, Gustafson and Mendoza. These two, who know how to distract a man and sap his strength at the same time, have a vital ally in the sultry Francesca, a freedom fighter who holds back nothing for the Nicaraguan counterrevolution. Ascher, arguably the dumbest Harvard graduate in all of American fiction, is a bit surprised by her pointed attentions but suspects no ulterior motive on her part. At the moment of truth, Brinkley outdoes even his own standard for ham-fisted irony: “Ascher moaned out loud, thinking: God, she’s a pro.”

With the invasion of Nicaragua by a full panoply of American forces, Brinkley pulls out all the stops, treating us to a vivid and highly informed guided tour of the new generation of our military hard- and software, punctuated by comic-book-style exclamations from enthused military personnel:

“ ‘Bombs away,’ Janeway said. Rising jerked the stick as the plane bucked, suddenly eight thousand pounds lighter. As the bombs fell, sensor pods in their noses locked on to the laser mark reflecting back from the target. Tiny fins and aerofoils on the bombs’ tails flipped left and right to keep the fall straight down the laser path.

” . . . Flame and black smoke poured straight up in a fiery jet . . . “ ‘Bingo, buddy,’ Janeway said, turning to Rising, thumbs up.”

The intended exhilaration of the scene might have been more infectious if forces opposing the Sandinistas were not known to have “obsolete weapons, demoralized conscripts, antiquated antiaircraft and nothing even resembling an air force,” but there may yet be something salutary in the rehearsal of such high-tech weaponry in the pages of a book, perhaps mitigating the impulse to search out actual opportunities for its engagement.

One has more trouble attempting to excuse the portrayal of the Nicaraguan conflict in terms that reduce it to anti-Communist slogans and shibboleths that haven’t passed muster since the days of Vietnam, let alone post-Gorbachev. For an insider, Brinkley sure likes to write it simple--there isn’t a word in this book about the Contra-cocaine connection, for instance--and making his bad guys such obvious, loner grotesques tends implicitly to legitimize our continuing support of the Contras. However, until such U.S.-backed forces are recognized and addressed as part and parcel of a long-term, consistent American policy that many argue doesn’t serve our real interests, we’re just looking at Latin America as, indeed, a sort of murderous Monopoly board.