Rum Soldier

What if the hostage you're rescuing turns out to be the enemy?

In the late 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, a welterweight named Loi Whitlow loses a bout with epilepsy and faces a future of waxing floors in office buildings. The local Army recruiter offers an alternative. Five years later, as an ROTC cadet, Whitlow hits his stride. He meets Sabrina Delk, a classmate with a pedigree and a security clearance. When he's summoned to Fort Myer, in northern Virginia, it's not about his future. It's about the future of a Caribbean nation. An island torn between the US and Soviet Union. A country collapsing into civil war.

Why Grenada?

The Soviets have oil, massive reserves on land and offshore. With military bases in the Middle East, they have influence on, if not control of much of the world's petroleum supply chain. By 1983, they're closing in on Venezuela, owner of the largest repository of undrilled oil in the world. A stone's throw from Caracas, on the island of Grenada, Cubans are building a military airstrip with Russian guidance. The U.S. has two liabilities there, a small group of medical students and a professor with a certain skill. A skill the enemy must never acquire.

The Mission

If it weren't SCI, Sabrina Delk might explain it like this: "Remember that play you read in European History where the doc in the madhouse asks, 'What's the point of a revolution without general copulation?' That's Professor Dinada in a nutshell. We're talking serious cold war burnout and all kinds of twisted. Like secret sex parties, the sort where you need a code word to get in. Anyhow, there was a coup in Grenada. Maurice Bishop's government fell. Matter of time before the Russians installed their own guy. And still the professor would not leave. No way was DoD letting him stay. Not with what he knew. So... we sent Whitlow to...uh... rescue him."