FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 15, 2006

BARBARIANS AT THE GATE: SUSPENSE/THRILLER FOCUSES ON SAN FRANCISCO TERRORIST EVENT

Could the Golden Gate Bridge, which has withstood the 6.9 magnitude jolt of Loma Prieta and countless other tremblers, be brought down by a terrorist attack? Not a chance, at least in the pages of a debut novel by former San Francisco resident, Cheryl Swanson, which postulates just such a scenario and then shows it checked in an inventive climax.

With homeland security a national priority, most government officials would prefer that we wipe the imagery of the bridge going down in a fireball from our minds. But when she was sailing her boat under the bridge, the author, an expert on three-dimensional computer technology, found herself wondering. “What if…?”

Such was the genesis of DEATH GAME, which will be published in January by Zumaya Publications, LLC. “Doing the research was a challenge,” Swanson said, “because officials at the Golden Gate Bridge District, like those at other high-profile facilities around the country, are loathe to share information. You get a stony stare; they simply won’t give you any specifics.”

The tight-lipped silence is probably because the bridge has been considered a terrorism target for many years. In 2002, Spanish officials found videos among the possessions of suspected terrorists that included detailed images of the span, and, in 2003, the state attorney general named the Golden Gate Bridge the fourth most likely target in California, after LAX and the ports of Long Beach and Oakland.

Since the bridge contains over 80,000 tons of steel and weighs nearly 900,000 tons overall, realistic scenarios of its destruction aren’t obvious. But Swanson found that speculation about possible methodology was rife on the Internet. “Most of the attention focuses on someone bringing in a car-bomb to blow a hole in the deck,” Swanson said. “But the Golden Gate Bridge has already survived countless tremblers. Compared to the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta, the typical car bomb attack is roughly equivalent to a mosquito bite.”

An airline attack on the bridge is also occasionally postulated. “The destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001 made it clear that massive concrete and steel structures can be brought down from the air,” according to Swanson. But her novel pegs the true danger somewhere else; Death Game is based on an attack on the piers by marine tankers. “I came up with the idea mostly based on an awareness of how easy it is to sail into harbors on the California coast unchallenged,” she said. “And then, I found out that most authorities seemed to consider marine tankers one of the most realistic threats.”

Swanson said that over the years she was only boarded once on the California coast—by immigration officials, when she strayed into Mexican waters. “My experience is that you can sail up and down the coast, enter whatever harbor you wish and no one pays any attention.”

Swanson is the author of three non-fiction books and an expert in esoteric adult gaming technologies, including those used to train surgeons, as well as robotic systems for guiding emergency surgery in remote locations. “The U.S. Army, medical schools, Hollywood animators, and teenage boys are all fascinated by computer games,” she said. “I already knew something about the technology, from a realm where it was used in a helpful way. But you can’t work with advanced technology without realizing that this millennium has become increasingly dangerous because the things with which we are surrounded with are more dangerous.”

Swanson never intended to write a thriller, when she chucked her career in medical technology and started writing a novel. “I would probably have written a cozy, except I was in the middle of chemotherapy for breast cancer,” she said. “And I was also in the final stages of an adoption from Guatemala, which my surgeon told me to stop pursuing because of my diagnosis. That put me in a black mood. And then, like all of America, I was transfixed by 9/11. After 9/11, the spectrum of credibility expanded for everyone in America with a thinking brain. What was inconceivable was now possible--the utterly awful had become chillingly real.”

Swanson neatly transferred her feelings of being out of control into the mind of her heroine, Cooper O’Brien. In DEATH GAME, Cooper is on a nonstop roller coaster, trying to prove her kid-brother is not a killer. “Being in a chemo room is like being in the anteroom of a gas chamber,” Swanson said. “My challenge was to put that thoroughly awful thrill into words. And then, final step, create a much more entertaining situation than my own, in which those feelings might have happened in the first place.”

Swanson said that she believes we are under-estimating the sophistication of terrorists, and mistaken in calling their acts irrational. “There’s a popular misconception that terrorists are lunatics who want to kill everyone in the West. It’s sort of like Batman fighting Robin. What we are actually seeing, instead, is much more complicated. These are highly sophisticated individuals, fully versed in media imagery. They know that we in the West think in images. On the West Coast, nothing is a more powerful image than a beloved landmark like the Golden Gate Bridge.”

DEATH GAME contains a superstar terrorist who is fully westernized. Swanson found that an amazing number of the Arab and Muslim terrorists have second and even primary identities as Westerners. “A standard part of growing up in bin Laden’s family, for example, involved attending university in the West. Osama studied in Jiddah, but he was a playboy in Westernized Beirut before he repented and returned to fundamentalist Islam. In many ways, that is the driving force of aggression against the West. They see it as a betrayal of his Muslim identity and pride.

“Terrorists intend to kill a certain number of people, yes, but their real goal is to exploit the news media to terrify a far larger portion of the public,” she added. “The brilliance of bin Laden’s plan was that he spoke to us in a language of images we understood. Watching 9/11 on television, many people said to me that it didn’t feel real to them. It seemed like something made up—a scene out of a movie. And that was the point. It was supposed to be like something out of a movie. The imagery kept it front and center on the world’s news’ channels for a long time. Bin Laden counted on that to help him attract a fresh army of recruits to jihad.”

Swanson said she felt there was a strong connection between the reduction of individuals to abstractions and terrorism. “In 1967, the political scientist Ole R. Holsti published an essay titled “Cognitive Dynamics and Images of the Enemy,” in which he argued that, while terrorists exploit media images, they are also psychologically disposed to reduce their human enemies into a single abstract image. Holsti went on to say that these abstractions cause terrorists to resort to violence, because the very abstractness and unreality of those images means they are bound to inspire immoral action.”

“It is a closed loop,” she said. ‘Terrorist groups manufacture oversimplified and repulsive images of the enemy, and then those images prompt attacks that are themselves highly repulsive.” With a replacement cost estimate at around 1.5 billion and immeasurable symbolic value, officials might prefer we wipe such imagery as is presented in Swanson’s novel from our minds.

She believes that it’s more likely the images created by books like hers are a deterrent. “One valuable benefit of fiction is that it alerts us to what’s possible,” she said. “With the publication of anything that contains a possible scenario for terrorists, that idea is no longer a usable terrorist plan. Once a plan is public knowledge, if it contains any overlooked detail the bad guys might have thought they could exploit, they’ve lost the element of surprise. They are forced to go on to Plan B, or Plan C.”

(Considered officially to be in cancer remission, after four years of being cancer free, Cheryl Swanson now lives with her Guatemala-born daughter, and her husband, Bob, two densely jungled miles from Michael Crichton in Kauai. Death Game will be available from Amazon.com and other local bookstores as well as the e-book format.)