It must have been in the early 1980s when I read a Ludlum-esque spy-action-thriller by “a major author” writing under a pseudonym, at least according to the back of the book.
Here’s the plot outline, as I recall it. A former F-4 Phantom pilot and Vietnam veteran gets embroiled in a Middle Eastern web of intrique. Now a Very Important Guy, he finds himself and his ravishingly beautiful wife embroiled in a web of Middle Eastern intrigue. The MacGuffin is the Pandora’s box of all weapons–a nuclear weapon that creates no radiation whatsoever.
Very Important Guy tracks the weapon down and discovers it will be dropped on the Aswan Dam, and the act is to be pinned on the Israelis. Very Important Guy rips off an Israeli F-4, shoots all his missles at a bunch of pursuing bad guys, and finds the bomber on the way to deliver the payload to the dam. Weaponless, he settles his plane onto the bomber, forcing it to ditch its radiationless nuclear bomb in the desert. Hooray!
Anyone ever read this tripe? More importantly, who is the chump who actually wrote it? I hope the fellow stuck to cookbooks thereafter.