''Day of the Cheetah'' is a 1989 technothriller novel written by former US Air Force officer

Dale Brown Dale Brown (born 2 November 1956) is an American writer and aviator known for aviation techno-thriller novels. At least thirteen of his novels have been ''New York Times'' Best Sellers. Early life Brown was born in Buffalo, New York, and w ...

. It is part of Brown's Patrick McLanahan series of novels. A number of key characters were killed in ''Day of the Cheetah'', only to reappear in later books, as when ''DotC'' was first written, Brown did not intend to write any further books in the series. Some parts of the plot were passively referenced in Brown's 1991 novel ''Sky Masters'', which is set two years before most of the events in ''Cheetah''.

Premise

Set in the then-future of 1996, ''Day of the Cheetah'' details the story of US Air Force pilot Kenneth Francis James, who is actually a Soviet KGB deep-cover agent assigned to the US High-Technology Aerospace Weapons Center (HAWC) at Groom Lake. His job at the secret base involves testing the highly advanced XF-34 Dreamstar, which is equipped with a thought-control interface. James hijacks the fighter, causing Patrick McLanahan and the rest of the HAWC crew to try to recover or destroy the plane before it reaches the USSR. The Cheetah mentioned in the novel is the XF-15F Cheetah, which is an experimental service version of the real-life F-15 S/MTD, often used as the Dreamstar's

chase plane A chase plane is an aircraft that "chases" a "subject" aircraft, spacecraft or rocket, for the purposes of making real-time observations and taking air-to-air photographs and video of the subject vehicle during flight. Background Safety can ...

. The Dreamstar is recovered after a number of aerial dogfights over Arizona, the Caribbean, and Costa Rica, but the fallout generated by the incident forces the closure of HAWC.

Reception

Reviewer Newgate Callendar in the ''New York Times'' said the novel "puts us in the cockpit" and "gives us quite a ride." He praised the flying sequences, but said otherwise it was a "standard Big Book with a very large cast of stereotypes." ''Day of the Cheetah'' was Brown's first best seller as a hardcover edition, following two previous paperback bestsellers. It reached number five on the ''New York Times'' paperback fiction best seller list in June 1990."Paperback Best Sellers: June 10, 1990," The New York Times, SECTION: Section 7; Page 52, Column 2; Book Review Desk. Retrieved August 31, 2011. LexisNexis Library Express (subscription)

References

External links

Day of the Cheetah section at Megafortress.com)
1989 American novels Novels by Dale Brown Techno-thriller novels American thriller novels Fiction set in 1996 Aviation novels Novels set in the future {{1980s-thriller-novel-stub