目录

Overview

Eagle Strike is the fourth book in the Alex Rider series written by British author Anthony Horowitz. The book was released in the United Kingdom on September 4, 2003 and in the United States on April 12, 2004. It is set mostly in Southern France, Paris, Amsterdam, and London.

Eagle Strike follows Alex Rider as he goes to rogue to stop a madman celebrity from launching 25 nukes at various locations across the world to stop the drug trade.

Plot

In a prelude chapter that takes place 15 years before the main series, two unnamed assassins travel through the Amazon jungle in search of their target, a major drug lord. Locating him, they prepare to take him out from his secret hideout before he boards a helicopter. However, a black widow spider lands on the neck of one of the assassins, compromising the mission. Changing his position, the second assassin manages to hit the black widow and take out the target with a single shot from his sniper rifle. Once escaping, the assassin thanks his partner for saving him before heading back to civilization.

After the events of Skeleton Key, Alex Rider is on holiday in the south of France with his friend Sabina Pleasure, where he spots Yassen Gregovich at the beach and follows him, but stops after a close encounter that endangers him. Later, the house that Sabina and her family are staying in explodes, injuring Sabina's father in the process. Convinced it was Yassen, Alex locates him on a yacht but is captured by Yassen's associates, and Yassen sends him to fight a bull. Alex manages to escape from the bullfight and discovers that the man Yassen was recently in contact with was a billionaire pop star-turned environmentalist, named Damian Cray.

Failing to convince MI6, Alex starts his own investigations on Cray and attends Cray's launch of a new gaming system called "Gameslayer", and its flagship game, Feathered Serpent, in which he participates in a demonstration. His suspicions about Cray grow as the next day Alex hears about the death of a journalist who was questioning Cray over the violence of the game, which is set in Aztec times. He then locates a journalist named Marc Antonio, a friend of Edward Pleasure, in Paris, who was investigating Cray. Marc reveals what he has been investigating Cray and a deal he made with a man called Charlie Roper, an American NSA agent. Marc is killed by Cray's men, while Alex manages to escape. Alex sneaks into Cray Software Technologies in Amsterdam, where he hears Roper and Cray talking about a flash drive, before they start arguing about the deal. Roper is then trapped in a room, and two million dollars worth of nickels (owed to him by Cray as part of their deal) is poured on top of him, both paying and killing him. Cray catches Alex as he tries to sneak away and puts him in a real-life version of Feathered Serpent. Alex manages to escape and steals Cray's flash drive. A pursuit breaks out between Alex and Cray's men across the streets of Amsterdam, which Alex narrowly survives, thanks to a bicycle laden with gadgets, courtesy of MI6 gadget-master Smithers. In response to Alex stealing the flash drive, Cray captures Sabina and holds her for ransom. Alex goes to Cray's convent home and attempts to force Cray to release Sabina, but Cray refuses and forces Alex to hand over the flash drive. Cray then explains his reasons for attempting to have Sabina's father killed and having Antonio killed.

Cray reveals his plan, code-named "Eagle Strike": he will board Air Force One and use its missile room to launch a total of twenty-five nuclear missiles at major drug-running countries around the globe to eradicate the drug trade, at the cost of millions of innocent lives. Leaving Sabina and Alex locked in a cellar together, Sabina and Alex apologize to each other and reconcile. Yassen comes in and forces the two to put on hazard suit. After creating a diversion using a plane full of fake nerve gas (which Alex saw back at Amsterdam), he, Yassen, Alex, and Sabina sneak aboard Air Force One at Heathrow International Airport. Cray plugs in the flash drive and activates the missiles, before asking the pilot, Henryk, to fly them to Russia, where Yassen will be honoured as a hero. After Sabina insults Cray, Cray demands Yassen to kill Sabina and Alex, which he refuses. Yassen is then killed by Cray before Cray shoots at Alex.

Sabina goes berserk and attacks Cray. Before Cray can kill her, Alex, saved by a bulletproof jersey (given to him by Mr. Smithers), gets up and fights Cray. After an intense fight that progresses across the entire plane, Sabina and Alex manage to push Cray out and into the jet engine, vaporising him instantly. The engine is destroyed, causing the plane to lose control and crash before take off. Alex and Sabina survive the crash, but Alex is wounded and Sabina is forced to use the self-destruct button to destroy the missiles. As Yassen lays dying, he reveals to Alex that he knew his father, John Rider, and he had worked with him as an assassin. He even shows a scar on his neck, which shows that Alex's father had saved him once (Referring to the prologue). Yassen then tells Alex he must go to Venice, and find someone called "Scorpia", before he dies.

At the end of the novel, Alex is visited by Mrs. Jones, who apologises for not believing him, and questions him about the final interaction between him and Yassen. She asks whether Yassen told him anything. Lying to her that Yassen shared nothing important, Alex vows to discover the truth of Yassen's story and prepares to find Scorpia. Later, he meets with Sabina, who tells him that she and her family are moving to San Francisco. Sharing a kiss, the two go their separate ways.

Autho

Anthony Horowitz's life might have been copied from the pages of Charles Dickens or the Brothers Grimm. Born in 1956 in Stanmore, Middlesex, to a family of wealth and status, Anthony was raised by nannies, surrounded by servants and chauffeurs. His father, a wealthy businessman, was, says Mr. Horowitz, "a fixer for Harold Wilson." What that means exactly is unclear — "My father was a very secretive man," he says— so an aura of suspicion and mystery surrounds both the word and the man. As unlikely as it might seem, Anthony's father, threatened with bankruptcy, withdrew all of his money from Swiss bank accounts in Zurich and deposited it in another account under a false name and then promptly died. His mother searched unsuccessfully for years in attempt to find the money, but it was never found. That too shaped Anthony's view of things. Today he says, "I think the only thing to do with money is spend it." His mother, whom he adored, eccentrically gave him a human skull for his 13th birthday. His grandmother, another Dickensian character, was mean-spirited and malevolent, a destructive force in his life. She was, he says, "a truly evil person", his first and worst arch villain. "My sister and I danced on her grave when she died," he now recalls.

A miserably unhappy and overweight child, Anthony had nowhere to turn for solace. "Family meals," he recalls, "had calories running into the thousands…. I was an astoundingly large, round child…." At the age of eight he was sent off to boarding school, a standard practice of the times and class in which he was raised. While being away from home came as an enormous relief, the school itself, Orley Farm, was a grand guignolhorror with a headmaster who flogged the boys till they bled. "Once the headmaster told me to stand up in assembly and in front of the whole school said, 'This boy is so stupid he will not be coming to Christmas games tomorrow.' I have never totally recovered." To relieve his misery and that of the other boys, he not unsurprisingly made up tales of astounding revenge and retribution.

So how did an unhappy boy, from a privileged background, metamorphose into the creator of Alex Rider, fourteen-year-old spy for Britain's MI6? Although his childhood permanently damaged him, it also gave him a gift — it provided him with rich source material for his writing career. He found solace in boyhood in the escapism of the James Bond films, he says. He claims that his two sons now watch the James Bond films with the same tremendous enjoyment he did at their age. Bond's glamour translates perfectly to the 14-year-old psyche, the author says. "Bond had his cocktails, the car and the clothes. Kids are just as picky. It's got to be the right Nike trainers (sneakers), the right skateboard. And I genuinely think that 14-year-olds are the coolest people on the planet. It's this wonderful, golden age, just on the cusp of manhood when everything seems possible."

Alex Rider is unwillingly recruited at the age of fourteen to spy for the British secret service, MI6. Forced into situations that most average adults would find terrifying and probably fatal, young Alex rarely loses his cool although at times he doubts his own courage. Using his intelligence and creativity, and aided by non-lethal gadgets dreamed up by MI6's delightfully eccentric, overweight and disheveled Smithers, Alex is able to extricate himself from situations when all seems completely lost. What is perhaps more terrifying than the deeply dangerous missions he finds himself engaged in, is the attitude of his handlers at MI6, who view the boy as nothing more than an expendable asset.

The highly successful Alex Rider novels include Stormbreaker, Point Blank, Skeleton Key, and the recent Eagle Strike.

Anthony Horowitz is perhaps the busiest writer in England. He has been writing since the age of eight, and professionally since the age of twenty. He writes in a comfortable shed in his garden for up to ten hours per day. In addition to the highly successful Alex Rider books, he has also written episodes of several popular TV crime series, including Poirot, Murder in Mind, Midsomer Murders and Murder Most Horrid. He has written a television series Foyle's War, which recently aired in the United States, and he has written the libretto of a Broadway musical adapted from Dr. Seuss's book, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. His film script The Gatheringhas just finished production. And…oh yes…there are more Alex Rider novels in the works. Anthony has also written the Diamond Brothersseries.

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Amazon Review
Anthony Horowitz's enormously popular series about the world’s premier teenage spy, returns for another round with secret agent Alex Rider fighting ingenious villains and charming every girl he meets. Eagle Strike, Horowitz’s fourth fictional foray into the world of British spy agency MI6, starts out calmly enough as Alex and his lovely companion, Miss Sabina Pleasure, vacation with her family in the south of France. But before you can say Goldfinger, Alex spots his old nemesis, renowned assassin Yassen Gregorovich, on the beach. What Alex discovers is a plan so diabolical that it makes all of his previous adventures seem like a stroll in the Queen Mum’s garden. Alex must fight to keep Gregorovich from executing the plans of a mysterious and murderous madman--an operation code named "Eagle Strike." He will just have to face down a few minor complications first: a virtual reality game that inflicts real pain; a fleet of Porche 911 GT3-driving hit men; and even a near fatal brush with death aboard the most famous aircraft in the world, Air Force One. But he’ll persevere, or his name isn’t Rider: Alex Rider. Eagle Strike, like all of the ridiculously fun Alex Rider adventures, is a pure guilty pleasure from start to finish. Even the most reluctant of readers won’t be able to resist Alex’s Bond-like ingenuity and charisma. Anthony Horowitz is a master of pacing, and as Alex swings from one cliff-hanging chapter to the next, Horowitz proves that you don’t have to be Shakespeare to pen a crackerjack plot! --Jennifer Hubert