HELMUT PORTMANN

Author of the Alex Beck Novels

The newest book from Helmut Portmann

Phantom Of The Gulf

The Navy picks up sonar echoes as sound blasts from Oil & Gas seismic surveys bounce off a mysterious underwater object moving among drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. They appear to be from some type of submerged vessel that has no other machinery or engine noise and seems to simply disappear after several hours. The Navy and CIA suspect some kind of submersible running on batteries……. but any diesel-electric submarine would have to eventually surface and charge its batteries by running their Diesel engine.

Both the Navy and CIA know that the massive undersea infrastructure of the oil & gas industry is an attractive target for any potential enemy of the U.S. But the Navy’s super-secret SOSUS acoustic arrays would pick up any submarine attempting to enter the Gulf, so it must be something else. Is Cuba behind it…. to maybe exact revenge for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion attempt? The CIA forms a special team led by Alex Beck to hunt for what they call the Phantom of the Gulf. Their mission is to hunt down the mysterious contact and neutralize any threat that they uncover.

Other Great Books from Helmut Portmann

Adios El Jefe Castro!: A Revenge Plot to Assassinate Fidel

Overview of Adios El Jefe Castro!

Five young boys and a younger sister are orphans who barely escaped Cuba with their lives after their families were brutally murdered by Fidel Castros’ revolutionaries in the 1950s. Ludovico Santana, his best friend Angel Rodriguez, and the others each have their own horror story about how they hid while helplessly watching their parents get raped, tortured, and killed. All five are smuggled out of Cuba by friends and relatives, and they find each other in elementary school in Little Havana, Miami. As they share their stories they form a tight bond and vow to seek vengeance.

As they grow older, they form a conspiracy they call Los Vengadores and start training themselves in the commando techniques they will need to secretly penetrate their stolen homeland and kill El Jefe, as Castro is called in Cuba. They plan to do what the CIA failed to do with over a thousand men in the Bay of Pigs disaster.

But the Vietnam War gets in their way as they reach draft age. They formulate a clever plan to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam by volunteering for an Army tactical nuclear missile system deployed in West Germany. The Pershing 1a missile carries a thermonuclear warhead that can take out an entire city – and there are 108 of them deployed in Europe to protect NATO.

Meet the Characters

Devastatingly beautiful with long black hair and a slender, athletic and tanned figure, ANA’s heart was hardened when as a young girl, she had to witness her mothers’ brutal rape and murder at the hands of Fidel Castros revolutionaries. She is quiet and lethal, with a black belt in Karate and proficiency with close combat weapons.

Best friends since meeting in elementary school in Little Havana, Ludo and Angel harbor the same intense hatred of Fidel Castro as consumes Ana. Ludo is a natural leader and the brains of the duo, while Angel is as quiet and lethal as Ana. He also has a black belt in Karate, and he quickly gains a reputation for being best not to cross.

Carlos and Raul are also expatriates that managed to escape Cuba, but their hatred of Castro and his revolutionaries does not quite consume them as it does the others. They are followers that generally go along with Ludo’s
leadership.

Jose is Anas’ older brother, and although he witnessed the violence inflicted on their parents alongside Ana, he is not as intensely consumed and does not like violence of any kind. He is the intellectual of the group, working on his PhD,

Preview the book Adios El Jefe!

Born in Switzerland and fluent in German,
ALEX BECK is recruited from logging oil wells for Schlumberger Offshore Services to be a supervisor of a European Field Office that evaluates the weapon system performance of the Army’s Pershing 1a tactical nuclear missile. Along the way, he becomes close friends with a small group of Cuban expatriates that also work on the missile system, not realizing that he is being drawn into a complex web of hatred and revenge.