As with Conclave, my first novel, Empty Quiver uses characters who are both historical and fictional, and places them in the real world of Cold War competition that existed in the 1980s during the missile deployment. There is a role for two of President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisors, Judge Bill Clark and Bud McFarland, just as there was in Conclave for President Jimmy Carter’s security advisor Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski. I even have a cameo for perhaps the most famous NSC staffer in history, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Ollie North. On the Soviet side, Yuri Andropov re-appears, this time as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the position he held before his death in early 1984. Palestinian Professor Walid Khalidi, who appears in the portion of the book set in Beirut, is also real and was one of my professors at Harvard – indeed, one of the best I had.
As for the fictional characters, Carter Caldwell, Katherine O’Connor, and Dimitry Zhukov are back and carry the main story line – therefore making Empty Quiver a true sequel. Many of the other fictional characters, from enlisted soldiers to senior military and governmental officials, are loosely based – in some cases less loosely – on people I have known over the years. Carter’s executive assistant, for example, is based on a secretary I met in the State Department who had an unbelievably uncanny intuition about people and events. She probably should have been the Secretary of State herself!
In further developing Katherine’s character, in Chapter 2 I placed her in Beirut when the American embassy was bombed. The CIA officer she is with, Robert Ames, and his colleagues are all real, and all in fact perished in the bombing. During my temporary assignment to the State Department, I met some of the people mentioned in the story in connection with this event, true American heroes all of them. [See below]
As for “Number Seven,” who appears at the opening of Empty Quiver, let me simply say that he is also a real person, but I’ll not divulge more than that. Once you get through the book his identity will be revealed. Let me simply say, there was a Number Seven who was addressed as such for many years.