John LeCarre’s spy thriller is brought to the big screen. A British spy (Pierce Brosnan) is banished to Panama after having an affair with an ambassador’s mistress. Once there he makes connection with a local tailor (Geoffrey Rush) with a nefarious past and connections to all of the top political and gangster figures in Panama. The tailor also has a wife (Jamie Lee Curtis), who works for the Panamanian president and a huge debt. The mission is to learn what the President intends to do with the Panama Canal. But what the two do is concoct a tremendous fictional tale about former mercenaries who are ready to topple the current government and are willing to work with Britain and the US to do so. Written by John Sacksteder {jsackste@bellsouth.net}

Based upon the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, Jack Ryan, a CIA analyst, is thrust right in the middle of a power struggle within the Colombian drug cartel after one of the President’s “life long” friends is murdered, apparently in retaliation for stealing money as part of a money laundering scheme for the cartel. Jack is then appointed acting Deputy Director of Intelligence, CIA, upon the terminal illness of Admiral James Greer, former DDI, and quickly gets in over his head due to his political naivete. The situation rapidly deteriorates when some of the presidents men convince the President to conduct covert actions against the cartel, in direct violation of congress. Felix Cortez, the security chief of Ernesto Escobeda, the “victim” of the missing money, is one of the cartel boss’s. Cortez tries to play both sides, appearing to inform Escobeda about the CIA’s involvement in the covert operations against him, while trying to orchestrate a coup to take over the cartel, with Cortez as it’s sole boss. James Cutter, the President’s National Security Advisor, makes his own deal with Cortez, with the Presidents knowledge, and halts communications to the covert troops still in Colombia, through the Deputy Director of Operations, CIA, Robert Ritter. Ryan ends up going to Colombia to rescue the covet ops troops with the help of field agent John Clark, but not before some fence mending between the two, being that Ritter blamed Ryan for the comm outage, with Clark’s men subsequently being captured by Cortez’s mercenaries. Written by Bill Walch {TheWalchs@aol.com}

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Tom Hardy, an ex-Army Ranger turned DEA agent, is drawn into an ever-widening mystery surrounding the disappearance of the feared and often hated Sgt. Nathan West, as well as several of his elite Special Forces trainees on what appears, at first, to have been a routine training exercise during a hurricane in the jungles of Panama. Only two survivors are found, Dunbar, and a badly wounded Kendall, the son of a high-profile Joint Chiefs of Staff official. Neither is willing to cooperate with Capt. Julia Osborne’s investigation. So base commander Col. Bill Styles calls in ex-Ranger Hardy, an old friend and a persuasive interrogator. Osborne disapproves of Hardy who is on leave from the D.E.A. after having come under suspicion of accepting bribes from local drug traffickers. She is also uneasy when she learns that Hardy once trained under West and hates him almost as passionately as his current recruits. With time running out, Hardy and Osborne call a temporary, if uneasy, truce. Hardy cajoles a confession out of Dunbar, who claims that Sgt. West and the missing Rangers have been murdered and their bodies blown away by the hurricane. When they later interview Kendall, he confirms that the other Rangers and West are dead. But, in almost every other way, his story contradicts Dunbar’s. What happened to West and his Ranger team? And what were they really doing out there in the jungle? As each layer reveals more lies and greater deceptions, Hardy and Osborne inch towards the horrible truth about the fate of the missing Rangers. Written by Sujit R. Varma

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