Choppers to Die For

About the Book

This novel is set against the background of this African armaments industry and its weapon capabilities. Because this industry is still important to South Africa, Julius Grant, a military journalist, was retained as a consultant by an aviation company, Africair. This company needed a substantial attack helicopter order from a questionable military client that would create thousands more jobs for the New South Africa.

Julius Grant was confident that a well designed marketing communications strategy would ensure a successful bid to supply a large number of highly sophisticated attack helicopters to the forces in Southeast Asia. Grant was excited by this lucrative project - not realizing that it could be the death trap of a crafty but brutal back-stabbing international armaments transaction.

Jack du Preez, an attack helicopter test pilot, who desired to satisfy a personal revenge by assassinating President Nelson Mandela, complicates Grant’s objective. An experienced Vietnam attack helicopter pilot, Brian Boddington, is also drawn into this clandestine international weapons transaction.

To execute their covert and dangerous missions, du Preez and Boddington needed to track Grant and his team from London to Dubai, Johannesburg, and Cape Town and on to magical Malaysia, where an international aviation show explodes into a ferocious and disastrous rendezvous.

This story introduces the reader to fictitious characters that create a new genre: the unrevealed reality of what took place behind the Apartheid Curtain in the armaments industry of South Africa. This tale will keep readers riveted to their armchairs.

About the Author

The author is a retired corporate communications practitioner and correspondent for military magazines. His career was devoted to the management and practice of strategic and general corporate communications pertaining to the South African gold mining, and armaments industries.

In this book ‘Choppers – to die for’, the writer created fictional characters who represent some of the intricate and diverse outlooks in the South African public sectors shortly after a majority black government was democratically elected to take over the country’s administration for the so-called new ‘Rainbow Nation”.

This novel is a work of fiction describing vivid imaginary situations and events. The writer invented fictional characters that are not intended to represent specific living persons.

Where places and incidents, as well as the names of particular prominent and well-known persons are mentioned in this novel, it is the product of the author’s imaginative and fictional creation of the relevance of these persons and locations to enhance the narrative.

The objective was to augment this exceptional story with its line-up of fictitious characters with a sense of authenticity to create a new and yet un-plotted novel genre: the unrevealed reality of what took place behind the Apartheid Curtain in the armaments industry of South Africa - which is to this day, an exceptional capability of this country’s diverse aptitude and capacity.

            Holtz Hauzen is the pseudonym of the writer of Choppers. He lives in the USA and in the meantime became an American Citizen.