A top secret lab the scene of intrigue in 'The Dragon’s C.L.A.W.'

Don’t be fooled by the title of this book — “The Dragon’s C.L.A.W.: A_Project_Z_Novel” by Gerold Yonas.

It has the ring of science fiction, though it reads more like fiction infused with science. Or a not quite so thrilling a techno-thriller.

Some of the setting is the top-secret, hilltop scientific community of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The hero is the nebbish, idealistic physicist Alek Spray. A top researcher at the lab, he really wants to develop a small, portable machine that can produce unlimited, clean energy from fusion power.

Alek knows it’s a hard sell to obtain federal funds for peaceful purposes.

He’s up against influential colleagues and federal officials who, by comparison, have it easier to corral funds needed for the same technology but aimed at producing deadly weapons.

Meanwhile, Alek must battle spies. Two of them are twin brothers who have infiltrated his workplace. They’re tied to a Mexican drug cartel and maybe a rogue Chinese scientist who want to steal the developing technology.

Alek isn’t a lone wolf in this intrigue. He gets critical help and emotional support from Gabi, an FBI agent working undercover as a waitress.

Yonas, an Albuquerque resident, said in a phone interview that Alek faces a moral dilemma similar to what J. Robert Oppenheimer faced when he was director of the Manhattan Project during World War II: Fight to fund research for peace or build a better bomb?

“Practically every vignette and almost every strange occurrence in the novel happened in my 60 years working for national labs,” Yonas said, yet insisting the book’s storyline and characters are drawn from his imagination.

Yonas, who is 83, worked as a physicist for Sandia National Laboratories and for President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, an anti-ballistic missile program nicknamed “Star Wars.”

He said his work on the Strategic Defense Initiative eventually led to his writing the 2017 memoir “Death Rays and Delusions,” which, curiously, is the title of the first chapter of “The Dragon’s C.L.A.W.”

“The Dragon’s C.L.A.W.” is Yonas’ first work of fiction. C.L.A.W. is an acronym for Collective Laser Accelerator Weapon.

Some of the ideas in the novel are inspired by the writings of H.G. Wells and Joseph Heller, Yonas said in a phone interview.

Wells was known for his 1897 sci-fi novel “The War of the Worlds.” Heller was the author of the popular novel “Catch-22,” a satire on war and bureaucracy.

Yonas employs satire, exaggeration and humor in his debut novel.

He began writing “The Dragon’s C.L.A.W.” before the pandemic. “When the pandemic hit, I was looking for something to do. I wrote the first draft. My daughter (Jill) knows how to write. She read it and said it needs some help. I was the technical guy and I really did not know how to develop characters or personalities, not even what they were wearing,” he said.

“She knows how to make the characters more real.”

Yet the characters could have used more polish.

“The Dragon’s C.L.A.W.” suffers from stodgy narrative, dry dialogue, and a peculiar repetition of a scene.

The prologue has a brief description of Alek observing an explosion that flattens the twins’ home in the Albuquerque suburb of Altavaca.

A second, much longer description of the same explosion from Alek’s view is in chapter three.

Questioned about this, Yonas said the short scene in the prologue is a premonition. Premonition? Maybe so, but it hardly seems necessary and may in fact slow the plot development.

Yonas said he’s finished writing a sequel, which is about the human brain, not a gadget. And he’s now at work on the third in the series, which will be about the upper atmosphere.