The Protectors

THE PROTECTORS

Creator: Zackary Blue (R.L. Stine)

Characters

Matt O’Neal

Micky Malano

John Wendell Waterford

Riana Riggs

Lu Golden

Five students receive airline tickets and special requests to come to Washington D.C., supposedly to receive Presidential Citations. However, when they arrive, they are secretly taken to a mysterious group headquarters called CONTROL, and told they are needed for a special mission; to help a Russian gymnast defect to America. The students are five very talented young people:

Matt O’Neal is a mechanical and electrical engineer genius.

Micky Malano, is a young girl who is an actress and disguise expert.

John Wendell Waterford IV, whose parents are connected to high society.

Riana Riggs, a 16-year-old black girl who has a photographic memory.

Lu Golden, Vietnamese and brown belt in karate.

Before they were brought to D.C. they had never met, now they have become good friends, and eventually feel like a team. This is definitely a young adult spy novel, with no sex or language, but it was cute. Everything seems to go wrong, and there is a nice twist at the end. I was a bit surprised when the author included a strange pain in Matt O’Neal’s side, which seemed to bother him suddenly at the wrong minute, a la Secret Agent X. If you’re looking for hard, fast gun battles and killings, this series isn’t for you. But it was a fun read, and a light-hearted spy novel with teenagers as our team of heroes.

In the second novel someone is stealing the plans of a secret airplane at an Air Base next to a youth military academy. Using the academy as a cover, CENTRAL sends The Protectors there as cadets. They uncover two CONQUEST agents, but they are also after the secret plans. So who is the hidden spy, and who is buying the information? The spy is uncovered, but we never learn the answer to the last question. And this is the final issue of The Protectors. The series is juvenile. There are no killings, no sex, and no language – which was a nice touch for a spy series. Lu, the brown belt in karate does have a fight with one of the CONQUEST agents, and Mickey uses disguises for her and Riana, and J.W. has fun being snobbish. Perhaps Matt has the best scene when he’s left alone in a jet on his first time in a cockpit.

In this last novel, the Air Force Base is easily accessible to anyone, with no real security, and there’s even a secret elevator built in a hanger for the team’s use. A tear in the fence is never reported or repaired. And there is absolutely no security around the secret plane. A sergeant flies a jet, and is an instructor for the cadets in the cockpit. Plus, I had a little trouble with ignition keys in a military jeep but the novel was written in 1987, and I got out in 1979, so maybe they had ignition keys by then; in my time, there was merely a switch on the dashboard of military jeeps. R.L. Stine has written many, many children and young adult books, and this was a fun series. And I’m sure parents would rather their children read this than Nick Carter – Killmaster, or The Executioner, The Enforcer, etc. Scholastic, Inc. was the paperback publisher, and the packaging was also top notch.

         Only two novels were ever published, both from Scholastic Books, in paperback.

The Protectors #1: “The Petrova Twist”

The Protectors #2: “The Jet Fighter Trap”