From Publishers Weekly
Submarine aficionado Buff stirs up his usual whirlpool of frightening undersea exploits, but in this fourth outing his formula is beginning to feel a little soggy. Like last year's Crush Depth, this adventure features Jeffrey Fuller, commander of the super sub USS Challenger, locked in mortal combat in the year 2011 with his usual enemy, a submariner from the German navy. This time out, that adversary is Commander Ernst Beck, at the helm of the jewel of the fatherland's U-boat fleet, the Admiral von Scheer. As in Buff's previous Fuller adventures, the world is in the chaos of nuclear war. The Germans have teamed up with the South Africans, where the whites have retaken control, to form the "Axis." On the other side, the "Allies" are a loose confederation headed by the United States and Great Britain. With the Allies struggling to hold onto central Africa and prevent the Axis from spreading its reach into South America, Fuller is dispatched to seek and destroy the von Scheer, which has been littering the floor of the Atlantic with the hulls of Allied ships for months. The action ends in an exhilarating if inevitable showdown off the African coast. Buff brings both a descriptive flair and an undeniable knowledge of undersea warfare to his series. Here, he has also wisely chosen to jettison a silly, plot-diverting love affair that Fuller has been nurturing for the past couple of books. Yet the inevitability of the ending, almost identical to others in the series, makes this one a tiresome journey.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Description
An electrifying new voice in military fiction, Joe Buff has written a riveting and utterly realistic submarine adventure.
Jeffrey Fuller is going back to war.
Commander Fuller has distinguished himself in battle, becoming one of America's most inspirational heroes in its war with the Berlin-Boer Axis. Time and time again, Fuller has taken his crew of elite submariners into the most dangerous waters in the world, matching wits and weapons with the best of Germany's and South Africa's fighting force, and every time he has emerged the victor.
But this time, Fuller is given an impossible mission. As the captain of America's most technologically advanced tactical nuclear submarine, Fuller is told that the Allies will lose the war unless two conditions are met. The only problem: if Fuller devotes his time to achieving one of his goals, he will sacrifice the other. With the war hanging in the balance, Fuller must accomplish the impossible, or he will lose not only his life, but the war itself.
