Tidal Rip - Hardcover

Buff, Joe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060009667 ISBN 13: 9780060009663

Publisher: William Morrow, 2003

Synopsis

A new world war has begun. It is the year 2012, and extremists in Germany and South Africa have succeeded in staging simultaneous coups to forge the Berlin-Boer Axis, a cabal determined to take over the world. The key instrument of this war is tactical nuclear weaponry, where a single torpedo or cruise missile can destroy an entire ship or city. And while the war will be fought with high-tech weapons, it will be won or lost by the men who command them...

Commander Jeffrey Fuller is America's newest hero. Awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his victories in battle as captain of America's most sophisticated and deadly fast-attack nuclear submarine, the USS Challenger, Fuller takes grim satisfaction in the honor, knowing at what cost it came.

But he has barely enough time to receive the decoration before he is tasked with a new mission. An Allied convoy is steaming toward Africa, hoping to establish a beachhead on the continent that would enable a D-day type of invasion. The enemy has dispatched its most lethal submarine, the SMS Admiral von Scheer, a ceramic-hulled sub virtually undetectable by even the most advanced sonar technology, to ensure that the convoy never reaches its destination. Fuller's mission is to protect the convoy at all costs, even if it means battling the phantom sub to do it.

Then a nearly impossible mission gets even more difficult. Fuller discovers from intelligence sources that agents of the Berlin-Boer Axis are attempting to gain a foothold in South America, a development that would force the United States to fight the war on yet another front, an escalating conflict they can't possibly win. Now Fuller must make a no-win decision: deploy his team of Navy SEALs to South America to destroy the nuclear-armed enemy insurgents or patrol the depths of the Atlantic, seeking threats to the convoy? Even Fuller cannot be in two places at once, and the failure of either mission will mean defeat for the Allied cause.

Fuller's opponents have every technological advantage of modern warfare: nuclear-tipped torpedoes, high-velocity flechette projectiles, and hyper-accurate targeting computers. But a weapon is only as powerful as the man who wields it, and Fuller possesses the intellect, the nerve, and the guts that earned him victories over the most dangerous warriors in the Axis Navy. Stalking his prey beneath the waves where the pressure alone can kill, Commander Jeffrey Fuller knows that while one man's life may be meaningless, one man's death could change the course of the war.

About this title

About the Author

Joe Buff is a Life Member of the U.S. Naval Institute, the Navy League of the United States, the CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation, and the Fellows of the Naval War College. Respected for his technical knowledge, he is considered an expert on submarines and national defense. Two of his nonfiction articles about future submarine technology have won the Annual Literary Award from the Naval Submarine League. He is the author of five previous highly regarded novels of submarine warfare—Straits of Power, Tidal Rip, Crush Depth, Thunder in the Deep, and Deep Sound Channel. He lives with his wife in Dutchess County, New York.

Reviews

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060009667
• ISBN 13: 9780060009663
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464