Deep Sound Channel - Hardcover

Buff, Joe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553801333 ISBN 13: 9780553801330

Publisher: Bantam, 2000

Synopsis

An electrifying new voice in military fiction, Joe Buff has written a riveting and totally realistic tale of military adventure-a spectacular novel that is sure to establish this outstanding author as the new master of the genre. Vividly authentic and impeccably researched, it takes readers into the not-too-distant future, when the United States is embroiled in a tactical nuclear war that will mark a new era of weapons and tactics, geopolitical alignments, and human courage....

Deep Sound Channel

The year is 2011, and in South Africa a reactionary coup has established a military government that has begun sinking U.S. and British merchant ships. NATO quickly responds, with only Germany holding back-until Germany starts nuking Poland and eviscerating the French. Now the South Atlantic is a battleground where nuclear-tipped missiles rule-and the only gun worth using is one that seeks and fires from deep beneath the sea.

In response, Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Fuller and the crew of the nuclear submarine USS Challenger are called in to help. Ceramic-hulled and designed for maximum stealth, the Challenger is being sent to South Africa for a mission critical to stopping the war. Together with a team of Navy SEALs and assisted by Boer freedom fighter Ilse Reebeck, Commander Fuller must infiltrate the enemy coast and attack a compound where scientists are putting together the ultimate biological weapon-a violent, deadly microbe that has the potential to wreak global devastation.

For Jeffrey Fuller, the operation will take him back to his former life as a SEAL. It's his job to steer the team of operatives to shore; penetrate concentric arcs of armaments, minefields, and sensors; and destroy the death lab. If the mission works, the
bioweapon will be destroyed and shock waves will cripple the South African government. If it goes wrong, fallout will kill thousands of innocent people.

Deep Sound Channel provides a rare and telling look into the future of our military's weapons-and into the horrific violence of tactical nuclear war. It is a cutting-edge masterpiece that takes readers on a wild and unforgettable ride of suspense, nuclear warfare, and underwater adventure

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Puts the reader in the hull of a deep-diving combat Virginia-class submarine on a mission to hell itself....A superb high-water mark in naval fiction."
--Michael DiMercurio, author of Threat Vector and Piranha Firing Point

"Deep Sound Channel is a hell of a read."
--David Hagberg, author of Assassin and Without Honor

"An action-packed thriller that is all too real. Lots of action, lots of grit."
--Dick Couch, Capt., U.S. Navy (Ret.), author of Rising Wind

"Nonstop and exhilarating...chilling and fascinating. Joe Buff takes the reader on a frightening ride in harm's way. A damn good story."
--Eric L. Harry, author of Invasion and Arc Light

"A sobering look into the possible future of undersea warfare-the one environment where nuclear weapons can, and probably will, be used."
--P. T. Deutermann, Capt., U.S. Navy (Ret.), author of Train Man and Scorpion in the Sea

"Deep Sound Channel demonstrates Joe Buff's intimate knowledge of undersea warfare....Nonstop action!"
--Barrett Tillman, author of The Sixth Battle and Warriors

From the Inside Flap

ing new voice in military fiction, Joe Buff has written a riveting and totally realistic tale of military adventure-a spectacular novel that is sure to establish this outstanding author as the new master of the genre. Vividly authentic and impeccably researched, it takes readers into the not-too-distant future, when the United States is embroiled in a tactical nuclear war that will mark a new era of weapons and tactics, geopolitical alignments, and human courage....

Deep Sound Channel

The year is 2011, and in South Africa a reactionary coup has established a military government that has begun sinking U.S. and British merchant ships. NATO quickly responds, with only Germany holding back-until Germany starts nuking Poland and eviscerating the French. Now the South Atlantic is a battleground where nuclear-tipped missiles rule-and the only gun worth using is one that seeks and fires from deep beneath the sea.

In response, Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Ful

Reviews

Exciting battle scenes, fascinating naval maneuvers and accessible technical data are offset by clich?d villains and tenuous narrative logic in this debut submarine warfare thriller set in the year 2011. World War III has begun, and Germany and South Africa, armed with nuclear weapons from a "neutral" Russia, are allied against the U.S. and Britain. The brunt of the war is borne by naval forces in deadly nuclear combat. Lt. Comdr. Jeffrey Fuller finds his state-of-the-art submarine, the U.S.S. Challenger, pulled from battle duty to run a covert team of Navy SEALs into Durban, South Africa. The mission: to destroy the secret lab where an ultra-lethal biological weapon is being perfected. Ilse Reebeck, a Durban marine biologist who worked at the lab until her family was executed in a Boer coup, is along as sonar consultant, and it is she who will lead the raid. But first Challenger must navigate a heavily mined port and evade enemy tracking devices and nuclear torpedo attacks launched by its South African counterpart under the command of Capt. Jan ter Horst. The fearless ter Horst, who is Ilse Reebeck's former lover, is the epitome of arrogant evil; their relationship adds a personal edge to the struggle. Buff scripts suspenseful submarine action and invents clever futuristic naval tricks as Challenger and its crew play dueling subs with ter Horst's vessel and improvise on the Durban raid. The inevitable romance is well handled, but the villains are straight from central casting, as are many of the good guys. A satisfying, cliff-hanging ending suggests a sequel. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

More electronic gimcrackery than you can shake a MAD (magnetic-anomaly detector) at in this debut thriller about submarine warfare in the year 2011. Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Fuller is executive officer of the nuclear-powered USS Challenger. He's fearless. So is Ilse Reebeck, a civilian oceanographer on board to assist with a special mission. It seems Germany and South Africa (the Berlin-Boer Axis) have formed an evil alliance threatening world peace in a variety of virulent ways. Notable among these is through the establishment of a formidable bio-weapons lab from which deadly microbes are meant to emanate. Brave Jeffrey, dauntless Ilse, and some intrepid Navy SEALS are sent to blow it up--and they do.Flat characters, mounds of high-tech detail. One needs more than just a fondness for gadgetry fiction to stay the course here: One needs to be addicted. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

An unholy alliance between South Africa and Germany in the year 2011 leads to a high-tech war at sea between this new Axis and NATO. Nuclear-tipped missiles are the weapons of choice, and nuclear submarines are the prime delivery vehicles. Add deadly biological warfare, toss in a touch of romance, and you have a page-turner that will keep technothriller fans at sea most of the night. Buff's fast-paced prose gets the job done effectively, and the glossary helps those unfamiliar with military technobabble. Buff's protagonist is Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Fuller, whose mission is to take out the South African lab where the bad guys are cooking up a new bioweapon that will destroy anyone and anything that gets in the way of their bid for world domination. The catch is that the job must be done without wiping out thousands of civilians. Good summer reading for the military-fiction addict. Budd Arthur
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

It is 2011, and the world is at war. Fascist coups in Germany and South Africa have created an unholy axis that is fighting the United States and her allies. Tactical nukes are used by both sides with great loss of life. This is a great premise, and Buff knows weapons and warfare. However, his descriptions are overly technical, his characters one-dimensional, and the nontechnical dialog trite. Nor is the overall premise plausible. For instance, it is unlikely that Germany, a traditional land power, would be willing and able to fight and sustain a major land war in southern Africa. Confronting defeat, the Axis plans biological warfare measures that Lt. Commander Jeff Fuller and the obligatory gorgeous blonde scientist set out to forestall. Their success is almost too easy, and the subsequent submarine chase is confusing. The ending implies a sequel; one hopes it is torpedoed. For larger collections.
-Robert Convoy, Warren, MI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A few days later, at Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean

Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Fuller looked up from his night-long labors at USS Challenger's weapons loading hatch, wiped his dripping brow, and watched in morbid fascination. The crewmen he'd been working with did too, and for once he didn't urge them back to it. They've more than earned a break, he told himself, so let them look. Let them see what this is all about, this tactical nuclear war at sea with the Berlin-Boer Axis.

"Jesus," the submarine's chief of the boat said, looking east from under the lead-lined awning with its propane jets, radar and thermal antisatellite masking.

"Yeah," Jeffrey said. What else was there to say? The young seamen just stared.

The sun had breasted the horizon now, well past the first moment of nautical dawn, that special time of day that Jeffrey loved but rarely saw. The extra-yellow early light shone above the seventy-foot-high trees off in the distance, the long-abandoned coconut plantation on the other side of the lagoon. The light picked out the cloud-flecked sky, high scudding altocumulus over fluffy fractostratus blobs, and it illuminated the hideous procession in the foreground.

"Ranger," Jeffrey whispered.

The ATR(X) oceangoing salvage tug bore zero three five relative, crossing the line of bearing to the lighthouse on Leconte Point. Her charge's stem could just be seen, slowly making progress past the anchorage. Gradually, like some obscene burlesque, the hulk came into view, dragged by the tow cable whose catenary curved beneath the water and then up again. Slowly, almost teasingly, she moved out from behind the looming steel-gray side of the submarine tender, USS Frank Cable, against which Challenger lay moored.

Instinctively Jeffrey did the target-motion analysis in his head. Angle on the bow starboard zero four zero, mark. Speed five knots, course one six five. Distance to the track, call it 1,200 yards.

Jeffrey noticed there was comparative silence now. Work topside had ceased on all the other ships as well. Only the incessant roar of jets and turboprops and helicopters persisted, off past his right shoulder at the airfield. Overhead, birds soared, oblivious.

Ranger's wake washed under Challenger, and she started pitching slightly as if in homage. The nylon mooring lines stretched, creaking softly. Thankfully the light breeze was from behind Jeffrey, from the west.

Ranger's island superstructure was gone, Jeffrey saw, except for a tangled mess of wreckage, a livid stump three meters high. Her flight deck, warped and twisted, was more or less still there, except for the aircraft elevators, which all were missing. Edge-on to the enemy cruise missile blast, Jeffrey figured, the flight deck was peeled upward as the atomic shock front's ground reflection diffracted over the vessel. Stress loadings of the incident wave, severe drag and compression forces, and explosive negative pressure gradients did the rest.

"My God," Jeffrey said out loud. "You can see right through her hull." He watched the sunrise glowing where the hangar deck had been, and in the other empty spaces lower down. Those once were all compartments, where her crew had worked and studied, slept and messed, written letters home. Tortured longitudinals were what remained of her first platform deck amidships, forward of engineering. Along her waterline arced the discharge from many pumps, undoubtedly P-250 portable gasoline-powered units, keeping her afloat.

"They're finishing the detailed decontamination," COB said, pointing out the little figures in nuclear-biological-chemical protective suits on the hull, busy with the scrubbing and the sealing. "Aging will have happened on its own."

"Iodine 131," Jeffrey said, continuing the idle shop talk in spite of himself, "radon 222, the shortest half-lived stuff."

COB nodded. "The gross washdown would have been completed after putting out the fires."

"The naval architects will claim her now, I think," Jeffrey said. "To improve their damageability models."

"It isn't right," COB said. "She's a tomb, not a pile of data."

Here and there patches of hull plating still clung to Ranger's side. The plates were pressed inward against the frame members, whose outlines stood out clearly. The plates seemed plastered to her flank like sheets of canvas in the wind, a devil's wind. Everything was black, deep coal-mine black, except for splotches where the fires and ocean salt had oxidized her steel a matte pastel red-brown.

"She fought hard," a junior officer said with awe.

"A Presidential Unit Citation for sure," a senior chief said.

"Awarded posthumously," COB said, an obvious tightness in his throat.

"The larger battle won," Jeffrey said, "but at such cost." It was better if they talked, he told himself. It eased the pain.

Jeffrey saw two seamen wipe their eyes--maybe they'd had friends aboard, or maybe not. He watched as Ranger moved on through the lagoon, toward its closed end at the south point of the atoll's miles-long V, toward shallow water and foul ground.

"Message from Frank Cable, sir," COB said when there seemed no point in watching further, being formal for the benefit of the enlisted men, all petty officers themselves. "Captain's due back in fifteen minutes."

A group of crewmen had been standing close together at the bow, huddling like at a funeral, near the dozen hatches for the Tactical Tomahawk cruise missile vertical launch system. The men got back to work, unbidden, at the torpedo loading gear.

"Last one, correct?" Jeffrey said, eyeing the lethal cylinder.

"Confirmed, last nuclear torpedo," COB said carefully.

Jeffrey initialed the checklist, then held out his clipboard for COB to countersign. The old chief would have his thirty years in soon, Jeffrey knew, but with this war the navy wouldn't let him go. Not that he would want to, and victory was much too tenuous to plan that far ahead. COB, whose given name was never used aboard, came from a clan of Latino Jersey City truckers. Black sheep of the family, he instead had gone to sea.

At least COB had a family who cared. Jeffrey sighed to himself, then stood up straighter. "Let me give you guys a hand."

They positioned the crane's long burden carefully, then eased the two-metric-ton weapon onto the loading cradle and secured it. Jeffrey watched the cradle first elevate to line up with the channel through the hull, then trundle down toward the transit rack in the torpedo room three decks below.

A variable-yield warhead, the cryptic markings on the fish's glossy green side said 0.01 to 0.1 kilotons. Maybe that didn't sound like much, till you remembered these were meant to go off underwater. "Up to almost one percent of Hiroshima," Jeffrey said, mostly to himself. The casing at the back for the fiber-optic guidance wire was labeled no step.

COB cleared his throat. "The message said we have two guests. Passengers. No honors to be rendered."

"Very well," Jeffrey said. He shrugged. "Security, I guess."

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0553801333
• ISBN 13: 9780553801330
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368