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. (Nov. 11)
