Hostile Waters

In October 1986, the Russian missile submarine K-219 was on patrol off the coast of the U.S. when one of its missile silos sprang a leak. Captain Igor Britanov sought to save his ship and crew from a nuclear explosion that might trigger a world war or a meltdown that might blanket eastern America with fallout. His superiors and his adversaries, meanwhile, conducted the Cold War as usual. Huchthausen and Kurdin, both retired naval officers, and White (Siberian Light, reviewed in Fiction Forecasts, this issue) depict vividly the hair-raising technical shortcomings of Russia's nuclear submarines, the security systems of which were often literally held together by duct tape--assuming its availability. They present the incompetence of senior Soviet officers who ordered vital oxygen canisters to be airdropped to K-219--without parachutes or protective packing. They indict a Soviet Union whose sailors, poisoned by nitric acid fumes, were ""treated"" by their breathing through vodka-soaked rags--the only remedy available, and a throwback to the earliest days of gas warfare in WWI. The authors criticize as well a U.S. government and a U.S. Navy that, in hindsight, seems to have exaggerated ridiculously the ""threat"" posed by K-219 and her sister ""boomers."" The Cold War's stakes were, however, no less mortal because the Soviet Union was incompetent. In any case, Captain Britanov and the men of K-219 emerge from these exciting, occasionally melodramatic, pages as legitimate heroes in a real-life struggle with the sea, their superiors and their system. HBO movie version scheduled for summer 1997; first serial to Reader's Digest. (Aug.)