Boomer

Taylor's ( War Ship ) military thriller might have stayed afloat if he hadn't leaked most of his secrets in the first 50 pages. Wayne Newell, the competent, confident commander of the attack submarine USS Pasadena , is a Russian agent, planted in the Navy 20 years ago. Claiming knowledge of a masking device that makes Soviet subs indistinguishable from American ones and supported by bogus communications, Newell directs his crew to torpedo two American nuclear submarines called boomers. Navy chiefs, knowing only that the boomers have vanished, order in the USS Manchester , a twin of Pasadena , to fill the defense gap. From then on, aside from watching the Pasadena 's crew succumb to stress as they begin to suspect they are indeed sinking American vessels, and Newell losing his mental balance for reasons that are less clear, much time is spent waiting for lumbering bureaucracies (both U.S. and Soviet) to catch up with what the reader already knows so the subs can get to their final underwater battle. ( June )