Mission Complete - Yet ANOTHER hijacked nuclear sub :-(

[Bill Nichols]

Previous Nuclear Submarine Commanding Officer Becomes Author

Captain L.S. Wigley, USN (Retired) has written his first novel "Mission Complete" which has been published by Publish America. The novel is fiction but could be a true story. The story revolves around terrorist takeover of a U.S. nuclear attack submarine.

(PRWEB) October 23, 2005 -- Commander Bruce Stewart, the commanding officer of the USS Jackfish (SSN945), attends a highly classified conference where it is revealed that an ultimatum was delivered to the President of the United States from a Soviet/Cuban terrorist group demanding a ransom of money plus the disarmament of the United States strategic nuclear weapons arsenal. The ultimatum would be met or the terrorist would launch nuclear cruise missiles from the pirated United States nuclear submarine Tigerfish in five days, Christmas Eve. The missiles would annihilate the cities of Norfolk, Washington, New York, and Groton, Connecticuit.

The Tigerfish had been pirated while at anchor off Piraeus, Greece, the victim of a well executed plan by an integrated Soviet/Cuban team. The submarine was still operated by its American crew who were at present receiving torture and brutality under the guns of the Soviet and Cuban guards.

The options available to the President are to conduct a nuclear preemptive first strike, to honoe the ultimatum, or to dispatch Commander Stewart to seek out and sink the Tigerfish.

The President gambles at his best option- Stewart and the Jackfish.

Captain Wigley, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, spent twenty-nine years on active duty with most of that time associated with nuclear submarines, including command of a nuclear attack submarine for over four years, command of the submarine repair ship in the Holy Loch, Scotland, and command of the construction and subsequent operation of the Trident Submarine Base in Bangor, Washington. This background provided him the knowledge and operational experience to capture all the details necessary to write a best seller.


http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/10/prweb301258.htm

[bradclark1]

I think it's just too plain hard to come up with a good idea for a submarine novel. Hence, the same old crap.
As good as Dangerous Ground was the plot was still a little far fetched. Would a president put a submarine in harms way to get some sample bottles filled?
I've tried thinking of a good plot for a sub novel and just can't do it.

[wild bill]

This is the same theme used by Robinson in his books" HMS UNSEEN" & "USS Seawolf". I enjoyed the former but not the later.

wild bill

[Oberon]

:damn: :damn: :damn: :damn: :damn: :damn: :damn: :damn:

[jason10mm]

I think the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war really put a dampner on almost the entire "technothriller" genre. Now everything is "rogue subs" or "spec-ops covert black ops" stuff. Big armored clashes like Fulda Gap scenarios or sea battles like red Storm Rising are all but gone. Perhaps it is the dearth of good new writers or the atrophy of the old ones or the explosion of autobiographies and true stories coming out. Or maybe with a real war on, our appetite for fictional conflict has waned. Or perhaps I just don't look hard enough in the corners of the used bookstores and online :P

[Grayback]

I wouldn't say that the end of the cold war has put a damper on anything. It may have made us more demanding readers, but look at it this way - people are still reading about both world wars, the civil war and the 1960's. (Wars I can understand - but the 1960's? The culture wars of the 1960's were done to death when I was in HS in the mid 1980's.) I hate to think that we're going to be denied good stories simply because some lazy editors think that only timely stories sell. I'll take Joe Poyer (who set his stories during different periods before the end of the cold war) over the post 9/11 tantrums of Pat Robinson any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.

The problem is that for all the bombast that writers give us about plots that make you feel like you're actually on a sub, few make even the slightest efforts to achieve that vaunted effect - it doesn't require some cookie-cutter plot line about eveil terrorists or hijacked or mercenary subs.

Just show us sub drivers at work - the boring stuff and the fascinating. As an example - I read "Dangerous Ground" by Larry Bond. The plot was pretty simple, but the execution was incredible - here was a slim book that actually made me understand why serving on an SSN could be the hardest job on Earth. Also, the characters weren't the one-note losers you see in these other books - the captain and this congressional aide start off as unsympathetic cretins, but Bond isn't satisfied and brings some (for lack of a better word) depth to them. "Ground" reminded me of the great "To Sink the Potemkin" which was written during the cold war, but told of an earlier part of it. "Potemkin" excelled not through its plot (a Skipjack boat encounters the very first Alfa) but the wayt it told the story. Not through a variety of military attaches and (typically) left wing wing political types, but through the labors of an SSN's resident sonar drivers. We've got tons of submarine thrillers written by ex-submariners, but few of them actually driving their plots based on what the men on submarines actually do. The last good example is "Typhoon" by White - and this was a horrible book, a shameless rip-off of both "Red October" and "Crimson Tide". It was a horrible book, but I couldn't stop reading it because so much of it was set on the submarines of the story, thus immersing me in the world of driving a submarine.

On the flip side, what do we have? "Barracuda: Final Bearing" in which Dimercurio takes like half the book just getting his subs into action, then abbreviates that action? :88) And don't me started on Pat Robinson!!:damn:

In short, there really isn't any limit to the kinds of books or books of a single kind that can appear as long as those who perpetrate these crimes against reading humanity are willing to actually give their yarns any depth.

my .02 - adjusted for %10,000 inflation.