Typhoon

Publishers Weekly

White (The Ice Curtain) pens another nail-biter, a gripping post-Cold War tale of an undersea standoff between a Russian ballistic-missile submarine and an American attack boat. Russian Typhoon class ballistic-missile subs are the largest ever built, each the size of an aircraft carrier. The U.S. has paid the Russians to scrap them, and they have-except for one, Baikal, which they've secretly held on to, then sold to China. A Russian crew has been ordered to transport the rusty behemoth from the Barents Sea to Shanghai, slipping under the Arctic ice cap. When the furious Americans get wind of this, they dispatch the USS Portland, an attack submarine, to intervene and delay the transport. In addition to dealing with the difficulties of navigation and concealment in sometimes dangerously shallow, ice-covered waters, the Russian skipper is impeded by a duplicitous officer. His mercurial American counterpart, Capt. James Vann, has his own problems: Lt. Rose Scavullo, a Russian language specialist, has been assigned to the Portland, the first woman on an American sub. Vann and many of his underlings bitterly resent her and are determined to make her life on the sub miserable; crew members flash her, while Vann blames her for the boat's mishaps. The international cat-and-mouse game becomes a contest between American technology and Russian cunning. The setting and stirring pace will remind readers of Clancy's The Hunt for Red October. Though the exhaustive technical details may stymie some readers, enthusiasts of naval warfare will delight in them. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Novelist White (Siberian Night; Ice Curtain) is the coauthor of the highly acclaimed Hostile Waters, the true story of a near catastrophe involving a Russian nuclear submarine. In Typhoon, he tells the story of the Baikal, the last of Russia's giant Typhoon-class submarines. The ship is supposed to be off to the scrap yard at American expense, but corrupt Russian admirals have illegally sold her to China. When the American sub Portland is ordered to stop her, its aggressive captain, James Vann, becomes obsessed with destroying the Baikal, commanded by his old nemesis, Alexander Markov. At the same time, the presence of Lt. Rose Scavullo, the first woman to serve on a U.S. submarine, is a major and divisive distraction to a crew that is disturbingly dysfunctional for a supposedly elite force. As the ships duel in the Arctic Ocean, war threatens to break out between the United States and China over Taiwan. Tense, exciting, and timely, White's latest technothriller is a worthy successor to Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October and is recommended for all fiction collections.-Robert Conroy, Warren, MI Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A solid, Arctic-set technothriller in which a cold war-cold as icebergs-breaks out when a pair of inimical subs (one US, one Russian) take each other on. Oh, that Baikal! Not only is the Russian sub humungous-big as an aircraft carrier-but it's supposed to be defunct. Originally, six Typhoon class submersibles, Baikal and her sisters, were built by the Russians, their number steadily diminished by a variety of mishaps. And then there was one, which the US paid the Russians to scrap. "Those son of bitches took our money and kept the boat," fumes the captain of the U.S.S Portland, the sleek nuclear sub that suddenly comes upon this formidable monster. In an act both rash and characteristic, Commander James Vann decides to pursue the Baikal and blow it out of the water if he can-never mind the very real risk of WWIII. Fortunately, there are some cooler heads on the Portland, belonging to Lieutenant Commander Willy Steadman, Vann's exec, and Senior Chief Jerome Browne, the very model of a seasoned, savvy career enlisted man. Also on board , for the first time in US submarine history, is a woman: the pretty, plucky, and cool-headed Lieutenant Rose Scavullo, a crack Russian translator. Vann hates everything about her, including the aroma that stems from soap a tad more delicate than standard issue. Most of all, however, he hates the fact of her: an alien presence, he decrees, on what was obviously meant to be an all-boys bastion. Vann's hunt for red Baikal persists, growing ever more obsessive until, it becomes clear to Steadman, Browne, and Scavullo, intervention is inescapable. Shades of Bligh and Queeg. Good work from a writer-never less than authoritative (The Ice Curtain, 2002, etc.)-who,with a little less techno and a bit more thriller, might have nudged this up to outstanding.