A former partner in a top-10 global management consulting firm, Joe Buff is a seasoned risk analyst and professional writer on national security and defense preparedness. He is also a novelist of tales of near-future warfare featuring nuclear submariners and Navy SEALs in action at their bravest and best. Two of Joe's non-fiction articles on future submarine technology and tactics, which appeared in The Submarine Review, received literary awards from the Naval Submarine League. His recent novel Crush Depth made the Military Book Club's Top 20 Bestseller List after being selected as a Featured Alternate of the Club in late 2002. Tidal Rip was released from Wm. Morrow/HarperCollins in hardcover in November, 2003, and the paperback edition (October, 2004) quickly hit high on the Barnes & Noble bookstores weekly National Bestseller List. Joe's next book, Straits of Power, was published in hardcover in late November, 2004.
Joe is a member of the Society for Risk Analysis, a non-partisan international scholarly body headquartered in McLean, VA. He is a Life Member of the following organizations: U.S. Naval Institute, the Navy League of the United States, the Fellows of the Naval War College, CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation, and the Naval Submarine League. Joe's father was an enlisted man in the Navy (Seabees in the Pacific Theater) from 1946 through 1951, and his uncle was a merchant mariner on the North Atlantic convoys late in World War II, before being drafted into the U.S. Army to serve in the Occupation of Nazi Germany. In August, 2004, Joe was made an Honorary Life Associate Member of the Navy Seabee Veterans of America, partly in recognition of his pro bono work for Operation Seabees Knowledge. In November, 2004, after having been a guest luncheon speaker at their Annual National Convention, Joe became a sponsored Life Associate Member of the U.S. Submarine Veterans, Inc.
The next world war rages. With the Allies at a stalemate with the Berlin-Boer Axis, every battle takes on a new significance. But in a conflict fought with billion-dollar technology and campaigns comprising millions of soldiers, the outcome may rest in the hands of a single man...
Commander Jeffrey Fuller, captain of America's most sophisticated and deadly fast-attack nuclear submarine, the USS Challenger, is accustomed to victory in battle. But for his latest mission he is informed that the only way he can succeed is if he crosses into enemy waters -- without firing a single shot.
His objective: recover a spy. The world of espionage is unknown territory for Fuller. He is ordered to locate an asset, code-named Zeno, who may hold the key to staving off a crippling Axis attack. But this new world is full of lies, feints, and betrayals. In combat, Fuller always knows who his enemy is and how to defeat him. In the shadow world of covert operatives and counterintelligence, the distinction between enemy and ally is far more elusive.
And it only gets more complicated. Steaming toward his target, Fuller and his crew begin to suspect that the spy they have been sent to retrieve may in fact be a subterfuge, a ploy intended to lure the Allies' most dangerous weapon into enemy hands. With the clock ticking down to an invasion that could alter the course of the war, Fuller suspects that his new "friend" could even be a double agent, intent on using Challenger as a weapon against his own allies, destroying the fragile ties binding nations in war.
Fuller is accustomed to the codes of the Silent Service, where loyalty is taken for granted, orders are followed without question, and battles are as precise as a torpedo's firing solution. But now he must adapt to a world where betrayers become the new patriots and lies are the instruments of destruction. With the lives of his crew and the fate of his country hanging in the balance, he will have to risk everything on the word of a man who has, for the last two years, served Fuller's most bitter enemies.
