William Roskey

Historical fiction at its best! This riveting World War II novel follows incredibly real characters in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack and in the desperate months immediately following it. Dade Bowie and his fellow submarine commanders in the Pacific find that their torpedoes are shockingly unreliable, meaning they must fight not only the Japanese, but a naval bureaucracy that continues to insist that the fault lies not in the Mark XIV torpedo or in its state-of-the-art Mark VI exploder, but in the ineptitude of the submarine commanders. Now he finds himself torn between a loyalty to his crew and the oath he took years before to obey the orders of his superiors. If he modifies the torpedo exploders to bypass the magnetic influence circuits, he believes he has a far better chance of sinking Japanese ships and of bringing his crew home safely from each patrol. If he is discovered, he faces a general court martial and time in a naval prison. The woman Bowie loves, Rachael Wyer, spent 20 years as a missionary in Japan, and left when Japanese naval cadets brutally murdered her husband in early 1941. Recruited by the Office of Naval Intelligence to translate intercepted classified Japanese coded messages, she fights the war in her own way by providing actionable intelligence concerning the movements of Japanese convoys and naval task forces, intelligence that is flashed to submarines and surface vessels via top secret ULTRA messages. Both Rachael and Dade join forces to fight the Japanese, fear, and their own inner demons.