Tripwire — Peter Shepherd

In the Soviet Union a new secretarygeneral, Konstantin Kutusov, has strongarmed his way to the top. As his first act in power he ramps up military exercises, his borders bristling with armies, air and sea forces, threatening to shatter the uneasy peace between East and West. At the NATO submarine base in Faslane, Captain Stoddard starts his routine patrol of the Arctic Ocean, in command of an aging but powerful Polaris nuclear submarine, HMS Resolute, and its crew of specialists and veterans. But he is unaware of the Soviet forces massed in the surrounding waters following Secretary-General Kutusov’s orders: that all NATO nuclear submarines be found, tracked and hounded. HMS Resolute is soon cut-off, outgunned and outnumbered, trapped beneath the Arctic ice in a deadly game of cat and mouse with catastrophic political stakes. As the likelihood of using one of the submarine’s forty-eight nuclear warheads becomes less remote, Stoddard comes face to face with the reality of pulling the trigger, and the possibility of Resolute’s failure as a nuclear deterrent.