Sunken, Treasure

The U.S.S. Seawolf is one bad piece of equipment. Ultra quiet, armed to the teeth, and able to stealthily trail and track almost any other seagoing vessel you could name, the nuclear submarine is one of the prides of the United States Navy.

Too bad author Patrick Robinson decided to abandon it a third of the way into his 2000 naval thriller U.S.S. Seawolf and switch to a by-the-numbers covert action operation weighed down by a confusing list of characters, inexplicable and wrong-headed actions by supposedly veteran military personnel and periodic tantrum-throwing by Robinson's series star, Admiral Arnold Morgan.

The Seawolf has been ordered to shadow a new Chinese submarine that has been built using stolen U.S. technology. Without good information on the sub, it's possible that Chinese missiles could be launched within reach of Los Angeles or other vital points on the California coastline. The sub's crack crew dares the waters almost within sight of the Chinese coast during a time of high Sino-American tension and military gamesmanship with Taiwan. A fatal error means the Seawolf and her crew are captured, and Chinese authorities plan on stripping Seawolf of her secrets and torturing the crew, if need be, in order to get the information they want. Morgan, now the National Security Advisor, develops a plan for a special operations team to land, rescue the crew and make sure Seawolf is destroyed so the Chinese can gain no information from her.

As mentioned above, Robinson has written several books featuring Morgan as his lead character, and although he's not one of the sailors he is the driver of the main part of the book's action: The rescue and sabotage mission. He's a bigoted, vulgar opinionated bully -- all qualities that he will probably need in order to make sure the mission succeeds. But Robinson manages to run all those same qualities into the ground before Morgan makes his fourth or fifth appearance, and the author's desire to smack the Clinton administration's laxity with military secrets gets tired just as quickly. His moves to rehabilitate Reagan-era policy implementers who signed off on things like the arms-for-hostages trade at the center of the Iran-Contra affair didn't even make a whole lot of sense in 2000.

In the end, Morgan is something like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan becomes -- the only intelligent man in the room, the only one who sees the Real Threat and has the Guts To Do Something About It. Robinson has a lighter touch than Clancy and manages to include humor in his story, which is something that has eluded Clancy for most of his career. But he trades that off with some implausible conduct on the part of some of his military protagonists that just derails important storyline developments.

And not to mention, as noted above, that he wrote a submarine book named after a submarine and he spends two-thirds of it nowhere near the submarine. That's just bonkers.