1983. Australian navy officer Max Kaplin is invited to go to sea onboard a British warship carrying the latest high tech sonar system to hone his skills in detecting submarines. He has no idea that he will soon become involved in a game of cat and mouse with a Soviet nuclear attack submarine and a downed Soviet spacecraft carrying an illegal nuclear weapon, Russia's answer to US President Ronald Reagan's Star Wars initiative.
Against a backdrop of increasing cold war tension between the West and the Eastern Bloc as a result of a NATO war game called Able Archer, Max Kaplin and the crew of
HMS Apollonius
must navigate their way through a minefield of lies and deception. When events reach a climax in the cold waters of the Norwegian Sea, they threaten to tip the world over the precipice into all-out nuclear war.
Based on true events, this book tells the story of what could easily have happened during the lead up to, and execution of, NATO Exercise Able Archer '83, the exercise that almost started World War III.