***This is a novel of the sea, ***and it is told with a skill that merits comparison with the best. It
consists of three parts:
The War is
the cold war of the 1960s, but on a little-publicized and bleakly isolated
front where opposing naval forces secretly maneuver against each other in the
eternally empty reaches of the Arctic Ocean. Here they contest for strategic
stakes as vital as those of Berlin or Viet Nam.
The Chase is
by a modern American destroyer on the track of a Soviet submarine whose mission
is to probe NATO defenses based on Greenland. The code-name of this brilliantly
elusive submarine is Moby Dick. As the stalking action moves through the lonely
vastness of a frozen desolation, some of the fatal obsession which cursed
Captain Ahab and his Pequod**** seems
mystically to afflict Captain Erik Finlander, USN, and his USS Bedford***.*
The Battle is
finally joined above the algaed hulk of a melancholy victim of one of the last
traditional battleship engagements in the North Atlantic. While all the
computer-controlled miracle weapons of modern anti-submarine warfare play their
part, it is the far more terrifying obstinacy and weakness of inflamed
human spirit which determines the ultimate outcome of this searing tale.
Mark Rascovich was born in San Francisco, California. He lived
in Europe from the time he was two years old until he was twenty-one. He
attended schools in Germany, England, Sweden and Paris, and was graduated from
the Sorbonne. His World War II service included three years as a reconnaissance
pilot in the Alaskan and African theaters and concluded with transport duty on
the North Atlantic. After the war, he was engaged in ocean towing, salvage
work, marine research and writing. Mr. Rascovich traveled throughout Europe and
the Americas, the Near East and Africa. He held pilot licenses for land and sea
aircraft and for watercraft.