A new world war has begun. It is the year 2012, and extremists in Germany and South Africa have succeeded in staging simultaneous coups to forge the Berlin-Boer Axis, a cabal determined to take over the world. The key instrument of this war is tactical nuclear weaponry, where a single torpedo or cruise missile can destroy an entire ship or city. And while the war will be fought with high-tech weapons, it will be won or lost by the men who command them...

Commander Jeffrey Fuller is America's newest hero. Awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his victories in battle as captain of America's most sophisticated and deadly fast-attack nuclear submarine, the USS Challenger, Fuller takes grim satisfaction in the honor, knowing at what cost it came.

But he has barely enough time to receive the decoration before he is tasked with a new mission.An Allied convoy is steaming toward Africa, hoping to establish a beachhead on the continent that would enable a D-day type of invasion. The enemy has dispatched its most lethal submarine, the SMS Admiral von Scheer, a ceramic-hulled sub virtually undetectable by even the most advanced sonar technology, to ensure that the convoy never reaches its destination. Fuller's mission is to protect the convoy at all costs, even if it means battling the phantom sub to do it.

Then a nearly impossible mission gets even more difficult. Fuller discovers from intelligence sources that agents of the Berlin-Boer Axis are attempting to gain a foothold in South America, a development that would force the United States to fight the war on yet another front, an escalating conflict they can't possibly win. Now Fuller must make a no-win decision: deploy his team of Navy SEALs to South America to destroy the nuclear-armed enemy insurgents or patrol the depths of the Atlantic, seeking threats to the convoy? Even Fuller cannot be in two places at once, and the failure of either mission will mean defeat for the Allied cause.

Fuller's opponents have every technological advantage of modern warfare: nuclear-tipped torpedoes, high-velocity flechette projectiles, and hyper-accurate targeting computers. But a weapon is only as powerful as the man who wields it, and Fuller possesses the intellect, the nerve, and the guts that earned him victories over the most dangerous warriors in the Axis Navy. Stalking his prey beneath the waves where the pressure alone can kill, Commander Jeffrey Fuller knows that while one man's life may be meaningless, one man's death could change the course of the war.