Review: Sea Leopard, by Craig Thomas

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS

A nuclear submarine equipped with a revolutionary stealth technology becomes the prize in a contest between the Soviet and Western navies in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. At the center of the resulting international crisis we have not a sea captain or professional field agent, but an intelligence service desk man who has to figure out the intentions of the other actors, and come up with the right course of action, which soon enough sends him flying to the scene of the action, with the ultimate outcome hinging on the ability of an American to (with help from his British friends) get aboard a submarine in Soviet hands, make contact with the captain, and then fight for his life against a Soviet officer fighting him in a rear-guard action against the plan . . .

It sounds an awful lot like Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October, but it is actually a description of Craig Thomas' earlier submarine-themed techno-thriller, Sea Leopard, to which it is at least a precedent and perhaps even an inspiration. (I know Clancy was an admirer of that crucial proto-techno-thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, a fact which shows from Red October on, and which led to a full-blown homage in Red Rabbit, but I recall nothing regarding comparable interest by Clancy in Thomas.*)

Thomas is, of course, better known for another, earlier book than Sea Leopard, Firefox, and this book resembles that one too, sufficiently so that it can seem like an underwater version of his earlier hit. Again, the balance of power depends on a technological breakthrough contained in a stealthy military vehicle that a set of Cold Warriors tries to steal; and again a principal character of that novel (actually Thomas' principal series' protagonist), British spy chief Kenneth Aubrey, is the man with the plan, which ultimately hinges on his infiltrating a borrowed American military officer into the Soviet Union to see that the good guys commandeer said vehicle and get it to the West. (It even seems worth remarking that a submarine operating in the far northern waters off the Kola peninsula did play a crucial role in Firefox, refueling and rearming the stolen plane in aid of Mitchell Gant's flying it out of the country. We even get flying scenes over some of the same territory as in Firefox and Firefox Down, both books having their characters note Finland's Lake Inari from the windows of their military aircraft while flying on a secret mission.)

Still, if Thomas clearly reused much here, there is also much that he is doing differently, not least the manner in which he distributes his attention. While his earlier plane-stealing story was attentive to the bigger picture (more so than Martin Caidin's Cyborg, one reason why Firefox seems to me to have the stronger claim to being a founding techno-thriller), it had a clearer center in Gant's performance of his mission. In the style Forsyth had already helped pioneer, and of which he and Clancy were to make careers, this time around his attention is more widely diffused about the broad situation as it fills in "the big picture."

Alas, the results are not all that might be hoped for, this larger-scale narrative seeming to me to contain a good deal that was unnecessary--in, for example, Soviet attempts to board the British submarine they were trying to capture, complete with lengthy description of the hazards of trying to getthe team into place. (As the ostensible villains of the piece--as one might expect of Thomas, this is very much an orthodox Cold War thrillers in its politics--how did their suffering setbacks contribute to the suspense?) In particular the thoroughly fleshed out subplot about Secret Intelligence Service agent Patrick Hyde's hunt for a scientist who has gone AWOL at a crucial moment could easily have been excised from the narrative (while remaining in it its main effect seemed to be to fatten and slow down a story I would have preferred to see lean and mean). This went even more for the events involving Hyde in its aftermath. Other, more essential scenes went on longer than they should have, not least the sneaking around in the climactic operation. All of this made the story fatter and slower where it ought to have been lean and mean, while the bits involving the scientist dragged in a few cliches that really rankled (and which actually get their own piece, here).

I might add that despite the breadth of the narrative, and its flights from reality, Sea Leopard's high-tech military action also offers nothing so visceral as the flying scenes from Firefox at their best (though this may also be because of the familiar problem of the slow pace of underwater action in large and lumbering subs compared with high-speed aerial combat); or in its cast of characters, anything to compare with the tensions inhering in Firefox's strung-out super-pilot Mitchell Gant. Still, the thriller mechanics are competent throughout, enough so that it never bores, while the book now has a fair measure of novelty--as a pre-boom techno-thriller, and as an example of what by its time had already become a rarity, a British-centered techno-thriller.

* It is interesting, too, that the last name of the American officer who must pull of the book's central covert action is Clark--just like the ex-Navy man Clark who was Jack Ryan's field counterpart in the Ryanverse novels.