TARGET: U.S.A. The Soviet nuclear submarine Kirov has been stolen by Central American rebels to prevent a CIA invasion. As nuclear weapons aim toward the U.S. from the ocean depths, sparks begin to fly between Moscow and Washington. THE MISSION THAT-RISKED IT ALL Navy Captain Peter Mackenzie receives the ultimate assignment: recover the Soviet sub before it launches its deadly payload. The stakes have never been higher, and time is running out. Using state-of-the-art, top-secret underwater high technology, Mackenzie dives through the silent sea toward a rendezvous that may very well threaten the future of the world. Powered by non-stop suspense, sudden violence and impossible love...sweeping from the Oval Office to the Kremlin to the shadowy world of modern undersea warfare...FULL FATHOM FIVE races toward a chilling and unforgettable climax. About the Author Bart Davis is the author of ten novels, five non-fiction books, two feature films, and a wide range of print articles. He is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and Stony Brook University. His books have been published internationally, and translated into Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Norwegian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, British, Spanish, and Korean. His novels include the five-book Peter MacKenzie submarine series and the bestselling A CONSPIRACY OF EAGLES and THE MIDNIGHT PARTNER. He has also written for the New York Times and NEWSDAY, and his work has appeared in “Psychology Today” and “People” magazine. Bart’s screenwriting credits include the feature film FULL FATHOM FIVE adapted from his novel; and the feature film LOVE OR MONEY. He lives with his family in New York.

    At the moment they touched, the two found themselves under a strange night sky where no stars were familiar and where Gaul and Rome were unknown. They were in an outpost of the embattled Empire of Videssos--in a world where magic and dark sorcery would test their skill and courage as no Roman legion had ever been tested before.

    It was nominated for the Hugo Award for best novella.From the Author's Commentary: I had wanted to write a “parallel Pennsylvania” story ever since reading H. Beam Piper’s “Gunpowder God” in high school. Growing up in Easton, Pennsylvania, the historical themes were all Revolutionary, so it was only natural that when I thought alternate history, I thought of that era. Sometimes we forget how revolutionary our Revolution was. How many other revolutions have slipped from republicanism to bonapartism and wound up with a Napoleon, a Lenin, or a Khomeini? After all, when you overthrow a System, those who must build something new afterward have only ever known the System. The acorn then does not fall far from the tree.Alone among constitutional states, ours does not grant rights to the people. The people told the government what it was allowed to do? Read the Bill of Rights, especially Amendments Nine and Ten. People possess rights under the Natural Law, and the government is forbidden to interfere with them. If you think that that is only a semantic quibble, think again: The “right to privacy” is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution.But what if this Union had never happened and North America had filled with squabbling petty states—“as many Nations in North America as there are in Europe,” as John Adams once feared? Prior to telegraph and radio, new ideas spread with traveling people, such as merchant-traders. Tariff and custom barriers would dampen trade and commerce, and with it, the spread of new ideas. Until the Constitution eliminated tariff barriers among the states, little England was the largest free trade zone in the world. So I imagined a pre-World War I milieu, full of what Winston Churchill called “pumpernickel principalities.”Speaking of pumpernickel, could Pennsylvania really have become German-speaking? Wer kennt? In Revolutionary times fully half the colony spoke German and even today it hosts Pennsylvaanisch, a Swabian dialect. Towns in my heimatland, the Lehigh Valley, bear names like Schenkweilersville, and hills are called Swoveberg and Hexenkopf. In June 1858, 14% of the students in the Northampton County schools spoke English only while 50% spoke German only. (The rest were bilingual, deutsch und englisch.) My Irish grandfather bore the unlikely sobriquet of “Dutch” Flynn because of his accent. (His mother was an Ochenfuss.) In the 1930s, German was still a required course at my mother’s elementary school, and our parish church had native-born German pastors until after I went off to college. I was raised on “German Hill,” where you could toss a rock and hit five Deutschers before you hit an Italian or a Gael. So, decouple the Commonwealth from the other English-speaking colonies, throw in some anti-Yankee enmity, and … what do you think could have happened?But all this is background. The story is not about an alternate Pennsylvania. That is only the setting. My one halfway original notion was that the departure and arrival of a cross-time traveler were themselves events which spawned new parallel worlds, and which therefore changed the “para-time” distances between them. One little slip in the quantum foam and—hey, presto!—you would be lost amid an infinity of worlds. The story was born of the single image of a man unable to find his way home and slowly losing hope because of it.Like the blind men touching the elephant, Vonderberge and the Hexmajor, General Schneider and Rudi Knecht, each found something different in Kelly. Dour, dutiful Rudi remains one of my favorite characters.