Down to a Sunless Sea

The time is the immediate future. Twin crises rock the globe: dwindling oil supply and the still unresolved Middle East conflict. And America is hit hardest of all. A soaring trade deficit has turned the dollar into worthless paper; the country’s economy is in ruins. Civil violence divides a starving, terrified population living in gutted cities and rural poverty. A huge airlift is undertaken in an effort to evacuate those fortunate Americans with family or business contacts overseas to safer, less troubled nations. The greatly expanded British national airline, supported by North Sea oil supplies, takes on much of the burden, and in a grisly scene reminiscent of the last days of Saigon, Captain Jonah Scott flies his stretched Jumbo Jet into Kennedy Airport for another 600-passenger load of refugees. Scott’s crew spends a nightmarish stopover in vandal-infested New York; then, at midnight, flight Delta Tango lifts off for London. Delta Tango is 1,000 miles out over the Atlantic when, with no warning, the long-feared nuclear war breaks out in the Middle East. Within an hour, as Scott and his crew listen helplessly, the conflagration leaps across the glob and one international airport after another falls into radio silence. With fuel supplies dwindling rapidly, Delta Tango searches frantically for some sanctuary on the devastated globe where the 600 survivors can find shelter from the sicking radioactive cloud blotting out the sun. How this supersonic ark on which the very survival of the human race now depends speeds towards its last remaining hope for safe harbor, how its crew and human cargo bear up under the unbelievable stress of navigating the silent, deadly ocean of radioactivity is a terrifying nonstop tale of heroism and suspense with a stunning and inspiring conclusion. (From the inside jacket cover)