To bring an end to the Cold War (and, no doubt, to reassert its naval mastery of the seas), the American government has paid the Russian government handsomely to retire and scrap its aging fleet of missile submarines. These “Typhoon” class behemoths had the sole purpose of hiding in the vast oceans, ready to launch their nuclear missiles in the event that the Cold War turned hot.

Oversight of the boats’ destruction has been lax, however, and some elements in the Russian government and Navy have made a deal to sell Baikal, a Typhoon-class sub, to the mainland Chinese. A small but skilled crew is chosen to pilot the boat from its Russian port on the Berents Sea to meet its buyers just south of the Bering Straights, a trip that will take Baikal under the Arctic polar ice cap.

As the situation becomes known to the Americans, the USS Portland is tasked with delaying Baikal from making her rendezvous with her Chinese buyers. So the two subs begin a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse under the polar ice.

The plot setup for this book drives the story pretty well, but White’s characters are too one-dimensional to provide any reason to pick this book out of the legion of military techno-thrillers published in the wake of Tom Clancy’s seminal The Hunt for Red October. The characters in Typhoon are given a small personality box—each is either good, violent, loyal, greedy, conflicted, or whatever—and once a character’s motif is established, they all stay true to form. No surprises await anyone keeping tabs on the characters in this story.