The Callisto Report

Authors:

Jason E. Call, Kevin R. Crawford

Genre:

Historical/Military Thriller

Logline:

The year is 1988.A routine trailing exercise in the north Atlantic leads a U.S. nuclear submarine and its crew into a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with the Soviet Navy, exposing one of the darkest remaining secrets from World War II.

Short Synopsis:

“Dead men tell no tales,” so runs the familiar diatribe.

Mere months before an American Superfortress dropped the bomb on Hiroshima ending World War II, a small group of Norwegian commandos deal a devastating blow to Hitler’s Norsk ‘heavy water’ factory in Telemark, Norway. History records that more than 2,000 pounds of deuterium oxide canisters were destroyed and the United States took an insurmountable lead in the race to usher in the nuclear age.

Weeks after the attack, a pair of German U-Boats goes missing on the eve of the fall of Berlin. It is rumored that Hitler has escaped. History records that U-530 and U-977 both wind up in Argentina. As the last of the Nazi conspirators and war criminals are reportedly caught and killed, Stalin furnishes verifiable evidence of Hitler’s demise by suicide in a bunker deep beneath Berlin.

Forty-three years later, a U.S. nuclear submarine (USS Houston) is seriously damaged while trailing a Typhoon class Soviet sub in the north Atlantic. The crippled Houston and her crew surface inside a lost cavern beneath SorkappoyaIsland(Norway) to effect repairs. Inside the underwater penCDR Reginald M. Tibbitsand CDR John Moore make an astonishing discovery – a German vault containing millions in stolen art and gold, including information on the two missing U-s and their intended mission to transship 4,000 gallons of heavy water along with high-ranking members of the Nazi Party to South America. Codebooks and encrypted files discovered by the Houston reveal Stalin’splans to co-opt Hitler’s “leftover” nuclear arsenal – in exchange for safe passage from Berlin – as means for blackmailing the Allies into re-drawing lines of control over Eastern Europe.

As the Houston’s gets underway, an unfortunate event with pen’s power distribution panel sets off an explosion inside the cavern poisoning the crew from the aging deuterium oxide canisters stored there. The sub attempts to return to its base of operations but sherelentlessly pursued by a pair of Akula class attack subs bent on destroying her before she can “report”.

The Callisto Report is about far more than the details of weapons that might have rewritten history, and the answers to questions that have puzzled military historians for decades. It’s about the courage of a captain and his crew in the face of overwhelming odds.

Somewhere between the frigid waters of north Atlantic and a tiny town buried deep in the Brazilian outback, history will be re-written and the Cold War has returned -- with a vengeance!