A powerful and fast-moving tale of the Navy-Marine Corps team in action, on a dangerous mission in the volatile Eastern Mediterranean.Cloaked by the mists of dawn, Task Force 61-- carrying tanks, aircraft, and over 5000 Marines-- steams toward Syria with deadly intent. Their mission: rescue 100 hostages from a terrorist stronghold-- alive.With realism seldom seen in military fiction, The Med is a magnificent and timely epic that brings the human drama of armed conflict compellingly to life. Driven by believable, flesh-and-blood characters, it is a painstakingly detailed portrait of amphibious warfare as only David Poyer can paint it. The Med is today's most explosive tale of international crisis, personal valor, and emotional struggle-- a disturbingly plausible novel that crackles with non-stop action.< David Poyer's naval career has included service in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Arctic, Caribbean, and Pacific. His seventeen novels have won millions of readers around the world, and his sea fiction is required reading in the Literature of the Sea course at the U.S. Naval Academy. The Med is the first in his novel-cycle of the modern Navy, which also includes The Gulf, The Circle, The Passage and Tomahawk. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.< "One of the outstanding bodies of nautical fiction during the last half-century."--Booklist"Poyer knows what he is writing about when it comes to anything on, above, or below the water."--The New York Times Book Review"Everything works in this first-rate, unsentimental, and thoroughly accurate look at the present-day navy...very well-handled!"--Kirkus Reviews< ILINE OF DEPARTURE1The Central MediterraneanFORTY MILES FROM LAND THE SEA heaves in predawn darkness. No buoy, no man-made mark interrupts the undulant glitter of stars on an easterly swell.The destroyer is a sharp-edged shadow against Cassiopeia. Since midnight she has cruised slowly before the prevailing sea. But at 0400, suddenly, she heels as her rudders bite water. The hum of turbines rises to a whine, the sound rolling out into blackness, and a phosphorescent waterfall shoots from the screws. As she gathers speed she begins to pitch, dipping her bow to the swell, then lifting to shake hissing spray into the sea. Above her wake a stain of smoke unrolls against the sky.The Line of Departure for an amphibious assault is drawn not through dark waves, over the mirror of stars, but across a Navy chart in number-two lead. On one side, in the minds of men, is peace. And on the other, the irrevocable commitment to battle.The destroyer crosses the line still accelerating, sonar pinging into the deep, radar sweeping the sky. Its gray sides fade to black. A single dimmed stem light retreats into the night. The waves of its passing widen and then disappear, merging at last with the unchanging sea.Half an hour later six gray ships slowly lift into view to the east. At first only their masts show above an empty horizon, against the faint glow that precedes morning. Then they grow closer. Not speedily, but with a steady and inexorable pace.They are not so sleek, nor so fast, nor so heavily armed as the destroyer that escorted them, ten miles in advance. But they are larger, swelling with displacement curves rather than the fine lines of speed. Instead of guns and missile launchers, their decks are cluttered with helicopter pads and replenishment stations, stacks of containers and nested landing craft. In the faint light rises deck on deck of superstructure, topped by the vertical spikes of booms and funnels.Flung wide across miles of sea, the task force moves across its face with ponderous eagerness; and from each ship, above the antennas and signal lines, streams the red-and-white-striped ensign of impending battle.The landing has begun.U.S.S. GUAM LPH-9High in the island of the helicopter carrier, a stocky man in khakis thrusted his face angrily into binoculars. He raised them with the ship’s roll, leaning into the coaming, examining a shadow that steamed parallel to her, four thousand yards away. The glasses remained level for several minutes; then Captain Isaac I. Sundstrom, Commander, Mediterranean Amphibious Ready Group, jerked them down. He muttered into the fresh wind of a twenty-knot passage, and turned for the interior of the flag bridge.“Commodore’s on the bridge!” At the shout officers and enlisted men looked up from dimly lit charts, flickering radars. They glanced at one another, but only one man—a lieutenant, junior grade—moved cautiously toward Sundst Read Less