The year is 1962, and KGB Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vasin is searching for ghosts: for evidence of the long-rumoured existence of an American spy embedded at the highest echelons of Soviet power. But it's while on this wild goose chase, a high-stakes espionage race against a rival State agency, that Vasin first hears whispers of an ominous top-secret undertaking: Operation Anadyr. As tensions flare between Nikita Khrushchev and President Kennedy over Russian missiles hidden in Cuba, four Soviet submarines - each carrying tactical ballistic missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads - are ordered to make a covert run at the U.S. blockade in the Caribbean . . . One of the most treacherous and terrifying moments in modern history - when the fate of the world lay with a lone, nervous Soviet naval officer one hundred meters under the sea and out of all contact with his commanders - lies at the heart of the claustrophobically tense new Cold War thriller by the author of the acclaimed Black Sun.