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The crew of the ship Station, helmed by Lee Michaels, is flung back in time to the Pacific theater during the Second World War. Several hundred miles off the coast of Hawaii, they discover the stranded survivors of a Japanese submarine's torpedo attack, one of them the great-great-grandfather of a man onboard the Station. The crew is faced with a moral dilemma: rescue the sailors and risk violating the laws of time, or allow them to perish in shark-infested waters.
A cracking adventure with echoes of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and the classic Kirk Douglas maritime film The Final Countdown, Coley's book approaches greatness as he writes about the mechanics of ships and submarines and the dangers of life at sea. Coley brings all his engineering expertise to these scenes, which lends later passages in the book a verisimilitude that makes the stakes seem real and concrete. In these moments, the book feels uncannily like a lost work of science fiction by Isaac Asimov.
The romantic subplots drag on for longer than seems necessary, and some may find the idea of a present-day leader who claims a direct mandate from God to kill his foes and to be above questioning, troubling. However, it's clear that Coley's great strengths as a writer are his scientific brain, his exacting eye for detail, and his ability to suspend disbelief through the meticulous construction of a realistic world. These attributes enable the book to succeed where many contemporary science fiction works fail. Coley's knack for transporting the reader into the past is a greater feat of time travel than any described in the book.