Fifty-Seven

The Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in October 1957 caught the U.S. flat-footed. The U.S. missile program is years behind. The U.S., however, had launched the first atomic-powered submarine, Nautilus, in 1956 and raced to develop the capability to launch missiles while submerged by 1960. Nautilus, and Seawolf, had the same limitations. Although they could prowl the oceans longer than conventional submarines, when they required maintenance, they had to return to Groton, Connecticut, an ocean away from their patrol area. Enter Stavros Niarchos.

Stavros Niarchos, a golden Greek, a wealthy shipping magnate, is a friend of the Americans. Niarchos buys a rundown shipyard near the Port of Piraeus and undertakes modernization to support his commercial enterprise. The new yard will also provide NATO atomic submarines with a secret maintenance bay in the eastern Mediterranean on the doorstep of the Soviet Black Sea fleet. But the communists…

Fifty-Seven is Book #4 in “The Greek Stories” series and the last novel.

A journey begins with The Greek Boxer.

A babe left forlorn in a defiled tent on an indifferent Colorado hillside, grows to adulthood. In American Andarte, Stavros joins other Greeks to battle Nazis in the Old Country as an OSS commando. As he leads his operational group in the mountains of Greece, a mythical kapetánios, Dimitra, captures his heart. Wolf Pelt unfolds in 1951 Greece, at the peak of American influence. Stavros, now CIA, orchestrates an influence campaign in Athens while covertly aiding the attempted overthrow of Albania’s Hoxha regime. The treachery of romance and espionage play side by side. Fifty-Seven caps the series, with Stavros returning to Greece. America is shaking in Sputnik’s shadow. Stavros must ferret Soviet agents in a vital NATO shipyard while Enosis, the Cyprus independence movement, intensifies. Threats loom over Stavros and friends, the stakes are high, and love endures.