TARGET MAYFLOWER by Hirschhorn, Richard

New York, 1977,Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, first edition, hard bound in dust jacket, 6x9, . fine/fine condition, . It is spring of 1944. Everywhere the Nazi war machine is in retreat. Hitler rules a weakening Reich from a mountain hideaway. In England and the United States, troops and convoys are assembling for the invasion of France. And in the headquarters of the Kreigsmarine, Grosse-admiral Erich von Eyssen has come up with a plan-a plan so ingenious and diabolical that it could set back the Allied war effort for a year or more, till the "final" weapons of the Reich are perfected. It is, quite simply, a plan for a Nazi invasion of the United States.The plan is built from a set of seemingly random ingredients-a handful of specially modified submarines; a POW camp near the Maine coast in which are interred members of the elite Afrika Korps; a secret American train, hurtling down the coast with a precious cargo of uranium. It requires split-second timing and iron nerve. And it results in a totally credible, terrifying ultimatum: allow the Nazis safe passage across the Atlantic with the deadly uranium ore, or watch helplessly as dozens of V-2 rockets rain death upon Boston ....This is but the framework of an absolutely riveting novel. Richard Hirschhorn fashions ten days of mounting terror in Target Mayflower as it moves at breakneck speed toward its increasingly inevitable climax-and he displays fantastic inventiveness when, at the novel's very close, he turns that climax end-over-end.