Leviathan

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To the United States Navy — the cooperation received from some nameless individuals was invaluable.

To the kind folks at General Dynamics — without their valuable insight into the future of submarines, this book could not have been written.

For Nicole Verdone and many, many others who keep this author grounded in reality.

Three years in darkness. Since Napoleon's coup in 1799, Roderick Deveroux had been imprisoned at Chateau d'If for refusing to reveal the secrets of his magical and mysterious designs for seagoing warfare. Without a trial — without so much as a word from his captors or his jailers — he was cast into the old castle's dungeons with the other supposed enemies of France. The fates of his young wife and father were as bleak to him as his own future.

Three years ago the new emperor himself had begged Deveroux for the designs, drawings, and mathematical calculations for his newest ships. The emperor had asked for them, then pleaded, and then finally threatened, but still Deveroux had refused to give the brutish little man what he desired: the design for an oil-fired ship that could drive the implacable British navy — the most powerful force in the world — from the surface of the seas.

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