by Kevin L. Hostbjor, 2025
In The 4th Cohort: Finding Dark in the Light, set in the late 1980s, a hidden, privately funded underwater facility uses an overhead offshore oil rig as its cover. Hiring secret, highly trained and highly paid crews (cohorts) for 5-year commitments, they operate small submarines to test cruise missiles as new technologies come on the market. In this imagining, both women and men inhabit the submarines, and love and sex are highly intertwined with the science and technology of manning a sub, something that in real life wouldn’t have happened in the 80s.
Even though each new cohort is assured of the safety of their underwater facilities during their onboarding and training, one of the missile tests turns tragic because of an incident out of their control: a fishing vessel hits an iceberg and sinks right in the path of the missile. In the post-mortem, when other team members follow the data trail, they have a sickening fear that there might be more to the story behind their missile tests.
The author is a Spokane, Washington indie author (and a colleague of mine) who spent the first 20 years of his career in the US Navy as a submariner. It shows in this novel—anyone else who has served in the Navy will be right at home with all the clanky bits: pressure chambers, valves, airlocks, periscopes, wedges, berths, dogs, escape trunks. I still do not know what a wedge is. It was all too technical for me and I couldn’t visualize the space, even though he did provide a few illustrations throughout the book. Much of this detail could have been streamlined for a lay reader, as I felt it bogged down the overall arc of the story. However, this may be entirely the fault of the reader; someone more comfortable with ships and the engineering aspects of navigation might find this assessment petty.
The final tying together of incidents on the subs with global events was exciting and intriguing, and I congratulate the author on a very imaginative novel.
