The last lieutenant is Todd Ingram. Half-starved and beyond exhaustion, Ingram refuses to give up the fight when General Jonathan Wainwright surrenders Corregidor Island to the Japanese. As artillery blasts The Rock's beaches and hillsides, Ingram commandeers a thirty-six-foot launch with eleven other desperate men. But only Ingram knows the most dangerous threat of all: that a Nazi spy lies undiscovered aboard the last evacuation submarine off the island. The Nazi knows about Chester Nimitz's plan to trap the Japanese fleet at Midway and needs just thirty seconds and a radio to get a warning dispatch to Yamamoto. Ingram must track down the spy through miles of Japanese-infested waters and stop him before the tide of the war turns irrevocably to the rising sun.
Before Ingram can save himself and his men, he must save his country.

From Publishers Weekly

Gobbell (The Brutus Lie), a former Navy lieutenant who served in the South China Sea in the 1960s, has fashioned a complex WWII thriller about events surrounding the American defeat at Corregidor and the subsequent victory at Midway, which turned the tide of the war against Japan. The tale is loosely based on South From Corregidor, Lt. Commander John H. Morrill II's 1943 factual account of his escape from the ill-fated island the night it fell to the Japanese. In June 1941, after murdering a U.S. Navy bugler named Walter A. Radtke in El Paso, a Nazi spy assumes the dead man's identity and winds up, nearly a year later, as an American cryptologist on the war-ravaged island of Corregidor. Because they hold crucial information about the American plan to defeat the Japanese at Midway Island, Radtke and his American superior, Lt. Epperson, are ordered to evacuate. Lt. Todd Ingram, skipper of the USS Pelican, which has been assigned to effect their rendezvous with a submarine, comes upon a mortally wounded Epperson and learns that Radtke has disappeared. As the Japanese overrun the island, Ingram takes 17 survivors on a desperate dash for freedom in a battered 36-foot launch. A subplot about war-thwarted musical careers and a miraculous reunion between Ingram and an Army nurse brutalized by a bestial, American-educated Japanese officer provides plenty of thrills and a poignant romantic twist. Gobbell's thickly inhabited page-turner successfully melds elements of espionage, classic combat heroism and carefully reconstructed historical fiction. Maps not seen by PW.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

YA?This fast-moving thriller is set during the early days of World War II. By April of 1942, the few remaining defenders of the Philippines are bottled up in the crumbling tunnels of the island fortress of Corregidor, stoically enduring round-the-clock bombing in a desperate attempt to prevent the Japanese from taking Manila. Holding out despite dwindling supplies are soldiers, sailors, nurses, and civilians caught in the war's awful web. Among them lurks a Nazi spy in the guise of a Navy cryptographer. This dastardly, clever espionage agent has not only managed to commit several murders, but is also gathering intelligence to pass on to the Axis. When the intelligence officer begins to suspect the cryptographer, he passes his doubts along to his roommate from the Naval Academy, Lt. Ace Ingram. As Corregidor falls, Ingram and his brave crew escape from Manila harbor and begin a perilous journey dodging Japanese patrols in pursuit of the spy. They make their way south through villages and hidden coves, escaping danger in a death-defying chase. Though the naval terminology and detail will elude some readers, and the absence of a good map of the Philippines is a detriment, Gobbell's fine descriptions of the horrors and heroisms of war, and the fascination of the compelling events, make this a real page turner.?Catherine Noonan, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Gobbell takes an actual incident--the voyage that a handful of U.S. Navy survivors of the fall of Corregidor made from the Philippines to Australia in 1942--and turns it into a consistently absorbing historical thriller. Lt. Todd Ingram and his distinctly motley crew must simultaneously survive, rescue friends in danger, and guard the vital secret of the U.S. Navy's code-breaking efforts, which a German spy threatens to reveal to the Japanese. The action is continuous, the characterization well above average (even sparked by touches of wit), and the sense of place and time strong. Noteworthy, too, are Gobbell's implicit tribute to the role of the Filipinos in resisting the Japanese and helping Americans escape and the stark realism of his treatment of the fall of Corregidor. Roland Green