The First Team
 The book begins with a Soviet governor already securely ensconced in the White House, and a young Air Force officer who tried to resist the occupiers being summarily executed on the White House lawn - without explaining exactly how things got to that dire pass. The reader is, however, made to understand that the Soviet takeover was made possible because of widespread cultural malaise. Undermined by Hippies and anti-war protesters, corrupt military-industrial complex producers who created faulty military hardware, weak-willed US Senators, and the super-power that was the USSR's propaganda machine (not to mention the Vietnam War's hangover), the USA was unable to defend against Soviet power. The country finds itself under an iron-willed Soviet bureaucrat, backed up by a vicious Soviet Colonel. The Soviets embark on blatantly anti-Semitic policies, making no effort to reconcile them with Marxist ideology, and drive hundreds of thousands of American Jews into Israel, where they are housed in makeshift tent camps. Small-time criminals soon turn into paid informers for the new regime. An unpaid collaborator is a hitherto popular singer, who openly welcomes the occupiers and tells his audience that "things could have been far worse" - whereupon attendance at his performances plummets. Rather than making use of him, the Soviets just ignore him and finally he is killed "by mistake" by a Soviet army unit that misunderstood his wish to welcome them on American soil. Another character at whose misfortune the reader is invited to smile is an imprisoned radical Black leader, who expects to be set free by the Soviet invaders, only to find that they have no intention to loose such a trouble-maker as himself, and that in fact the new warden (a Russian woman) is far tougher than her American predecessor. American students try to voice their protest but find the Soviet occupiers' response far more brutal than anything they encountered in the years of the anti-war movement. And a trade union official in an (unnamed) East Coast port, who tries to obstruct the occupiers, is summarily shot. However, hope is not lost. The main protagonist - US White House interpreter Raleigh Hewitt, kept at his post by the invaders - comes to be recruited into a secret underground resistance organization, "The First Team" of the title. It turns out that the fall of the United States wasn't altogether unforeseen, and that a very resourceful band of patriots was already in place, with considerable material resources - such as a well-equipped secret control centre - prepared for them carefully in advance. There are months of careful preparatory work, secret manoeuvrings and counter-manoeuvrings, using especially the classic spying device of a small private brothel sited in a Washington. D.C. suburb - before the brave conspirators are ready to strike. This work includes the political conversion of a formerly liberal Senator, whose son had been a patriot, killed by the Soviets during a planning session. Key to ending the Soviet occupation is the USS Ramon Magsaysay, a fully armed and fueled nuclear ballistic missile submarine at a Navy yard in the San Francisco Bay. The Magsaysay is critical because all other US Navy subs had obeyed orders to put into foreign ports and be taken over by the Soviets, while the Magsaysay is readily accessible. The patriots put a team aboard during a false "reactor emergency" (a subplot later used in Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October) and manage to steal the sub -- without provisions aboard. The last part of the book involves the pressure of both sides not knowing whether the sub and its possibly starving skeleton crew has successfully escaped Soviet forces and reached a place where the missiles could be fired.