Awful in every sense.
Alternates between excrutiating detail of the motivation behind every action, and obtuse Naval jargon, much of which I suspect is made up.
Written in the early 1990s, it tries to show how progressive the future Navy is by having women on submarines, but falls back to the sexist "leave the dangerous stuff for the menfolk." In one typical overwritten passage that seemed to run on for pages, the women explain why they don't mind having mysoginist call-sign labels assigned to them by their male colleagues, because it makes them "one of the guys."
Overt racism against Chinese and African peoples.
Questionable word choice, in the "I don't think that means what you think it means" variety.
I try to give leeway when characters make dumb choices, because real-life people make dumb choices all the time. But it strains credulity that when they encounter an as-yet unidentified sea species, their first assumption is that they must be space aliens.
They never actually accomplish their stated mission, to find out whey American nationals are disappearing from an African city. They make assumptions that are never verified.
And all of this could be excused, all of it, if the story wasn't so damned boring. Stine somehow made a first-contact story totally unineresting.
One star.