The most dangerous battlefield on Earth may be one you’ll never see.
Thousands of feet beneath the surface, submarines play a deadly game of hide-and-seek where the first mistake may be the last. Above them, the South China Sea has become one of the world’s most contested regions, with rival navies maneuvering through increasingly dangerous confrontations.
In this episode of From Fact to Fiction, I welcome former U.S. Navy officers and bestselling thriller authors David Bruns and J.R. Olson to discuss their new novel, Weapons Free.
Together we explore the real technology, tactics, and geopolitics behind the story—from passive sonar and underwater communications to China’s growing military presence in the South China Sea and the challenges facing today’s submarine commanders.
If you’re a fan of Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October, or simply love learning the real science and strategy behind great thrillers, this conversation offers a fascinating look beneath the surface.
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READ the transcript below, edited for length and clarity
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Introduction
Linda Whitaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to From Fact to Fiction. Thank you for joining us.
On From Fact to Fiction, we unpack the truth behind my favorite specialty thrillers.
Think Michael Crichton, John le Carré, and Tom Clancy. And while these books differ in specialty—from medical and political to national security and techno thrillers—each immerses readers in a new but realistic world.
The best of these blend fact and fiction so seamlessly that it’s hard to tell the difference. You don’t know what is, what could be, and what’s impossible. It would take an expert to know.
That’s why each time we meet, I pair up with an expert and we select a new specialty thriller. We’ll not only talk about why we love the book, but unpack the truth behind the fiction.
Our book today is the 2026 novel Weapons Free by David Bruns and J.R. Olson. And our experts today are David and JR.
Thank you both very much for joining us again.
David Bruns
Thank you for having us again.
J.R. Olson
Yes, thank you.
Linda
I should mention that David and JR joined us last year when we discussed A Tenuous Line of Succession in their Command and Control series. If you haven’t listened to that episode, be sure to check it out.
Today we’re talking about the first book in their new series, The Third Option.
The premise, as I see it, is this:
The Chinese Navy has unleashed a game-changing weapon that could tip the balance of power in the Pacific. Amid this alarming intelligence lies an opportunity to execute one of the boldest covert operations in CIA history.
Hence Weapons Free.
Before we dive in, is there anything you’d like to add?
David
I was a submarine officer, and this novel really sprang out of my love for The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy.
I first read it as a plebe at the Naval Academy. Then I went on summer cruises aboard submarines and eventually became a submarine officer myself.
I’ve always wanted to write a true submarine thriller, and JR finally let me do it on our thirteenth book.
This is our version of The Hunt for Red October, updated for the twenty-first century.
The Chinese and the Americans square off in the South China Sea—a region that’s been a geopolitical flashpoint for more than thirty years.
We loved writing this submarine cat-and-mouse game beneath those waves of the South China Sea.
J.R.
To be fair, several of our novels have included submarine warfare and undersea operations.
But this is the first where roughly half the story takes place underwater.
THis is a great story. It was a lot of fun to develop, and judging from the reviews, readers seem to be loving it just as much as we enjoyed writing it.
Linda
Including me—I loved it.
David, you served six years as a submarine officer, and JR spent twenty-one years on active duty in the Navy, serving aboard aircraft carriers and large-deck amphibious assault ships.
You two really are the perfect people to write these books.
I said this last time, and I’ll say it again. I love this quote:
“These two guys have lived it. Now they’re writing it. Taut, tense, and totally believable. You’ll be dropped into the midst of a world with which few of us are familiar.”
That’s exactly what makes a great specialty thriller for me.
I’m so happy y’all came back to talk about your new book.
The Facts Behind the Fiction
Hunting in the Deep
Linda
Let’s jump into the facts behind the fiction.
Much of this book takes place aboard both American and Chinese submarines, and revolves around the cat-and-mouse game between them.
Can you explain how submarines hide from one another—and how they find each other?
David
Sure.
Submarine 101 in about three minutes.
There are two basic propulsion systems.
A nuclear-powered submarine has a reactor that generally doesn’t need refueling for fifteen years or more. That means virtually unlimited power. It can make its own fresh water, generate its own oxygen, and operate almost indefinitely. The only real limitation is food.
A diesel-electric submarine is essentially a giant battery that’s charged by diesel engines.
When it’s submerged, it’s running on battery power. If you think about the difference between an electric car and a gasoline-powered car, the electric vehicle is much quieter because it has far fewer moving parts.
For submarines, stealth is the number one weapon. Stealth means not being seen—and more importantly—not being heard. That’s accomplished through sound dampening and extremely sophisticated passive sonar systems.
People are familiar with the “ping... ping... ping...” from World War II movies—that’s active sonar.
We almost never used active sonar. Nearly all submarine tracking is done passively. You’re simply listening.
You might hear broadband noise, like a propeller moving through the water. Or narrowband noise, such as a motor transmitting a unique frequency through the hull.
Our sonar systems are incredibly sophisticated.
In all my years aboard submarines, I can probably count on one hand the number of times we actually used active sonar—and every one of those was during training exercises.
Linda
Because if you transmit sound, everyone else can hear you too.
David
Exactly.
The moment you broadcast sound into the water, you’ve announced where you are—which is the last thing a submarine wants to do.
The submarines in this novel are both fast-attack submarines. Those are frontline boats. Their mission is hunting other submarines, gathering intelligence, and protecting naval forces.
The other major type is the fleet ballistic missile submarine—or “boomer.” They carry nuclear weapons. Their mission is simple: disappear and stay hidden.
Fast-attack submarines, on the other hand, patrol areas like the waters off Russia or China, remaining outside territorial waters while monitoring ports, tracking ship movements, and following other submarines.
Just like in The Hunt for Red October, they tow a long sonar array behind the submarine. It contains hydrophones that listen for sounds and establish what’s called a line of bearing.
As the submarine changes course, those bearings change, eventually you can triangulate the other submarine’s position without ever broadcasting your own.
Did I miss anything, JR?
J.R.
Can I use my completely darkened gym example?
Imagine two people locked inside a high school gym that is completely blacked out. Each has a flashlight and a 9 mm. Their mission is to hunt down and kill the other person.
That’s essentially submarine warfare.
The first one to shine the flashlight immediately gives away their position. Unless they happen to shine it directly onto the enemy first. Then they could probably get off a pretty good shot.
David
Or somebody trips and makes a noise, then the other person can find them.
J.R.
Or breathes too heavily.
Life Aboard a Submarine
Linda
How many submarines does the U.S. have?
And of those, how many are boomers versus fast attacks?
JR
Off the top of my head, I think we have around seventy submarines.
We’re working toward expanding that. The Columbia-class submarines will eventually replace the Ohio-class boomers, and we’re continuing to build Virginia-class attack submarines, although there are still some Los Angeles-class boats in service.
Linda
Wow. Are they deployed most of the time?
David
Submarines have a very high operational tempo, especially the fast attacks.
The schedules are different depending on the type of submarine.
A fleet ballistic missile submarine—a boomer—has two complete crews: a Blue Crew and a Gold Crew.
The Blue Crew takes the submarine through its workup, deploys for about three months, comes home, and turns it over to the Gold Crew. They repeat the cycle.
Fast attacks only have one crew. You’re constantly being tasked with different missions.
A typical schedule might be two weeks at sea, one week in port fixing whatever broke—because something always breaks—and then back out for another three weeks.
Longer deployments were common too.
I was based in Norfolk, so a common deployment was what we called a Northern Run, operating around Norway and into the Barents Sea, monitoring Soviet naval activity. Today it’s the Russian Federation, but the mission is essentially the same.
Those deployments typically lasted about three months. Other than maybe a brief port call on the way home, you stayed underwater the entire time.
JR
Talk about the food stores. I found that fascinating.
David
Food is really your only limiting factor. So you bring as much food as you can possibly bring, and you put it everywhere.
In the berthing compartments, we’d line the deck with giant industrial cans of tomato sauce and other supplies. You’d literally walk on canned food until you’d eaten your way through it. Any empty space became food storage.
For the first week or two, you have fresh fruits and vegetables. Fresh eggs might last two or three weeks. After that, it’s frozen, powdered, freeze-dried—whatever you’ve packed.
The food itself is actually excellent. Our culinary specialists do an incredible job. But after about six weeks, you’re living in a sealed environment with a lot of competing smells, and eventually everything tastes about the same.
How Submarines Communicate Without Being Seen
Linda
One thing that surprised me in the book was communications.
You explained passive and active sonar—but I was shocked that submarines still have to come close to the surface to transmit and receive messages.
Is that really true?
David
Yes. To transmit, you have to come up. You can receive very limited messages while submerged by trailing either a wire antenna or a communications buoy.
That’s done using VLF—Very Low Frequency—communications. The wavelengths are enormous—tens of kilometers long. If I remember correctly, there are only a handful of VLF stations around the world. The data rate is incredibly slow—just a few characters per minute.
Years ago we also had ELF—Extremely Low Frequency—which was even slower. That system has since been retired. You might receive a tiny coded message that simply tells you to come to periscope depth.
If you need messages intended specifically for your submarine, you come to periscope depth, raise a communications mast, query the satellite, receive a burst transmission, and then you’re back underwater.
In a high-threat environment, that entire evolution might only take a minute or two.
Linda
Because in the book they’re worried the Chinese—or satellites or drones—could detect them the moment they came up.
David
Exactly.
There are even people aboard monitoring mast exposure.
“Periscope up for eight seconds... down.”
In high-risk situations, that’s absolutely how it’s done.
Linda
That struck me because it made me realize that the ocean floor may be the last place on Earth where someone can truly hide.
David
The ocean is a very complicated environment. You have temperature layers. Salinity layers. Currents. All of those affect how sound travels.
Submarines constantly sample the water column, building a temperature and salinity profile. Those layers can either channel sound or block it.
Sometimes you deliberately hide beneath a thermal layer so sound bends around you, creating what’s called a shadow zone.
But your greatest friend is still silence. That’s why sound dampening is so important.
At the beginning of the novel, the Chinese submarine has a noisy pump and that’s how they were tracking them.
If memory serves, it was something like a bilge pump. It wasn’t running continuously, but whenever it cycled on, it produced a distinctive narrowband frequency.
The Americans could track that specific sound.
Testing a Secret Weapon
Linda
One of the central plot points is that China has developed a new weapon and wants to test it.
They send out a warning to the world. How do you secretly test a weapon while simultaneously telling everyone to stay away?
JR
The U.S. Navy—and really every navy—issues Notices to Mariners and Notices to Airmen whenever live weapons testing is taking place.
It’s fundamentally a safety issue.
There’s actually a great example where that went wrong. Back in the early 1980s, during a live-fire Harpoon missile test, an Indian-flagged merchant ship apparently missed the Notice to Mariners alert and entered the test area.
The harpoon struck the ship and killed several crew members.
So those notifications are taken extremely seriously. But they also tell everyone you’re testing something. You’re announcing to the world that military activity is taking place.
In our story, the Chinese already have an underwater test range inside what they consider their territorial waters. But for the final test, they need deeper water. That meant temporarily closing one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.
And the way we set up the story, I think is pretty realistic. And it was fun thinking through all of the mechanics and the timing and everything else that had to be in place for the covert action, quote unquote, to succeed at the climax of the story.
The South China Sea Powder Keg
Linda
Much of this story takes place in international waters, outside the twelve-mile territorial limit.
I was struck by the amount of posturing and political theater that happens out there—ships harassing one another, pretending they’re going to collide, and sometimes actually bumping into each other.
Does that really happen?
JR
It absolutely does.
If your viewers search YouTube for something like Chinese–Philippines incidents in the South China Sea, they’ll find plenty of videos showing Chinese and Philippine ships colliding, shouldering each other, and Chinese Coast Guard vessels harassing Philippine ships.
It’s pretty intense around the Spratly Islands.
It’s amazing what you can see now with the technology—you can actually watch these encounters unfold.
David
The larger issue is China’s claim to almost the entire South China Sea.
They call it the Nine-Dash Line, which essentially surrounds most of the sea and declares it Chinese territory.
Inside what should be the Philippines’ 200-mile Economic Zone are a number of small atolls known as the Spratly Islands.
Over the last twenty-five to thirty years, China has claimed many of them, dredged them into artificial islands, built military bases, installed missile batteries and airfields, and stationed armed forces there.
It’s become a serious strategic situation, and China shows no signs of slowing down.
Meanwhile, for the last thirty years the United States has been heavily focused elsewhere—the Global War on Terror and other priorities.
And about thirty percent of the world’s shipping passes through the South China Sea.
Linda
So by claiming these islands, China could potentially disrupt all of that?
JR
Potentially, yes.
The U.S. Navy routinely conducts what’s called Freedom of Navigation Operations, or FONOPs.
We deliberately sail within twelve nautical miles of those Chinese-built islands to demonstrate that we don’t recognize those territorial claims.
The Chinese protest every time. We ignore them. We say, these are international waters and we’re exercising freedom of navigation.
The reality is that many of those island bases are militarily vulnerable. A single carrier strike group could eliminate them. But doing so would create a major international crisis, and no one wants that.
David
There’s one interesting exception, where the Philippines has turned the tables on the Chinese.
The Philippines intentionally grounded an old transport ship—the Sierra Madre—on a reef back in 1999. They’ve kept personnel aboard ever since as a way of asserting their own territorial claim.
The challenge is that you have to keep those sailors supplied with food and water. Resupplying that rusting ship has become a genuine flashpoint between China and the Philippines.
It also plays a role in our novel...
...and I’ll end there before I give away too much.
Pressure and Leadership
Linda
Yes, let’s not spoil it!
One thing I especially love about your books is that you tell both sides of the story.
Here it’s largely the United States versus China in this novel, but you spend time inside the heads of the Chinese officers as well. You show the pressures they’re under professionally and personally.
One thing that struck me was the difference between serving in the Chinese military and serving in the U.S. military. There seems to be tremendous pressure to conform—to think, act, and even speak in ways that align with the Communist Party.
JR
That’s a fair observation.
China operates a social credit system.
You probably have heard the term, but many don’t realize how pervasive it is. In major Chinese cities, people are under constant surveillance. Facial recognition. Online activity. Even things like jaywalking.
If you violate expectations, your social credit score drops.
That affects employment, education, loans—virtually every aspect of life. That pressure to conform naturally extends into the military.
What’s always fascinated me, having served in the U.S. Navy, is the contrast with our own services. The Army and Air Force tend to be very doctrine-driven.
The Navy is different. Navy commanders generally see doctrine as guidance—not handcuffs. At sea, creativity often wins battles.
We tried to reflect that difference in the novel through Janet Everett’s command style and by contrasting it with the Chinese submarine captain and the political commissar constantly looking over his shoulder.
Of course, Janet is under enormous pressure herself. Just a very different kind of pressure.
What’s Next for the Third Option Series
Linda
As always, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I can’t wait for readers to discover it.
And you already have another book in the series coming soon—and a third not long after that.
You guys are super prolific.
David
The second book is Alpha Strike, and it releases on July 21.
It’s a little different for us.
The story begins when a doctor working for a Doctors Without Borders–type organization in Africa is kidnapped and taken deep into Mali by a jihadi warlord.
Our fearless CIA team is tasked with finding them. So this one takes us a long way from the deep blue sea.
We felt like we wanted to mess around in the desert for a little bit.
Linda
I can’t wait to read it.
We’ll be sure to remind everyone when it comes out.
Thank you both so much for joining me again.
Congratulations on the new series, and best of luck with the upcoming books.
David
Thank you so much.
JR
Thank you.
Linda
And thank you all for listening.
We’ll see you next time on From Fact to Fiction.
