Dirk Pitt/NUMA

Dirk Pitt rides a tidal wave of intrigue in this classic Cussler.On an isolated Greek island, a World War I fighter plane attacks a modern U.S. Air Force base--a mysterious saboteur preys on an American scientific expedition--and Dirk Pitt plays a deadly game of hunter and hunted with the elusive head of an international smuggling ring.

Just seventy-two hours ago, Dirk Pitt was lying in the hot California sun with a beautiful woman, a Scotch-rocks in one hand, but an urgent call from Admiral James Sandecker, his commander at the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), brings Pitt out of the warm Pacific breezes and straight into a North Atlantic deep freeze. The reason: the dis- covery of a long-missing luxury yacht, en route to a secret White House rendezvous, frozen solid in a mil- lion-ton tombstone of ice. Tunneling his way into the core of the berg, Pitt comes upon a gruesome scene -- a crew of corpses, hor- ribly incinerated at their posts -- but the vessel's price- less cargo, which could alter the balance of world power and put the threat of annihilation at America's doorstep, has vanished. This discovery is the springboard from which Clive Cussler -- The Grand Master of Adventure -- launches a compelling and powerful story that takes Dirk Pitt from the remote, uninhabited tundra of Iceland to the frigid abyss of the North Atlantic, determined to force his deadly, unseen opponent -- a multibillionaire in the business of playing God -- to make his next move. But first Pitt will have to penetrate the shroud of mystery concealing a titanic network of international financial intrigue -- and mass murder. Lives, nations, continents are at stake. And although his enemies may have the firepower as always, Dirk Pitt has the skill and the daring, the ruth- lessness and resourcefulness to meet it. He also has Kirsti Fyrie, an Icelandic beauty whose twin brother died on the ice-encased yacht and who carries in her heart the secret that Pitt needs to destroy his opponents in this deadly game. Iceberg is classic Cussler.

1954 Vixen 03 is down. The plane, bound for the south Pacific and bearing several canisters of a particularly virulent organism, vanishes. Believed ditched at sea, Vixen has in fact crashed into an ice-covered lake in Colorado. 1988. Dirk Pitt, on holiday, discovers remnants of Vixen 03. The lethal canisters are raised—but they're not all accounted for. It turns out that two of them are in the hands of an African terrorist group. The group's mission: to attack nothing less than Washington, D.C. The catch is that the group is not aware that it will be firing anything but conventional missiles. But Pitt knows—and so does the president of the United States. To complicate matters further, the World War II ghost ship bearing the catastrophic warheads up the Potomac cannot be blown out of the water. Pitt's problems are compounded when he and his lady, a United States congresswoman, becomes the target of a vicious blackmail scheme.

A deadly tide of poison flows into ocean waters. A ghost ship drifts across the empty northern Pacific. A luxury Soviet liner blazes into a funeral pyre. The Presidential yacht cruises the Potomac night—and the President disappears without a trace. Dirk Pitt takes on a sinister Asian shipping empire in an intercontinental duel of nerves. In his most dangerous, fast-paced adventure, he fights to save the US government—and to seize one desperate moment of revenge!

In the spring of 1945 Benito Mussolini, knowing that the Allied armies were advancing, and sure that his only chance of survival was in Switzerland, headed toward that border with his close associates, his mistress and a cache of treasure estimated at between eighty and one hundred and twenty million dollars in currency, gold, jewels and priceless historical documents. In the northern Italian town of Dongo, he was captured and executed by the partisans. An inventory was made of the treasure, which then mysteriously disappeared. Today, despite the investigations and trials of those involved in its transport, this vast treasure of the Italian people is still missing. It is against these facts and this setting that A. E. Hotchner's exciting novel is played. Paul Selwyn, an American, becomes involved in an intrigue that takes him from Italy to Paris to London to Stockholm, and fially back to the small town of Dongo on Lake Como, searching for the lost treasure.

Following the runaway success of his first nonfiction book, The Sea Hunters, Clive Cussler returns with his legendary fictional hero Dirk Pitt" - in a masterfully crafted tale of villainy on the high seas and the Mississippi River that can only enhance his status as the grand master of adventure fiction. The coin of the realm for the wealthy, insatiably greedy Chinese smuggler who is Dirk Pitt's adversary in Flood Tide is human lives: much of his vast fortune has been made smuggling Chinese immigrants into countries around the globe, including the United States. Tracking the smuggler's activities leads Pitt from Washington State to Louisiana, where his quarry is constructing a huge shipping port in the middle of nowhere. Why has he chosen this unlikely location? The trail then leads to the race to find the site of the mysterious sinking of the ship that Chiang Kai-shek filled with treasure when he fled China in 1949, including the legendary boxes containing the bones of Peking Man that had vanished at the beginning of World War 1. As Pitt prepares for a final showdown, he is faced with the most formidable foe he has ever encountered. With a dozen consecutive New York Times bestsellers and over 70 million copies of his books in print, Clive Cussler is one of America's most popular novelists. His latest book is enthralling, intricately plotted, and supremely suspenseful.