When it comes to sheer excitement, nobody can top Clive Cussler - except Clive Cussler himself! After his adventures in the best-selling Deep Six, the indomitable Dirk Pitt returns in a new, even more enthralling spellbinder. It begins when a noted financial publisher and adventurer, Raymond LeBaron, sets off in an antique blimp in search of the Cyclops, a U.S. Navy collier which vanished in mysterious circumstances in 1918 near Cuban waters - and which may have had on board a fabulous treasure ...
LeBaron and his crew also vanish, in circumstances that are at once puzzling and alarming and which lead a reluctant Dirk Pitt into one of the most extraordinary adventures of this career - and adventure that leads him step by step, in constant danger, to the discovery of a secret base on the moon, a Soviet plot against Castro that endangers the peace of the world, and the unveiling of the treasure itself...
The bizarre chain of events that begins with LeBaron's disappearance explodes into a battle between the Soviet Union and the United States for possession of the moon and ends with a blazing, cliff-hanging race against time to prevent an awesome tragedy. It almost defeats Dirk Pitt and takes him from the inner councils of the White House to a confrontation with Fidel Castro himself...
Dirk Pitt doesn't go looking for adventure. It finds him easily enough. His chance witnessing of an airship disaster which nearly kills him and his discovery of the gruesome fate of the crew, sets in motion the most nail-biting chain of events of his career.
About the Author
A bestselling author who has had an adventurous life - sought lost gold mines in the American southwest, dived in isolated lakes of the Rocky Mountains for lost aircraft, dived for shipwrecks of historical significance
Industry Reviews
Comic-strip specialist Cussler (Raise the Titanic!) returns with as implausible a tale as he can invent, again featuring death-proof underwater-recovery mariner Dirk Pitt. An antique blimp carrying multimillionaire publisher Raymond LeBaron is searching for the US Navy collier Cyclops, which went down in the Caribbean in 1918, when the blimp loses radio contact with land and disappears for 10 days. It reappears, manned by dessicated dead men, floating toward the Sonesta Hotel in Key Biscayne. Pitt, who is enjoying himself sailboarding, spots the colossus and snags a line from it, just averting a tragedy. Later, Mrs. LeBaron refuses to identify one of the dead, who is wearing her husband's clothes and jewelry, as LeBaron. As it happens, the three substitute corpses are Soviet cosmonauts whose bodies had been recovered and frozen a year ago. By whom? Meanwhile, the President is buttonholed by a caddy on a golf course who pretends to be carrying a bomb and reveals a fantastic private enterprise scheme which placed a US team on the moon six years ago and is now about to return its men to earth and go public. But the Russians are also establishing their own team on the moon! What is the connection between Cyclops and the moon colony? Only that LeBaron is among the rich founders of the colony, and had hoped to recover from the collier a secret treasure: a six-foot solid gold goddess with a 30-pound emerald for a head and giant ruby in her breast, stolen from a wealthy native tribe. But when Pitt locates and boards the sunken ship, the statue is missing. Also, the Russians have a ship loaded to the gills with explosive ammonium nitrate in Havana harbor and plan to blow up Havana and Castro in a tremendous fireball. Castro now wishes to establish peace with Washington. Can Pitt save Havana? As a matter of fact, he doesn't altogether and is himself caught up in the fireball. But he's immortal, right? Nicely paced junk, expertly set in motion for ultraescapists who like hollow noises between their ears. (Kirkus Reviews)
