The #1 New York Times bestseller! An underwater graveyard in the Pacific Northwest... A mysterious seaport in the bayous of Louisiana... A diabolical plot to destroy America! Unknown waters， 1948. The Princess Dou Wan， a sea-weary cruise ship covertly seized by Chiang Kai-shek， slams into a devastating storm that tears the hull apart and sends it and a mysterious cargo down into the depths， lost to all searchers for more than fifty years. Pacific Northwest， 2000. Dirk Pitt? rescues a beautiful undercover immigration agent from Qin Shang， an insatiably greedy smuggler whose vast fortune is made selling Chinese immigrants into slavery around the globe. Shang s campaign contributions have bought him a collection of powerful U.S. politicians， but Pitt finds the secret behind Shang s vast and mystifying seaport in the Louisiana bayou to be shockingly sinister. From an adrenaline-pumped race against time and tide up the Mississippi River to a desperate dash to recover Chinese treasures， Dirk Pitt faces one of his most formidable foes -- a madman bent on killing hundreds of thousands of innocent men， women， and children with a catastrophic surge of mass destruction.