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.