NUMA director Dirk Pitt searches for the connections among newly discovered Roman artifacts, the rise of a fundamentalist movement, and the existence of a mysterious long-lost "manifest," which, if discovered again, may change the history of the world.

Dirk Pitt, the director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, is on the Black Sea, helping to locate a lost Ottoman shipwreck, when he responds to an urgent Mayday—“Under attack!”—from a nearby freighter. But when he and his colleague Al Giordino arrive, there is nobody there. Just dead bodies and a smell of sulfur in the air. As Pitt and Giordino explore, a blast from the stern scuttles the ship swiftly, almost taking them with it....

Doc Ford's old pal Carl Fitzpatrick has been chasing sunken wrecks most of his life, but now he's run afoul of the Florida Division of Historical Resources. Its director, Clive Nickelby, despises amateur archaeologists, which is bad enough, but now he and his young "assistant" have disappeared--along with Fitzpatrick's impounded cache of rare Spanish coins and the list of uncharted wreck sites Fitz spent decades putting together. Some of Fitz's own...

In the final days of World War II, the Japanese launch two submarines carrying a new strain of a deadly virus to the west coast of the United States, but years after the subs are lost at sea, someone plots to use their deadly cargo.