The loss of the library, burned in 391 A.D., has been considered by scholars one of the world's great tragedies, but when Dirk Pitt discovers that the most precious part of it was saved and hidden, the race is on to recover its secrets - a race that involves a deadly plot which could unseat the friendly governments of Egypt and Mexico, expose America to invasion, economic collapse and political blackmail, destroy Israel, and plunge a large part of the world back into savage barbarism. With a company of Roman mercenaries, a small army of slaves, and a fleet of ships, Venator transports the priceless treasures of the ancients across an unknown sea to a barren land, where they are hidden in caverns tunneled by the slaves, only to see his company slaughtered by a horde of barbarians, except for the crew of one small merchant ship that manages to escape…

Sixteen hundred years later, Dirk Pitt finds the ship and its crew, frozen in the ice of a Greenland fjord, and with the help of a beautiful young archaeologist, NUMA's sophisticated computers, and his own do-or-die enthusiasm for adventure, sets out to find Venator's secret hiding place/ His quest, which is already difficult (the treasure could be anywhere in the ancient world), is complicated by a series of bizarre and threatening events that lead Pitt into the most deadly challenge of his life; an airliner crashes, sabotaged, among its passengers the glamorous and controversial new woman Secretary General of the United Nations, the White House is threatened by fanatic zealots in Egypt and Mexico; Pitt's own father, a distinguished U.S. senator and presidential advisor, is in danger; a cruise ship with a distinguished list of passengers, including heads of state, is hijacked and then vanishes - and all of these dire happenings seem to be mysteriously connected to the treasure... Dirk Pitt's chase takes the reader from the ski slopes of Colorado (with the most memorable and unique car chase in fiction history) to the frozen wastes of Tierra del Fuego (with a full-scale assault on a terrorist stronghold in which he almost loses his life), by way of a deep-sea dive that reveals an astonishing secret, to a brilliant scheme of deception that leads the book to its awesome climax...