Dirk Pitt Adventures

Fully armed and with all hands onboard, the nuclear submarine Starbuck sailed into the calm Pacific Ocean for sea trials - and vanished. No wreckage, no signals, no survivors: nothing...until ace maritime troubleshooter Dirk Pitt finds a single chilling clue in the shark-torn surf off Hawaii - the log of the Starbuck. 'Do not search for us, it can only end in vain....' A crazed journal of madness and death is all that remains.

Major Dirk Pitt picked up the frantic distress call as he cruised his lumbering amphibious plane over the islands of the Aegean. Brady Air Force base was under fire, its entire force of jets destroyed on the ground...by just one First World War biplane! A psychotic ex-Nazi, a bloodthirsty Greek strongman and a beautiful double agent set Pitt on the trail of the warped mastermind behind a devastating sabotage plot. And on that trail, danger and death are never far behind....

The towering iceberg drifting in the North Atlantic was a floating tomb. Embedded in the great gleaming mass was a ship - sealed in so solidly that not even its mast protruded. Here was a sea mystery to rank alongside the Bermuda Triangle and the Marie Celeste. But for Major Dirk Pitt, top trouble-shooter for the National Underwater and Marine Agency, it was also the first link in a fantastic chain of events that would lead him too close - and too often - to violent death.

Two and a half miles beneath the icy North Atlantic, the mighty Titanic holds the key to the safety of the free world. The Americans want it. So do the Russians. Ace maritime troubleshooter Dirk Pitt faces one of the most stupendous tests of courage and ingenuity ever. Raise the Titanic is a spellbinding blockbuster of action and suspense.

Over 30 years ago, on an ultra-secret flight to the South Pacific, the transport plane Vixen 03 vanished. It was believed to be lost at sea. And carrying canisters of the most lethal substance known to man. Now Vixen 03 has returned to haunt the world. Dirk Pitt, the ace maritime troubleshooter who raised the Titanic, is the only man who can overcome the nightmarish problems involved in retrieving her cargo. And the price of failure is terrifying.

May 1914. Two diplomats hurry home by sea and rail, each carrying a document of world-changing importance. Then the liner Empress of India is sunk in a collision, and the Manhattan-Line express plunges from a bridge - both dragging their VIP passengers to watery oblivion. Tragic coincidence or conspiracy? In the energy-starved, fear-torn 1980s, Dirk Pitt discovers that those long-lost papers could destroy whole nations, throwing him into his biggest challenge yet.

For the President of the United States, the crisis point is approaching fast. With his new Soviet initiative entering its most crucial phase, the President suddenly finds himself faced with a pollution disaster of potentially cataclysmic proportions. And then - incredibly - he vanishes into thin air, leaving his country poised on the brink of chaos.

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 subsequent discovery of the gruesome fate of the crew sets in motion the most nail-biting chain of events of his career. The hijacking on a golf course of one of the world's most powerful leaders; an exotic but outrageous undercover operation in the Caribbean; the sinister intrigue of a secret power base on the moon...Pitt's considerable resources and guile are about to be tested to the limit.

The President of the United States had reason to be grateful. Dirk Pitt had unearthed the greatest storehouse of knowledge in the ancient world: the Alexandria Library. The trail began in a lonely fjord in Greenland. It ended on the banks of the Rio Grande. In between Pitt had frustrated an assassination, rescued a hijacked liner, survived a deadly gun battle and halted an invasion. A gripping, action-packed story by a master of the craft.

Buried in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Japan, lies one of the greatest drowned secrets of World Wart Two - a crashed B-29 bomber that was carrying a third atomic bomb to Japan in 1945. Its deadly cargo, lost in the sea for nearly 50 years, is at the heart of this classic Dirk Pitt thriller, in which a small group of Japanese nationalist fanatics, dreaming of a new Nipponese Empire, set out to neutralise and blackmail the USA - with nuclear weapons planted strategically in the country's major cities....

Deep in the African desert, Dirk Pitt discovers that a top secret scientific installation is leaking a lethal chemical into the rivers, threatening to kill thousands of people - and to destroy all life in the world's seas. To warn the world of the catastrophe, Pitt must escape capture and death at the hands of a ruthless West African dictator and French industrialist and undertake a long, perilous journey across the merciless Sahara....

A call for help from a stricken archaeological expedition brings Dirk Pitt to a sacred well high in the Andes. There he confronts a band of ruthless art thieves, who plunder ancient sites for their precious artefacts. But soon Dirk Pitt faces even graver danger, as he searches for a lost Spanish galleon and hunts for a fabulous hoard of Inca gold. And in a desperate race against time, Pitt must track down a sacred site - before the richest prize known to man is lost to the world forever....

A hundred and forty years after a British ship wrecks on the way to an Australian penal colony and the survivors discover diamonds on the tropical island where they wash up, Maeve Fletcher, one of their descendants, is stranded on an island in Antarctica with a party of passengers after their cruise ship seemingly abandons them. Dirk Pitt, on an expedition to find the source of a deadly plague that is killing dolphins and seals in the Weddell Sea, finds Maeve and the passengers and rescues them from death.

Tracking a notorious Chinese smuggler's activities leads Dirk Pitt from Washington State to Louisiana, where his quarry is constructing a huge shipping port in the middle of nowhere. Why has he chosen this unlikely location? The trail then leads to the race to find the site of the mysterious sinking of the ship that Chiang Kai-shek filled with treasure when he fled China in 1949, including the legendary boxes containing the bones of Peking Man that had vanished at the beginning of World War I.

In the final minutes of Valhalla Rising, Dirk Pitt discovered, to his shock, that he had two grown children he had never known, 23-year-old fraternal twins born to a woman he thought had died in an underwater earthquake. Both have inherited his love of the sea: the girl, Summer, is a marine biologist; the boy, himself named Dirk, is a marine engineer. And now they are about to help their father in the adventure of a lifetime.

In the final minutes of Valhalla Rising, Dirk Pitt discovered, to his shock, that he had two grown children he had never known, 23-year-old fraternal twins born to a woman he thought had died in an underwater earthquake. Both have inherited his love of the sea: the girl, Summer, is a marine biologist; the boy, himself named Dirk, is a marine engineer. And now they are about to help their father in the adventure of a lifetime.

In the waning days of World War II, the Japanese tried a last desperate measure, a different kind of kamikaze mission, this one carried out by two submarines bound for the west coast of the United States, their cargo a revolutionary new strain of deadly virus.