A wealthy American financier disappears on a treasure hunt in an antique blimp. From Cuban waters, the blimp drifts toward Florida with a crew of dead men -- Soviet cosmonauts. DIRK PITT discovers a shocking scheme: a covert group of U.S. industrialists has put a colony on the moon, a secret base they will defend at any cost. Threatened in space, the Russians are about to strike a savage blow in Cuba -- and only DIRK PITT can stop them. From a Cuban torture chamber to the cold ocean depths, Pitt is racing to defuse an international conspiracy that threatens to shatter the earth!

From Publishers Weekly

Written in the bestselling style of Pacific Vortex! and Deep Six, and with the indestructible Dirk Pitt as its hero, this latest Cussler suspense caper features, and ingeniously connects, a maverick American colony on the Moon, a fabulous sunken treasure sought by an unscrupulous, blimp-owning financier, and two cunningly devised Soviet schemes, one to steal U.S. space secrets, the other to replace Fidel Castro with a Kremlin puppet, no matter what the cost in human lives. The nonstop action involves murder and torture as well as superpower politicking, and Pitt extricates himself from one desperate situation after another, even finding time for a little romance. The writing is brittle, but the reader is not likely to worry about that in a story whose plot resembles a box of exploding fireworks and poses some interesting questions regarding both Cuba and the militarization of space. Paperback rights to Pocket Books. February 7
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Stephen Coonts

"Nobody does it better than Clive Cussler. Nobody." -- Review