A missing aircraft.
Flying over the South Pacific, the most technologically advanced spacecraft ever built vanishes into thin air. Extremely valuable, both China and Russia would kill for the state-of-the-art machine.
An unstable cargo.
Kurt Austin and the NUMA team are drawn into a stealthy race to locate the wreck, before someone else does. Only the United States know that waiting in its debris is a payload of exotic matter, stripped from the outermost reaches of the atmosphere.
A devastating weapon.
Kept at absolute zero, the matter is so unstable that it could obliterate the face of the earth if allowed to thaw. In a race they cannot lose, the NUMA team will risk everything to stop the world's most dazzling research from being the very thing that destroys it. The fate of humanity depends on them.
Author Biography
Clive Cussler (Author)
Clive Cussler is the author of over twenty-five internationally bestselling books, including the Dirk Pitt adventure series, the NUMA Files novels and the Oregon Files Adventures.
He grew up in Alhambra, California. He later attended Pasadena City College for two years, but then enlisted in the Air Force during the Korean War where he served as an aircraft mechanic and flight engineer in the Military Air Transport Service. Upon his discharge, he became a copywriter and later creative director for two leading ad agencies. At that time, he wrote and produced radio and television commercials that won numerous international awards, one at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.
Cussler began writing in 1965 and published his first novel featuring Dirk Pitt in 1973. His first non-fiction work, The Sea Hunters, was released in 1996. Because of this work the Board of Governors of the Maritime College, State University of New York considered The Sea Hunters in lieu of a Ph.D. thesis and awarded Cussler a Doctor of Letters degree in May of 1997. It was the first time since the College was founded in 1874 that such a degree was bestowed.
Cussler is the founder the National Underwater & Marine Agency, (NUMA), a non-profit organisation that dedicates itself to American maritime and naval history. In addition to being Chairman of NUMA, Cussler is a fellow in both the Explorers Club of New York and the Royal Geographic Society in London.
A noted collector of classic automobiles, Cussler owns 85 of the finest examples of custom coachwork and 50's convertibles to be found anywhere. They are garaged near Golden, Colorado. Today, Cussler divides his time between the mountains of Colorado and the deserts of Arizona.
Graham Brown (Author)
Graham Brown, a former pilot and lawyer and later part of a start-up healthcare firm, decided he hadn't had enough different careers yet and decided to become a writer.
A huge fan of Clive Cussler, Michael Crichton, Stephen King and television shows like the X-filesand Lost, Graham's first novel Black Rain debuted in January 2010. He has now co-written five NUMA Files novels with Clive Cussler- Devil's Gate, The Storm, Zero Hour, Ghost Ship and The Pharaoh's Secret.