Clive Cussler’s Serpent Ver 1.0

Scanned and OCRed using Omnipage Pro 10

INTRODUCING A FRIEND

When I was asked to introduce Kurt Austin, Joe Zavala, and their friends who serve the National Underwater and Marine Agency, I accepted with great pleasure and enthusiasm. I’ve had the privilege of knowing Kurt and Joe for many years. We first met when they joined NUMA at Admiral Sandecker’s invitation not long after Al Giordino and I came on board. Although we’ve never had the opportunity to work on the same project together, Kurt and Joe’s escapades above and underwater have often fired my imagination and left me wishing I’d done that.

In some ways Kurt and I are similar. He’s a few years younger, and we hardly look alike, but he lives in an old remodeled boathouse on the Potomac River and collects antique dueling pistols, a wise choice when you consider how much simpler they are to maintain and store than the old. cars in my aircraft hangar. He’s also into rowing and sailing, which sends me into exhaustion just thinking about it.

Kurt is resourceful and shrewd, and he has more guts than a white shark on steroids. He’s also a genuine nice guy with two tons of integrity who believes in the flag, mothers, and apple pie. To my chagrin, the ladies find him very attractive, even more attractive than they find me.

The only obscure conclusion I can reachit pains me deeply to say sois that between the two of us he’s better looking.

I’m happy that Kurt and Joe’s exploits are finally being chronicled from the NUMA Files. There is not the slightest doubt that you will find them entertaining as well as an intriguing way to while away the time. I know that I have.

Dirk Pitt

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WITH APPRECIATION TO DON STEVENS for taking us down to the Andrea Doria without getting our feet wet, and for the work of two fine writers, Alvin Moscow and William Hoffer, whose books Collision Course and Saved so vividly describe the human side of that great sea tragedy. And for the tenacity of that intrepid explorer John L. Stephens, who braved mosquitoes and malaria as he trekked through the Yucatan discovering the wonders of the lost Mayan civilization.

PROLOGUE

July 25, 1956

South of Nantucket Island

SO QUICKLY DID THE PALE SHIP appear, she seemed to spring whole from the depths, gliding like a ghost across the silver pool of luminescence cast by the near full moon. Tiaras of porthole lights glittered along her bone-white sides as she raced eastward in the warm night, her sharply raked bow knifing through the flat seas as easily as a stiletto cutting through black satin.