In 1916, a British warship mysteriously explodes in the middle of the North Sea. In A.D. 327, a Roman galley barely escapes a pirate attack with its extraordinary cargo. Does anything tie them together? NUMA director Dirk Pitt is about to find out, as Roman artifacts discovered in Turkey and Israel unnervingly connect to the rise of a fundamentalist movement determined to restore the glory of the Ottoman Empire, and to the existence of a mysterious "manifest," lost long ago, which if discovered again. In the present day, a cluster of important mosques in Turkey and Egypt are wracked by explosions. 2011. just may change the history of the world as we know it.