Clive Cussler has been in the news lately if you’ve been listening. He lost his bid to claim the discovery of the ironclad ship, the Hunley in a South Carolina court this past month. He’s well known for his Dirk Pitt novels and has recently begun teaming up with his son, Dirk as author on several of them.

Treasure of Khan is one such production and as all of Mr. Cussler’s works, has basis in historical fact skillfully woven with fiction which coincidentally stars characters modeled after himself and other people he knows. He is the founder of the National Underwater Marine Agency which is often featured in his books and has personally discovered over 80 shipwrecks which he has written several non-fiction books about. A fascinating man who seems to have boundless energy and talents.

Treasure of Khan begins in ancient China during the reign of the famed Mongol chieftain, Kublai Khan as his fleet of Mongol laden Korean piloted ships invades Japan. A super typhoon defeats the invading navy and saves Japan, but one lone ship is driven off course and eventually finds its way to an island inhabited by friendly natives. He eventually finds his way back to the now crumbling empire of Kublai Khan and tells him about the peaceful island and it’s natives. The Khan decides to go there to die and so our adventure begins.

It picks up in 1937 where an archeologist is digging at what is believed to be the site of the royal summer palace of the Yuan dynasty when one of the diggers finds a yellow lacquered box. Inside the box is an animal skin rolled up like a scroll and a heavy bronze tube with a dragon etched into it. When opened, the tube is found to contain a bolt of silk dyed a pale blue which when unfurled, showed a landscape with mountains, valleys gorges and streams depicted in great detail. Along one edge is script which is in Uighur the earliest Mongolian written language. Faced with an approaching Japanese army, the archaeologists pack up the silk, the tube and the animal skin and prepare to leave the site. A Fokker F. VIIb trimotor plane takes them to wards Mongolia, but before it is far from the excavation site, it’s under attack by a Japanese bomber which shoots them down.

Our heroes are tracking current flows in Lake Baikal for the Limnological Institute at Irkutsk when an unexplainable disturbance is recorded by the sensors they have laid across the lake bed. At first, an earthquake is suspected since the area is prone to them, but the uplift is not concurrent with an earthquake, so they begin investigating the source of the disturbance.

This leads them to a mysterious ship carrying some kind of large crane-like apparatus and gets a team of scientists who are working for an oil company researching oil seeps in the area kidnapped. Not wasting time in any St. Martin villa rentals, Dirk, Rudy and and Al race to the rescue only to discover a madman who believes himself to be the direct descendant of Genghis Khan is amassing land and oil rights and planning to blow up existing supertankers and oil pipelines so as to control the world’s oil and thereby become the ruler of the world.

I won’t spoil the story for you by telling you any more, but suffice to say this one is right up there with Cussler’s finest works. Although Pitt is no spring chicken any more, he’s still all man and capable of out thinking the most diabolical enemy.