Corsair - Clive Cussler (First edition)

For five novels, Clive Cussler has brought readers into the world of the Oregon, a seemingly dilapidated ship packed with sophisticated equipment, and captained by the rakish, one-legged Juan Cabrillo. And now the Oregon and its crew face their biggest challenges yet.

Corsairs are pirates, and pirates come in many different varieties. There are the pirates who fought off the Barbary Coast in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the contemporary pirates who infest the waters of Africa and Asia, and the pirates...who look like something else.

When the US Secretary of State's plane crashes while bringing her to a summit meeting in Libya, the CIA, distrusting the Libyans, hire Cabrillo to search for it. The crew locators the plane, but the Secretary of State has vanished. It turns out Libya's new foreign minister has other plans for the conference, ones Cabrillo can not let happen. But what does it all have to do with a naval battle fought two hundred years ago and centuries-old Islamic scrolls which the Libyans seem so determined  to find? The answers will lead Cabrillo full circle into history, and into another pitched battle on the sea, this time against Islamic terrorists - and with the fate of nations resting on its outcome.