Corsair

Corsair is an adventure novel by the American writer Clive Cussler, published in 2009. It is the sixth book about the ship Oregon and her captain, Juan Cabrillo.

The Oregon looks derelict from the outside and is full of sophisticated equipment inside, and Cabrillo, a one-legged former CIA ship captain, runs her with a crew that takes on the work governments would prefer not to be seen doing themselves.

The secretary of state's plane crashes while she is travelling to a summit meeting in Libya, and the CIA, distrusting the Libyans, hires Cabrillo to search for her. His crew finds the aircraft, and the secretary of state is not in it. She has disappeared, and Libya's new foreign minister has plans for the conference that are not the ones the Americans are expecting, and that Cabrillo cannot let go ahead.

The thread he follows runs back into history, to a naval battle two hundred years old and to Islamic scrolls that the Libyans seem determined to recover, and it ends in another battle at sea, this time against terrorists. The book's title refers to corsairs, the pirates of the Barbary Coast, and to the kinds of piracy that have nothing to do with ships.