Flood Tide

Flood Tide is a thriller by Clive Cussler, published in 1997 and one of the long series of novels about Dirk Pitt.

The antagonist is a wealthy Chinese smuggler whose business is people: a large part of his fortune has been accumulated by moving immigrants into countries around the world, including the United States, and he treats human lives as inventory. Dirk Pitt starts by tracking the smuggling operation, which takes him from Washington State down to Louisiana, where the man is building an enormous shipping port in a location that makes no commercial sense. Working out why that particular spot was chosen is the thread that leads Pitt into the rest of the plot, which involves a wreck, a hidden fortune and a scheme that would not survive public scrutiny. Cussler writes the series as adventure with a technical puzzle attached, and Pitt's method is to keep pulling at the anomaly until the plan becomes visible.

The Dirk Pitt novels are large-scale adventure stories, and this one is built on a crime that is both ordinary and enormous: the smuggling of people, protected by money and by a port nobody can explain.