Inca Gold

Inca Gold is an adventure novel by Clive Cussler, published in 1994 and one of the Dirk Pitt books. It opens with an account of a fleet that landed on an island in an inland sea, where an ancient Andean people hid a hoard of gold and then vanished.

The present-day plot involves Pitt and his colleagues at NUMA, who are drawn into the search after a fellow researcher disappears. The investigation connects the lost treasure to a network of dealers in archaeological objects, and the book moves between the United States, South America and Europe as the two stories come together, with the historical material explained through documents and through what the characters find.

Cussler writes the series as fast adventure with a heavy interest in ships, diving and old artifacts, and each volume puts its hero through a set of rescues and set pieces. This is one of the middle books of the Dirk Pitt sequence, from the period when the series moved between the sea and the archive.