Raise the Titanic!

Raise the Titanic! is a 1976 adventure novel by the American writer Clive Cussler, published in the United States by the Viking Press. It is the third book to feature his salvage man, Dirk Pitt, and the first of them to open with a prologue set long before the main story.

The plot turns on Byzanium, an element so rare that the Sicilian Project, an American missile-defence programme meant to stop an incoming attack with sound waves, cannot be built without it. A secret Pentagon office tracks the most likely source to an island off the northern coast of the Soviet Union, and finds that the ore left the island decades earlier.

The trail leads to the Titanic, lying far below the surface of the North Atlantic with the consignment still aboard, and Pitt is drawn into the search for where it went. Much of the book follows the effort to reach the liner at that depth and to raise her, an operation the characters have to work out as a problem of engineering before it can be attempted as a salvage job. A film adaptation followed in 1980.