The Navigator

The Navigator is an adventure novel by the American writer Clive Cussler, published in 2007. It is one of the books about Kurt Austin and the NUMA team.

The story turns on a Phoenician statue called the Navigator, which was taken from the museum in Baghdad years before the novel begins. There are men who are prepared to do anything at all to get it into their hands, and the first person to die over it is a crooked antiquities dealer, murdered in cold blood.

The second intended victim is an investigator working for the United Nations, who would be at the bottom of the water if Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala had not reached him in time. Austin cannot see what makes the statue worth killing for, and working that out is what drives the book.

The answer takes the NUMA team into a search that stretches across both time and distance, through the lost treasures of King Solomon, a packet of documents that Thomas Jefferson encoded himself, and a secret scientific project with the potential to change the world.