Books like Vixen 03 by Clive Cussler

The story opens with the disappearance of the 1954 aircraft Vixen 03, which was carrying a large number of highly lethal biological weapons. Although the plane was thought to have crashed at sea, it actually fell into an ice‑covered lake in Colorado. In 1988, during a holiday in the United States, Dirk Pitt stumbles upon the wreckage of Vixen and the surviving biological casings, only to discover that two of the containers have fallen into the hands of a terrorist organization based in Africa. The group’s plan is to launch attacks against Washington, D.C. – but they are not aware that the weapons aboard the plane are not conventional missiles. The president of the United States and Pitt himself are aware of this, setting up a high‑stakes race to prevent the terrorist plot. Compounding Pitt’s troubles, the old World War II vessel that is still afloat in the Potomac carries the catastrophic warheads and cannot be blown out of the water. Pitt’s ordeal is further intensified when he and his partner, a United States congresswoman, become targets of a vicious blackmail scheme, forcing them to protect both themselves and the nation from a looming crisis.

First publish date: 1976