A Category Four hurricane has swept the west coast of Florida, creating havoc, changing lives, and reshaping the ocean bottom. Well-known reefs and wrecks have been covered up-and new ones have emerged. The old woman who visits Doc Ford's lab late one night has a haunting story, of a loved one lost while rendezvousing with a German submarine off the coast of Florida sixty years earlier, of her belief that he was being blackmailed and that the storm has given her a second chance to prove his innocence by uncovering the wreck of his boat-and the truth-if only Ford would look for it. Intrigued, Ford agrees, and sets in motion a chain of events that will change his life forever. For there are other things in that wreck as well, and other men want those things, men willing to commit terrible acts to get them. And the woman herself-the woman is not what she seems. . . .