As a child, Cotton Malone heard from his mother that his father, a sailor, had died in a submarine crash in the North Atlantic. Now Cotton, a former Justice Department agent, wants to know the whole truth about this tragedy. What he found shocks him: it turns out that in fact his father’s nuclear submarine disappeared without a trace while performing a top-secret mission somewhere in the ice of Antarctica. Cotton is trying to find out what his father and his team were looking for there. The investigation leads him to encrypted information stored for centuries in the tomb of Emperor Charlemagne. This mystery is connected with Antarctica and is crucial for the fate of all mankind. But, it turns out, not only Malone is following in the footsteps of an ancient mystery...