Looking for a title --SF story about meteorite in Argentina that was actually a planet terraforming 'egg'?

I was dumpster diving three years ago at the Mall looking for boxes, ran across two full boxes of 'destroyed books' - meaning the covers were torn off and the Barnes & Noble had discarded them. Got some good reads out of it (yeay!) but one in particular that I wanted to read again. Everyone I passed the book to loved it. However the cover and all pages up to the first page of the writing was gone. I don't know what the name was or the author--and the book is somewhere with a cousin now.

Plot--millionaire wantes the world's largest meteorite, which has been found at the tip of Argentina. He has to load up a special boat to carry it, which is disguised as a tramp freighter, to get past the Argentinian government. There's a rogue submarine commander bent on destroying him for 'looting' and three teams of people trying to dig this meteor out, which has hit the mountainside back before life appeared on this planet.

It ends in a south pole shootout, with the ship being sunk and the sub destroyed, and the meteor dropped to the bottom of the ocean, and the last page lets us know it was a 'seed' sent out to terraform planets with water that have not had life develop on it. It starts the process, not knowing that life has evolved already--setting roots into the earth's core and starting to destabalize the entire surface of the world.

Does anyone know what the title or author is on this? I really want to read it again, it was a great read. Even said at one point that the Millionaire hired Spielberg's Light & Magic people to disguise the brand new ship to look ancient. And that the meteor was to be taken to a new museum in Ohio built especially for it.