Dirk Pitt battles his most dangerous foe ever – with help from a very unexpected source. There is a black tide infesting the ocean off the shore of Nicaragua. Whilst trying to determine its origin, startling things begin to occur and the inhabitants of a floating resort find themselves directly in the path of a violent storm. Dirk and the NUMA crew rush to their rescue, but they discover that there is an all-too-human evil at work and the black tide is only a by-product of its plan. Soon its work will be complete – and the world will be a very different place?
This 17th Dirk Pitt extravaganza finds Cussler (literally, as he makes a cameo at book’s end) and his entourage of paint-by-number characters in fine fettle, foiling a dastardly plot by outlandish villains to launch a new ice age, and at the same time demonstrating that the Achaeans were not Greeks but Celts, and that Troy was a town in what’s now England. After a prelude set during the Trojan War, the novel proper starts with a roar, as a monstrous hurricane sweeps toward the Caribbean, endangering not only Pitt’s twin son and daughter, engaged in undersea exploration, but also the Ocean Wanderer, a luxury floating hotel owned by a mysterious billionaire known as Specter. In a manly manner, Pitt and his longtime sidekick, Al Giordino, both of NUMA (the National Underwater and Marine Agency), save the hotel and Pitt’s grown kids, but not before those kids discover a trove of underwater relics that indicate that the Celts, aka Achaeans, reached the New World millennia ago. And the Celts are still here, in the guise of a female Druidic cult linked to Specter and aiming for world domination by altering ocean currents via a vast underground mechanism in Nicaragua, which will plunge the earth into cold, then selling a new type of cheap fuel cell to supply needed heat.
The action never flags, the heroics never halt and the bodies pile up as Pitt and Co. take on the villains; some big changes in Pitt’s personal life close the book
Dirk Pitt is the ultimate man of action: always ready for any challenge, always prepared to pit quick wits and brawn against an intractable problem.
Ex-US Air force, he is cool, courageous and resourceful, which is why he works for the US National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) – the undersea counterpart to NASA. In service of NUMA Pitt travels across the globe – and wherever he goes, action and adventure are sure to follow…