Sahara

In 1996, Dirk Pitt is mapping the bed of the Nile for the National Underwater and Marine Agency when he pulls Dr. Eva Rojas out of an assassination attempt. Rojas investigates for the World Health Organization, and she is chasing a plague in West Africa that turns its victims violent and frenzied.

At sea, a red tide is spreading and killing marine life, and it threatens the oxygen the planet depends on. Pitt and his longtime partner Al Giordino follow both disasters to Mali.

There, a profitable waste-disposal business belongs to Yves Massarde, a French industrialist, and General Kazim. Its dumping has poisoned the water table. Pitt is soon fleeing across the Sahara, and the wreck of a plane lost in 1931 may offer the only way out.

The modern thriller runs alongside two historical mysteries. One is the disappearance of the aviator Kitty Mannock over the desert. The other is the Confederate ironclad Texas, which ran the Union blockade carrying a secret.

This is the eleventh Dirk Pitt novel, winner of the Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize and adapted as a 2005 film. It moves across continents at large scale, with an ecological threat driving the plot from the Nile to the open desert.