'Sahara'

Author: Clive Cussler

Publisher: Harper Collins / 1992

Pages: 551

This is a story with multiple beginnings.

A young researcher who is in Cairo for a conference goes to a lonely spot on the shore for some sunbathing and almost gets killed by a man she does not know.

A tourist group passing through a deserted part of Mali is attacked by mysterious carnivorous half-humans and get killed.

The story gets weirder and weirder: at the end of the American civil war the last ironclad on the defeated side carrying the entire treasure of the losing side and a mysterious person makes a run for it and escapes to open sea.

And a heroic Australian woman aviator trying to set up a new world record comes down in the most inhospitable part of the Sahara Desert and leaves a record of what happened to her over the next days.

Enter hero Dirk Pitt and his sidekick Giordino. And the novel takes off.

This is one of the 17 Dirk Pitt adventure novels by author Clive Cussler (not forgetting the other six by Dirk Cussler).

Deep in the African desert, Dirk Pitt discovers that a top secret scientific installation is leaking a lethal chemical into the rivers, threatening to kill thousands of people and to destroy all life in the world's seas.

To warn the world of the impending catastrophe, Pitt must escape capture and death at the hands of a ruthless West African dictator and French industrialist, and undertake a long, perilous journey across the merciless Sahara.