Dirk Pitt and his brood fight to save Los Angeles

A very dirty bomb is headed for Los Angeles (naturally) in Clive Cussler’s latest Dirk Pitt thriller, “Black Wind,” packing a one-two punch of the smallpox virus and HIV. If it lands, it will kill millions of people and permanently cripple the United States, enabling one of the rogue nations on the “Axis of Evil” list to gobble up a neighbor. Fortunately, underwater superhero Pitt and his twin children, Dirk Junior and Summer, are on the job. Robotically brilliant though the villains may be, can they prevail against old-fashioned Yankee grit and ingenuity?

Cussler’s readers know what to expect. Horrible things will happen in widely dispersed parts of the globe. Freeze-dried biological weapons, sealed in watertight porcelain -- the product of imperial Japan’s devilish experiments in China during World War II -- will be found in a submarine sunk in 1945 off the coast of Washington state. A toxic cloud will kill Coast Guardsmen in the Aleutians. A sniper will pick off the U.S. ambassador to Japan as he bends over a putt on a Tokyo golf course. Fish-killing arsenic will leak from another Japanese sub sunk in the Philippines. A U.S. serviceman in South Korea will be framed in the murder of a 13-year-old girl.

The elder Pitt is now director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, a well-funded, super-efficient outfit that exists, alas, only in Cussler’s imagination. Pitt plays a decisive role in the end (“God have mercy on the fool that would harm that man’s offspring,” a colleague thinks), but the dangerous task of connecting the dots falls mostly to the younger generation, especially Dirk Junior, whose eyes “were a deep shade of iridescent green and revealed a sense of intelligence, adventure, and integrity all rolled into one. They were the eyes of a man who could be trusted.”

Cussler, assisted by his real son Dirk, is a good mechanical plotter. Every few chapters, he puts the Pitts or other good guys in seemingly hopeless predicaments -- shot out of the sky in a helicopter, trapped in deep-sea wreckage with air running out, imprisoned in a sinking ship, tied to a platform under a rocket about to be launched -- and dares us to guess how they’ll escape. Once, for the fun of it, he cheats. Dirk Junior and Summer, swimming a five-mile-wide river, chased by thugs in a speedboat, are rescued by a restored Chinese junk piloted by ... Clive Cussler himself.

The true foundation of the Cussler franchise, however, is research. Though his novels have a downside (more on that in a moment), they brim with geographic, historical and scientific data, encouraging the reader to feel that he or she is engaging a significant chunk of the real world rather than indulging in escapist fantasy.

Cussler seems able to describe anything: how a Japanese sub could carry seaplanes underwater, how Navy SEALs mount special ops and how blimps are steered and missiles launched from pads bobbing in mid-ocean. Though his characters are stock, he treats us to great gobs of cutting-edge technology -- if a gob can be said to have a cutting edge.

But Cussler’s prose is uniformly and relentlessly awful. Not just in the occasional howler (“You have an annoying proclivity for survival, Mr. Pitt, which is exceeded only by your irritating penchant for intrusion”), but sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it’s hurried, sloppy, ungrammatical, cliched.

We finish “Black Wind” with profound relief -- that the world has been saved once again, and that we don’t have to read more.

*

Black Wind

A Dirk Pitt Novel

Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler

Putnam: 530 pp., $27.95