While browsing through books at an airport recently Clive Cussler’s book Black Wind, caught my eye because it was set partly in Korea.

I have read a few of Clive Cussler’s books before and always found them to be entertaining historical fiction and quick reads. For those that haven’t read his books, Cussler’s books are adventure novels in the mold of Indiana Jones involving the hero Dirk Pitt. Pitt works for the National Underwater & Maritime Agency (NUMA), which conducts various studies of the world’s oceans and underwater exploration. Pitt’s work with NUMA in Cussler’s books leads him into conflicts against various villains while often searching for lost treasure or ancient secrets. Some readers may remember the 2005 movie Sahara staring Matthew Matthew McConaughey. This movie was based off of Cussler’s novel of the same name, which the movie ended up straying so far from the original story line that Cussler told his readers not to watch the movie and sued the production company for breach of contract. Cussler ultimately lost the law suit and was ordered to pay $13.9 million in legal fees too the production company, ouch! So it may be a while before any new Cussler novels make the big screen after this blow up.

Clive Cussler

Cussler book, Black Wind was written in 2004 just a year before the Sahara movie bombed. The book opens by telling the tale of how a Japanese submarine attempted to infiltrate the American Northwest during World War II and attack the major population centers of Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland with a deadly biological virus developed by the infamous Unit 731. The sub was detected off the American coast and sunk but its pay load remained inside its sunken hull. The novel then moves forward to present day when a team of CDC researchers in the Aleutian Islands, is rescued by NUMA’s Dirk Pitt Jr. after being exposed to an unknown and deadly virus. NUMA investigates the virus and is able to link it back to the sunken Japanese submarine. An underwater exploration of the submarine reveals that its contents had been removed.

While this all transpiring the chairman of a Korean chaebol, Dae-jong Kang is covertly trying to get US forces removed from the Korean peninsula by framing a US Air Force servicemember with a horrific rape and murder of a Korean teenage girl. Through Kang’s manipulation of the Korean media and bribery of Korean politicians he is able to get a date set to vote on the withdrawal of USFK in the wake of the staged murder. It is pretty clear that Cussler used the 2002 Armed Vehicle Accident as the point of reference for this portion of the plot.

Protests from 2002

Kang is attempting to get USFK removed in an attempt to pave the way for a North Korean invasion of South Korea because Kang is actually a North Korean sleeper agent. Kang however knows that just removing USFK would not be enough to stop a US intervention in South Korea, so Kang comes up with an elaborate plot to acquire the biological weapons developed by Unit 731 from the sunken submarine and then use it to launch an attack on the US mainland. Kang believed that if the US government was busy dealing with a massive epidemic killing hundreds of thousands of Americans they would not be ready to intervene in a conflict on the Korean peninsula. To avoid North Korean blame for the terrorist attack Kang has an elaborate scheme to where the Japanese Red Army would be blamed as the ones responsible for the attack.

The book concludes with Pitt and his NUMA comrades of course foiling the plot with the assistance of a US Navy SEAL team that assault Kang’s base of operations outside of Incheon. To see how this is all wrapped up you will need to read the book, but it was an entertaining read that was made better due to its Korean setting. If you haven’t read one of Cussler’s books before and you have an interest in Korea, then this book is worth checking out.