Sahara

Sahara is an adventure novel by the American writer Clive Cussler, published in 1992. It is one of the books about Dirk Pitt, and it sends him and his team after two problems that turn out to be one.

Pitt is on the Nile in 1996 looking for a treasure when he thwarts an attempt to kill a beautiful scientist working for the United Nations. She is investigating a disease that is driving thousands of people across North Africa into madness, cannibalism and death, and the men who want her stopped are neither ordinary criminals nor ordinary officials.

The suspected cause of the epidemic is pollution on a scale nobody has dealt with before, and it threatens to end life in the world's oceans. Pitt and his crew race to identify the source and to keep the outbreak from spreading further, with the treasure hunt and the search for the pollution converging as they go. The scale of the pollution is what gives the book its urgency, and Pitt's crew is the only group with the equipment to reach it.