The Clive Cussler Adventures by Steven Philip Jones

Author:Steven Philip Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2014-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Repeating Plot Elements

While the prologue for Deep Six is unique in many ways, Cussler is as prone to repeating plot elements in his stories as any writer. Deep Six provides quite a few examples.

The main adventure begins when a deadly biological weapon called Nerve Agent S kills the crew of a crab ship, the Amie Marie, and then anyone from the Coast Guard cutter Catawaba that boards the Amie Marie to investigate the derelict. All traces of Nerve Agent S, which was developed by the U.S. Army in Colorado during the sixties, were ordered destroyed when it became clear that the weapon is as much of a threat to anyone using it as the intended target. A boxcar carrying one thousand gallons of Nerve Agent S never reached the incineration depot in Nevada, however, and now those missing gallons are leaking from inside a Liberty ship called the Pilottown that vanished in the seventies. The Pilottown is also known as the Magic Ship because it has been reported floating around the Cook Inlet region off Alaska for ten years, but Pitt locates the elusive ship on volcanic Augustine Island, where everything except her stern has been covered by mudflows and volcanic ash. The volcano is poised to erupt again, but Pitt manages to stop the remaining Nerve Agent S from leaking into the ocean in time to prevent it from wiping out all marine life on the planet. Pitt’s victory comes at a terrible cost, though, when the protective suit worn by his potential new romantic interest, Mendoza, tears in an accident, leading to her demise.

Cussler hangs a lantern on the fact that Deep Six repeats some plot elements from Iceberg by bringing back the Catawaba (with Dover now in command) and having Pitt talk about his Iceland adventures with Mendoza. The missing Nerve Agent S is reminiscent of the missing QD organism in Vixen 03, while its potential effects on marine life presages the effects of the red tide in Sahara.92 The Amie Marie likewise presages derelicts like the Polar Queen (Shock Wave) and abandoned death ships like Divine Star (Dragon) and Golden Dawn (Plague Ship). As for the Pilottown on desolate Augustine Island, in a series that includes the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion in the jungles near Panama and the Odysseus as well as the Nautilus in caves along the Hudson River, the Liberty ship, formerly known as the San Marino, remains one of Cussler’s most memorable and imposing Flying Dutchmen or lost ships to be found in an incongruous location.93 Cussler also repeats one of his most famous conceits by naming the manufacturer of the Pilottown’s boilers the Alhambra Iron and Boiler Company after his California boyhood home.94

As discussed in Chapter 5, rebirths are one of Cussler’s thematic preoccupations, but Maeve is one of the few non-cast members in a Cussler adventure to experience one. During Act One of Shock Wave we discover that Maeve ran away from the dysfunctional Dorsetts to start a new life in Australia under the name Fletcher, which she took from her great-great-great-grandmother Betsy.

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