Book Review – Clive Cussler’s “Night Probe!”
Today I finished reading another of Clive Cussler’s books, Night Probe!
Another book review? Why are there so many of them lately?
The movie and marketing reviews will return soon. For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a major project that has been requiring most of my attention. I’m still reading here and there, and today I happened to finished my third book for the month of August. Figured I might as well spend a few minutes talking about it before working on the next project.
Night Probe! is the fifth book in Cussler’s popular Dirk Pitt series of adventure novels. The novel’s title is a term that divers commonly use (or at least they were still using back in 1981 when this story was first published) when exploring the dark of underwater caves. That’s important for an event near the end of the story.
Night Probe! begins with a prologue set in 1914.
One night in May of 1914, there’s a robbery and hold up in a train station by the Hudson River in southern New York. Held captive by the robbers, the two workers are unable to run outside and warn the approaching steam train, the Manhattan Limited, that the bridge over the Hudson River is out. Supposedly the bridge was destroyed by the storm. The train races past the station and crashes into the river, killing everybody on board including a passenger carrying a special document.
The only problem is that nobody could find the wreckage of the train. Divers and crews checked up and downstream, but it appears that the train has simply vanished. To make matters worse, on many nights a phantom train can be seen racing along those same tracks and stopping where the old bridge used to stand.
The same night that the Manhattan Limited crashed into the Hudson River, the ship RMS Empress of Ireland is sailing up the St. Lawrence River. Suddenly, the Empress of Ireland is accidentally rammed amidships by a Norwegian ship. The impact cuts a gaping hole into the side of the Empress of Ireland, and the ship sinks to the bottom of the St. Lawrence River in a matter of minutes. Like the Manhattan Limited, the Empress of Ireland was also carrying a passenger with a very special document.
Fast forward to 1989.
The economy of the United States is failing as the country is dealing with an energy crisis. Most of the northeastern part of the country is forced to import energy from Quebec’s new hyrdo-electric power plant.
Meanwhile, the Canadian economy is also in a state of crisis, and to make matters worse, there’s a movement to have Quebec succeed from Canada and become its own independent country. A Moscow-oriented terrorist organization known as the Free Quebec Society (FPS) is intent on making this happen. The United States is well aware of this organization’s ties and fearing having another Cuba-like country just across the U.S. border.
Canada’s prime minister, Charles Sarveux, has a different fear of Quebec’s separation of Canada. With the current economic crisis, if one province leaves Canada, chances are likely that the other provinces will also leave and most likely try to join the United States. Charles Sarveux barely survives a terrorist attack when the FPS shoots down his aircraft while on departure. The plane makes a crash landing at the airport, but Sarveux is the lone survivor when his bodyguards toss him from the aircraft upon touchdown. The aircraft then rolls over and its aviation fuel ignites, destroying most of the aircraft in a fireball.
Back in the U.S., Navy Lieutenant Commander Heidi Milligan (the same woman Dirk Pitt met at an inn in Vixen 03) is currently researching historic documents while writing a research paper for her PhD. She stumbles across a letter from President Woodrow Wilson making reference to some kind of treaty between the U.S. and England back in 1914. The only problem is that when conducting further research, nobody seems to know anything about any treaties that were signed back then.
While this is taking place, Dirk Pitt is on a research mission for NUMA, the National Underwater and Marine Agency. He and two other scientists are in a highly advanced ship taking sea floor readings off the coast of Quebec. They discover a massive oil field that would be a tremendous asset for the United States’ current energy crisis. The only problem is that the find is technically within the territorial limits of Canada.
Heidi Milligan’s inquiries about the mysterious treaty at the National Archives gather some attention, and it isn’t long before somebody who knows the secret about the treaty of 1914 (known as the North American Treaty) is able to inform the U.S. president about the treaty. It turns out that with war on the horizon, England was in desperate need of money to pay for munitions and supplies for the upcoming conflict. For a fee of a billion dollars, England sold Canada to the United States.
Three copies of the signed treaties were made. Two of those copies were lost the same night in May of 1914 onboard the Manhattan Limited and the Empress of Ireland. Once England learned that the treaties were lost, they ordered Canada to destroy its copy of the North American Treaty. The U.S. did pay England an initial fee of $150 million for the purchase of Canada, and that was simply written off as a war loan.
Upon learning of the North American Treaty, the U.S. president sees the unification of Canada and the Unites States as the solution to both countries economic problems. In addition to that, the combined country would better challenge the size of the Soviet Union. Although the $150 million payment in 1914 was written off as a war loan, all of the financial loans given to England past that point had clearly passed the sum of a billion dollars. All the president needs to claim proof of Canada is a physical copy of the signed North American Treaty.
The president already has a meeting scheduled with the Canadian Parliament, so it’s a race against time as the president orders NUMA to recover one of the North American Treaties.
Admiral James Sandecker, the commander of NUMA, takes Dirk Pitt’s advice and launches two simultaneous recovery projects. Dirk Pitt leads the recovery of the treaty on the sunken Empress of Ireland in the St. Lawrence River, while Al Giordino leads the team of men hunting for the Manhattan Limited in the Hudson River.
As if speedy recovery projects weren’t challenging enough, especially with the location of the Manhattan Limited a great mystery, England is aware of the president’s plans to locate the lost North American Treaty. Brian Shaw, a retired British Secret Intelligence Service commando, is ordered to prevent NUMA from succeeding and destroy the North American Treaty at all costs.
What follows is a thrilling series of events beginning with the recovery process of the Empress of Ireland.
The NUMA team quickly begins working on the wreckage using a submarine, some scuba divers in a special pressure tank, and a couple of divers in cool JIM suits. The recovery effort has an initial problem with the Canadian navy attempting to interfere, and then later by Shaw’s terrorists. The terrorists succeed in detonating explosives planted in the wreckage, but the explosion only kills about twelve people. The hole actually aids the NUMA team, and Dirk Pitt is able to recover the lost North American Treaty. Unfortunately, water had penetrated the case and the treaty was destroyed.
All hope for the North American Treaty lies with the Manhattan Limited. After dredging and scanning the floor of the Hudson River, Pitt realizes that the train was never there in the first place. It turns out that the train station robbery in 1914 was more elaborate than originally believed. The Manhattan Limited was carrying a secret cargo of newly minted gold coins which happened to be the robbers’ real target.
The Manhattan Limited was really captured many miles north and it taken along a separate line and hid inside of a mountain used by miners. The robbers ran down to the Hudson River Bridge, robbed the station, and used lights and sounds to create the illusion of a passing train. They then returned to the real train hidden in the mountain and set off explosives to seal themselves with their treasure. The problem is that the explosion triggered an earthquake that released an underground water chamber into the escape tunnel, flooding it. The robbers were forced to die with the rest of the train’s passengers deep within the mountain.
What follows is a race as Dirk Pitt and his team from NUMA race Brian Shaw and his British commandos to the buried train. Pitt uses scuba gear and dives through the flooded escape tunnel while Shaw’s men dig their way through the narrow ventilation shaft. Pitt wins the race and safely recovers the treaty.
Night Probe! ends with the U.S. president speaking to members of Canada’s Parliament and stating his plans for the merger with Canada. Although Quebec had voted earlier and succeeded from Canada earlier in the story, it’s believed that some of the other provinces would be willing to apply for U.S. statehood. Once the ball begins rolling, it’s believed that the others would follow suit. Prime Minister Charles Sarveux plans on running for president of Quebec, and once he achieves that he’ll help smooth the process of Quebec joining the United States.
As a whole, Night Probe! is a good story and worthy addition to the Cussler collection. The action is good, the settings are interesting, and the story involving the Manhattan Limited was quite intriguing. The cover of the book is a bit misleading though as the train was never underwater at any point. It was believed to be lying on the bottom of the river, but that was later proven to be false.
One of my problems with Night Probe! was basically the ending where the U.S. president intends to merge the United States and Canada. I was awfully young back in 1981 when the book was published, but such a concept seems was too simple and just unrealistic. Perhaps it would have been a better story if the North American Treaty was for a different agreement instead the outright sale and transfer of ownership of Canada.
The character of Foss Gly, the leader of the Free Quebec Society terrorists was particularly interesting. His use of disguises to impersonate high-ranking people was a little too convenient at times, and it seemed like Cussler killed such an intelligent person too easily. Being a fellow pilot, it seems likely that Foss would have recognized the symptoms of flying too high without oxygen, and he would have ordered the pilot to either land or fly at a lower altitude.
And on a side note, Dirk Pitt “dies” twice in Night Probe!: once when his submersible is accidentally attacked by a U.S. submarine, and again when swimming through the flooded escape tunnel. It’s a little bit annoying when the lead character keeps going to the brink of death several times in a single book. I remember this being a semi-frequent issue with the books that follow Night Probe! in the series. It would be better if Cussler would find more creative ways of making the stories more suspenseful instead of constantly bringing the main character to the brink of death.
But that’s minor stuff. The rest of Night Probe! outshines those issues. Cussler is writing at his peak when he goes into detail of the underwater activities involving the Empress of Ireland ship.
Night Probe! is a worthy addition to Clive Cussler’s novels. Fans of shipwrecks will find it particularly entertaining.
