Rereading these books, I’ve been surprised which stories I’ve remembered and which ones I’ve forgotten. Raise the Titanic! (1976, USA), Vixen 03 (1978, USA) and Night Probe! (1981, USA) had stuck in memory. But not Deep Six (1984, USA), or this one, Cyclops (1986, USA). I’d completely forgotten, for example, that Cyclops is chiefly about a secret base on the Moon the US has been operating for over a decade. You’d think you’d remember something like that in a novel.

The formula for the Dirk Pitt novels was beginning to settle by Cyclops, the eighth in the series. Open with an historical mystery, typically a ship that vanished without trace. Hint at a great treasure, or a great threat. Add a present-day geopolitical threat to the US which requires the president to get involved. Pitt is dragged in by accident, or bad luck. Tie the mystery and the present-day threat together, and resolve both.

The title refers to a US Navy Auxiliary ship which disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in 1912 (Cussler never mentions the Bermuda Triangle, however). In 1989, a US millionaire goes searching for the wreck from an airship. He and his crew vanish. A full-scale search fails to find him or the airship. A few weeks later, while Dirk Pitt is working in Florida, the airship reappears. Pitt manages to stop it before it crashes into a hotel and burns. Onboard are three dead bodies – strangers, not the missing three men.

Meanwhile, the US has been running a secret Moon base programme for years. It’s so secret not even the president knows about it. Also meanwhile, Castro is making secret overtures to the Americans – because the USSR wants to take over Cuba, and he’s not happy about that.

Pitt, Giordino, Gunn, and the wife of the missing millionaire re-enact the airship’s hunt for the Cyclops, to discover what happened to the missing men. The Cuban military shoots them down, but they still find the wreck, But then they’re washed ashore on an uninhabited island. Which isn’t uninhabited. There’s a secret Soviet base on it, with a hidden radio dish that allows it to eavesdrop, and interfere, with all radio traffic in the US.

All three plots collide as Pitt blunders about, somehow managing to defy the odds – and physics, and human strength and endurance – and scupper the villains. The Soviet leadership are all nasty horrible venal people, much like the present-day US leadership, and Putin, of course. The Moon base colonists are all engineers and scientists, but they manage to defeat a squad of Soviet special forces. Pitt discovers the secret of the Cyclops – a mysterious and incalculably valuable statue it was carrying, but which isn’t in the wreck.

It all comes to an explosive head when the USSR triggers its plan to oust Castro by detonating a nuclear bomb in Havana. Except it’s not an atom bomb, although just as devastating. Pitt prevents the worst of it happening, but doesn’t entirely stop it. The results drive Castro straight into the arms of the US.

And then Pitt finds the missing statue.

The writing is bad, of course; but the formula actually works quite well in this one. And Cussler has now added Cuba to the US, after adding Canada in an earlier book. And there’s a US base on the Moon too, currently unoccupied, as the astronauts have returned home– oh wait, I forgot to mention the Soviets seized remote control of the Space Shuttle bringing the astronauts back to Earth and tried to crash it, but Pitt managed to destroy the secret Soviet base with the radio dish in time…

I’ve known from the start these books follow a downward path after Raise the Titanic!, but one or two have surprised me by not actually being as bad as I’d expected. To be fair, my expectations were really low. We shall have to see how the next book in the series fares.