"01 - Pacific Vortex!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cussler Clive)

"Sir, we seem to have some strange readings here."

"Nothing like a mystery to end the day," Dupree replied good-naturedly.

He moved between the two men and stared down at a sheet of finely printed chart paper illuminated by a soft light from the frosted glass tabletop. A series of short dark lines crisscrossed the chart, edged with carelessly written notations and mathematical formulas.

"What have you got?" Dupree asked.

The navigator began slowly. "The bottom is raising

at an astonishing rate. It it doesn't peak out in the next twenty-five miles, we're going to find ourselves rubbing noses with an island, or islands, that aren't supposed to exist."

"What's our position?"

"We're here, sir," the navigator answered, tapping his pencil at a point on the chart. "Six hundred seventy miles north of Kahuku Point, Oahu, bearing zero-zero-seven degrees."

Dupree swung to a control panel and switched on a microphone. "Radar, this is the captain. Do you have anything?"

"No, sir," a voice replied mechanically through the speaker. "The scope is clear... wait... correction, Captain. I have a vague reading on the horizon at twenty-three miles, dead ahead."

"An object?"

"No, sir. More like a low cloud. Or maybe a trail of smoke; I can't quite make it out."

"Okay, report when you confirm its identity." Dupree hung up the microphone and faced the men at the plot table. "Well, gentlemen, how do you read it?"

The Executive Officer shook his head. "Where there's smoke, there's fire. And where there's fire, something's got to be burning. An oil slick, possibly?"

"An oil slick from what?" Dupree asked impatiently. "We're nowhere near the northern shipping lanes. The San Francisco to Honolulu to Orient traffic is four hundred miles south. This is one of the deadest spots in die ocean; that's why the Navy picked it for the Starbuck's initial tests. No prying eyes." He shook his head. "A burning oil slick doesn't fit. A new volcano rising from the Pacific floor would be a closer guess. And that's all it would beЧa guess."

The navigator pinpointed the radar's fix and drew a circle on the chart. "A low cloud on or near the surface," he thought out loud. "Highly unlikely. Atmospheric conditions are all wrong for such an occurrence."

The speaker clicked on. "Captain, this is radar."

"This is the captain," Dupree answered.

"I've identified it, sir." The voice seemed to hesitate before it went on. "The contact reads as a heavy bank of fog, approximately three miles in diameter."

"Are you positive?^

"Stake my rating on it."

Dupree touched a switch on the microphone and rang the bridge. "Lieutenant, we have a radar sighting ahead. Let me know the minute you see anything." He rang off and turned to the Executive Officer. "What's the depth now?"

"Still coming up fast. Twenty-eight hundred feet and climbing."

The navigator pulled a cotton handkerchief from bis hip pocket and dabbed it to his neck. "Beats the hell out of me. The only rise I've heard of that comes close to this one is the Peru-Chili Trench. Beginning at twenty-five thousand feet beneath the surface of the sea, it climbs at a rate of one vertical mile for every one horizontal mile. Until now, it was considered the world's most spectacular underwater slope."

"Yeah," the Executive Officer grunted. "Won't marine geologists have a ball with this little discovery?"