“Maybe we’d better play safe and douse him now.” Bud reached for a fire extinguisher.
“Don’t get fresh, you hombres, jest ‘cause I look so high-styled!” Chow roared indignantly.
Chuckling, Tom took his place at the controls. He and Bud waved a final farewell to the girls
80 AQUATOMIC TRACKER
through the cabin window. Then, after clearing with the tower, Tom gunned the atomic turbines and the Sea Hound zoomed up into the blue.
Soon Land’s End was lost to view and they were jetting over the Atlantic. Bud joked with the crew, but Tom was silent and absorbed as he turned the mystery over and over in his mind.
Why had he been kidnapped in London? Who was the mysterious enemy who had sabotaged his and Bud’s electronic hydrolungs? And where did Tristan Carlow fit into the picture with his threats and his underhanded attempt to discredit the two hydronauts?
“Almost there, aren’t we?” Arv Hanson asked. He was studying a hydrographic chart on which Tom had marked the position of the sinking.
“Just about.” Tom watched the latitude and longitude figures clicking off on the dials of his automatic navigator. Presently he cut the jets and brought the Sea Hound gently down on the water. “Prepare to dive!” As Tom reversed the rotor and eased the control wheel forward, the seacopter plummeted downward into the ocean.
The bright blue-green of the surface waters faded into gray. At a hundred fathoms they were beyond the sunlight zone and descending into the realm of perpetual night. Flickering trails of luminescence marked the passage of strange deep-sea fishes. Tom switched on the search beam.
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