MYSTERY MILLIONAIRE 109
“Pirated?” Arv Hanson echoed. “Do you mean that a submarine made off with the liner underwater?”
110 AQUATOMIC TRACKER
Tom nodded quietly. “Yes, and that’s why we were unable to find her. I believe the Centurion was towed away on this course.”
“But how could a sub tow a sinking ship?” Bud asked. “How could it even attach a towline?”
“After the bomb exploded, the Centurion’s skipper tried to control the damage by rigging collision mats over the hole in the hull and closing certain watertight doors belowdecks,” Tom replied. “She wallowed for a while before she went down. That would have given the sub time to send out frogmen to attach a towline-or maybe some kind of magnetic grappling device.”
Tom added that this would also explain the Sea Hound’s gyrations and the tracker’s failure on their first attempt to trail the Centurion.
“The liner would still have some buoyancy due to entrapped air, since the water pressure at this depth probably wouldn’t rupture her inner compartmentation. She wouldn’t be too hard to tow underwater, except that she’d bob and weave around on her towline like a crazy pendulum till they got going. That’s what confused our tracking detectors-and also the fact that the submarine’s propeller wake stirred up the trace pattern even worse.”
The Sea Hound plowed rapidly along on a southwesterly course. Some time later a mountainous undersea formation became visible dead ahead.
MYSTERY MILLIONAIRE 111
“It’s the guyot where we saw those lights 1” Bud called out.