Free Treasure of Khan by Clive Cussler Page B

azure sky overhead. Removing a thick pair of horn-rimmed glasses, he carefully cleaned the lenses and then peered upward again. Shaking his head, he walked back onto the bridge and muttered, “Sounds like thunder, but there’s hardly a cloud in the sky.”
    A hearty laugh erupted at his words, flowing from a portly man with black hair and matching beard. Dr. Alexander Sarghov resembled a circus bear, his large frame softened by a jovial demeanor and warm ebony eyes that twinkled with life. The geophysicist from the Russian Academy of Sciences Limnological Institute enjoyed a good laugh, especially if it was at the expense of his newfound American friends.
    â€œYou Westerners are very amusing,” he chuckled in a heavily accented voice.
    â€œAlexander, you’ll have to excuse Rudi,” answered a warm, deep voice from the opposite side of the bridge. “He’s never lived in an earthquake zone.”
    The green opaline eyes of Dirk Pitt sparkled with mirth as he helped heckle his deputy. The head of the National Underwater and Marine Agency stood up from a bank of video monitors and stretched his six-foot-three frame, his palms scraping against the deckhead. Though more than two decades of undersea adventures had exacted a toll on his rugged body, he still had a lean and fit form. Just a few more wrinkles around the eyes and a growing tussle of gray at the temples indicated a wavering battle with age.
    â€œAn earthquake?” Gunn speculated. The brainy deputy director of NUMA, an Annapolis graduate and former Navy commander, stared out the bridge in wonder.
    â€œI’ve only been in one or two, but those were felt and not heard.”
    â€œPuny ones just rattle the dishes, but larger quakes can sound like a string of locomotives running by,” Pitt said.
    â€œThere is a great deal of tectonic activity under Lake Baikal,” Sarghov added. “Earthquakes occur frequently in this region.”
    â€œPersonally, I can do without them,” Gunn said sheepishly, retaining his seat by the monitor bank. “I hope they don’t disrupt our data collection of the lake’s currents.”
    The Vereshchagin was engaged in a joint Russian-American scientific survey of Lake Baikal’s uncharted current flows. Not one to stay confined in NUMA’s Washington headquarters, Pitt was leading a small team from the government research agency in collaboration with local scientists from the Limnological Institute at Irkutsk. The Russians provided the ship and crew, while the Americans provided high-tech sonobuoys and monitoring equipment which would be used to paint a three-dimensional image of the lake and its currents. The great depth of Lake Baikal was known to create unique water-circulation patterns that often behaved unpredictably. Tales of swirling vortexes and fishing boats getting pulled underwater by their nets were common stories among the local lakeside communities.
    Starting at the northern tip of the lake, the scientific team had deployed dozens of tiny sensors, packaged in orange colored pods that were ballasted to drift at varying depths. Constantly measuring temperature, pressure, and position, the pods relayed the data instantaneously to a series of large underwater transponders that were positioned in fixed locations. Computers onboard the Vereshchagin processed the data from the transponders, displaying the results in 3-D graphic images. Gunn glanced at a bank of the monitors in front of his seat, then focused on one in particular, which depicted the midsection of the lake. The image resembled a pack of orange marbles floating in a bowl of blue ice cream. Nearly in unison, a vertical string of the orange balls suddenly jumped rapidly toward the top edge of the screen.
    â€œWhoa! Either one of our transponders is going tilt or there’s a significant disturbance at the bottom of the lake,” he blurted.
    Pitt and Sarghov turned and studied the monitor,