Into the Abyss (Tom Swift, Young Inventor) by Victor Appleton

and I also had a pretty good idea of what my dad had been trying to say. The sub had been caught in an underwater avalanche, and he was trying to maneuver it away from danger!
    “Dad! Dad, do you read me!” I tried once more.
    This time only static answered me.
    “Any live video coming through?” I asked.
    “Nothing,” Bud said.
    “Do we have a location for the sub, Dr. Fletcher?”
    She started checking her readouts. “Yes, here we are,” she said.
    “What if they’re trapped down there? What are we going to do?”
    I could hear the panic in my own voice. I knew I had to calm down—and fast—if I wanted to help save my father.
    Dr. Fletcher looked at me and shook her head. “It was a six-point-five on the Richter scale, Tom. This was the quake your father was trying to warn people about. It could spawn tsunamis all along the East Coast!”
    Dr. Fletcher bent over her shortwave radio. “Coast Guard, this is research ship
Nestor
, off the Turner Seamounts. Come in, please!”
    “Coast Guard monitor zero-one-five-four-nine, go ahead,
Nestor
.”
    “Reporting an undersea quake, magnitude six-point-five. Tsunamis possible. Please alert all appropriate authorities to spread the alarm!”
    “Are you sure,
Nestor
?”
    “Affirmative!”
    “All right, we’ll get right on it. Can you give us your exact position, please?”
    I couldn’t breathe. I felt as if the weight of fifteen thousand feet of ocean water was pressing down on my chest. I needed to get up on deck … needed some fresh air …
    “Hey,” Bud stopped me at the door. “If it was such a big earthquake, how come we didn’t feel anything?”
    He was right. The boat hadn’t even rocked.
    Suddenly—but right on cue—we were all knocked to the floor as a violent wave hit the
Nestor
head-on!
    The lights blacked out, along with every monitor in the control room. Luckily, the emergency lightskicked in immediately, allowing us to find our way out of the control room and up the stairs.
    “Wait here until I make sure it’s safe,” I told Bud and Yo as we reached the open hatch. I stepped through it and inched my way carefully out onto the deck, making sure I had a firm handhold at all times.
    It was a gorgeous, sunny day, but the ocean, which had been so calm just an hour ago, was churning madly. It looked like a washing machine in the spin cycle. The
Nestor
was being tossed around in circles, first this way, then that.
    Yo, Bud, and I grabbed onto anything sturdy we could find. This was not the usual pitch and roll—the kind we’d had yesterday, the kind that had made Yo so seasick. This was something entirely different, and totally weird.
    And next something even weirder happened. The
Nestor
suddenly rose up, riding on the crest of a huge wall of water.
    She paused at the height of the wave, suspended for an instant, then sank back down so quickly that for a moment, we were all completely weightless.
    I lost hold of whatever I was grabbing onto, andwent spinning across the deck. As I neared the railing, a huge wave crested over the side of the ship.
    It swept me up, over the railing. I plunged into the open sea!

6
 
  Castaway
    I was underwater. I’d swallowed a ton of seawater. Panic took over and I thought,
I’m definitely going to die.
    Then, my survival instinct took over. I flailed my arms until I broke the surface. I sucked in as much air as I could, kicking like crazy. I coughed up seawater, gasped for more air, coughed some more, and so on—until finally, I just had to float on my back for a minute or two, until my breathing could return to normal, and my heart could calm way down.
    When my panic started to ease, I let myself go upright again. Treading water, I looked around for the
Nestor
.

    She was quickly fading into the distance! My heart sank.
    Didn’t they know I’d been washed overboard?
    My panic returned in an instant, my chest pounding so hard I thought it would burst. I went back to floating on my back, my arms and legs