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"Did your Ouija board also tell you the tidal wave and the galleon are little more than folklore?"

"If anyone can smell fact from fiction, it's our friend Dirk Pitt," Sandecker said inflexibly "Nohat have you dug up?"

Yaeger s into various Geographic Inforical site for a ship to rele over four centuries solobal positioning satellites, we can look at details of Central and South A tropical rain forests that grow along the coastline were studied first I quickly disions are deserts with little or no vegetation That still left over a thousand kilo northern Ecuador and alain, I was able to eliy too steep or unfavorable for a ith enough mass and momentum to carry a five-hundred-and-seventy-ton ship any distance overland Then I knocked off another twenty percent for open grassland areas without thick trees or other foliage that could hide the remains of a ship"

"That still leaves Pitt with a search area four hundred kiloth"

"Nature can drastically alter the environ with antiquerecords of changes that occurred in the geology and landscape, I was able to decrease the length of the search grid another hundred and fifty kilometers"

"How did you compare the modern terrain with the old?"

"With three-di or increasing the scale of the old charts toone upon the other, any variations of the coastal jungles since the galleon vanished became readily apparent I found that les had been cut down over the centuries for farmland"

"Not enough," Sandecker said irritably, "not nearly enough You'll have to whittle the grid down to no more than twenty kilometers if y

ou want to give Pitt a fighting chance of finding the wreck"

"Bear with er patiently "The next step was to conduct a search through historical archives for recorded tidal waves that struck the Pacific coastline of South America in the sixteenth century Fortunately, the occasions ell docu the conquest I found four Two in Chile in 1562 and 1575 Peru suffered thealleon"

"Where did the latter strike?" Sandecker asked

"The only account co of a Spanish supply ship on its way to Callao It passed over àcrazy sea' that swept inland toward Bahia de Caraquez in Ecuador Bahia, of course, means bay"

" `Crazy sea' is a good description of water turmoil above an earthquake on the seafloor No doubt a seisenerated by a movement of the fault that parallels the west coast of the entire South American continent"

"The captain also noted that on the return voyage, a village that sat at theinto the bay had vanished"

"There is no question of the date?"