Pacific Vortex!

Pacific Vortex is an adventure novel by the American writer Clive Cussler, published in 1982. It is one of the earliest books about his maritime hero Dirk Pitt.

The submarine Starbuck disappears during sea trials in the Pacific with its full crew and its weapons aboard, leaving no wreckage, no signal and no survivor to explain what happened. Dirk Pitt is a troubleshooter who specialises in work at sea, and the single clue he recovers is the submarine's own log, found in the shark-torn surf off Hawaii; it contains an account of the crew's last days that reads like the journal of a man losing his mind, and the captain's final note places the wreck hundreds of miles from the submarine's last reported position. Following that clue draws Pitt into one of his hardest assignments, and the search turns on what a whirlpool in that part of the ocean actually is.

Cussler's Dirk Pitt books combine underwater salvage, historical puzzles and a hero who is as much at home in a diving suit as in an office, and this is one of the novels that set the pattern.