Treasure of Khan dp-19 Page 11

  The captain nodded with reluctant acceptance. "Yes, we must locate my friend Alexander. I am afraid we will have to wait for a police dive team to give us the answer."

  "I don't think you'll have to wait that long, Captain," Pitt said, nodding toward an approaching figure.

  Fifty yards away, Al Giordino marched along the waterfront toward the two men, toting a red-handled pair of bolt cutters over his shoulder.

  "Found these at a garage sale in town," Giordino said, hoisting the bolt cutters off his shoulder. The long handles stretched half his height from the ground to his waist.

  "Should allow us access to the verboten portions of the ship," Pitt said.

  "You? You will investigate the damage?" Kharitonov asked, surprised at the Americans' initiative.

  "We need to find out if Alexander and the others are still aboard," Giordino said with a stern look.

  "Whoever tried to sink your vessel may have had an interest in halting our research project," Pitt added.

  "If so, I'd like to find out why. Our dive gear is stowed in the forward hold, so we have access to all of our equipment."

  "It may not be safe," Kharitonov cautioned.

  "The only difficult part will be to convince Al to dive before breakfast," Pitt said, trying to lighten the morbid task at hand.

  "I have it on good authority that the local IHOP is having an all-you-can-eat special on sturgeon pancakes," Giordino replied with a raised brow.

  "We'll just have to hope they don't run out."

  Gunn joined Pitt and Giordino as they motored up to the grounded ship in a borrowed Zodiac. Climbing the sloped deck to the forward hold, Gunn lent a hand as the two men pulled on black dry suits and weight belts, then hooked up the lightweight rebreather systems. Before they pulled on their faceplates, Gunn pointed a finger up toward the deckhead.

  "I'm going to check the computers up in the bridge and get an update on regional seismic activity. Don't run off with any mermaids without me," he said.

  "They'd be too blue to swim in this frigid water anyway," Giordino grunted.

  Foregoing fins, the two men trudged down the deck in the rubber-soled feet of their dry suits and waded into the water. When the water level reached his shoulders, Pitt reached up and flicked on a small light strapped to his head, then ducked underwater. A starboard side stairwell was just a few feet ahead and Pitt walked toward it like Frankenstein's monster, plodding slowly against the water's resistance. A bouncing beam of light to his rear told him Giordino was following just a few feet behind.

  Dropping down the stairs in a series of hops, Pitt passed the lower cabin level and continued down to the poop deck and engine room. Distancing himself from the surface daylight, a cloud of darkness quickly enshrouded him. The water itself was as clear as a swimming pool, though, and Pitt's small headlight cut a bright white path through the gloom. With negative buoyancy, it was easier to walk than swim and he moon-hopped his way to the starboard engine-room hatchway. As the chief engineer had reported, the heavy steel door was sealed closed. An old, rusty chain was wrapped around the latch and fastened to the bulkhead, locking the hatch shut. Pitt noted that a gold-colored padlock, which secured the chain, appeared to be new.

  Pitt watched the glow from Giordino's light illuminate the hatch, then the snips from the bolt cutter slipped in front of him and grasped a link of chain near the padlock. Pitt turned and watched as Giordino cut the link as if cracking a walnut, the Italian's thick arms easily brandishing the cutter. As it sliced through the second half of the link, Pitt unwound the chain and pulled open the hatch, then stepped inside.

  Though the Vereshchagin was more than thirty years old, the engine room was neat and spotless, the hallmark of a meticulous chief engineer. The ship's large diesel generator occupied most of the room, centered in the middle of the bay. Pitt slowly circled the bay, searching for obvious signs of damage to the deck and bulkheads, as well as the engine itself, but none was evident. Only a large steel-grated footplate was out of place, pulled up from the rear deck and left leaning against a tool bin. Peering inside, Pitt recognized it as an opening to the bilge. A four-foot drop led to a crawl space that ran under the enclosed deck. At its base was the curved steel plate of the ship's hull.

  Lowering himself into the hole, Pitt dropped to the hull plate and knelt down, examining the compartment toward the stern. As far as his light would shine, the hull plates appeared smooth and intact. Spinning slowly around, he backed into a metal object as Giordino's light-dispensing head poked into the compartment. Under the beam of Giordino's spotlight, Pitt noticed a thick pipe running forward from the object at his back. Turning to examine the protrusion, he noted Giordino was nodding his head up and down in affirmation.

  The object was a squat valve that rose a foot above the trailing pipe. Adjacent to it was a small red placard that proclaimed in bold white letters PREDOSTEREZHENIYE!, which Pitt could only assume meant "Caution!" Pitt placed his gloved hands on the valve and twisted it counterclockwise. The valve wouldn't budge. He then reversed pressure and tried turning it clockwise. The valve turned freely under a light touch until Pitt pushed it to its stops. He glanced at Giordino, who nodded back with a knowing look. It was as simple as that. The valve opened the ship's sea cock, which would flood the bilge—and, ultimately, the entire ship—when opened at sea. Somebody had entered the engine room, opened the sea cock, disabled the bilge pumps, and then sealed off access to the bay. A quick and easy way to sink a ship in the middle of the night.

  Pitt swam out of the bilge compartment and crossed the engine room. On the opposite side, he found an identical grated floor plate, this one properly positioned in the deck. Yanking the grate off, he climbed down and inspected the portside sea cock, finding it too had been turned to the open position. Closing the valve, he reached for the open hand of Giordino, who helped yank him out of the compartment and onto the engine-room deck.

  Half of their objective was complete. They had accessed the engine room and determined the cause of the flooding. But there was still the question of Sarghov, Anatoly, and the missing oil survey team.

  Glancing at his watch, Pitt noted that they had been submerged for nearly thirty minutes. Though they had plenty of air and bottom time left, the cold water was beginning to sap at his bones, despite the insulating dry suit. In his younger days, he would dive nearly oblivious to the cold, but Father Time was offering yet another reminder that he was no longer a kid.

  Shaking off the thought, he led Giordino out of the room, then quickly checked the other flooded compartments around the engine bay. Finding nothing out of sorts, they ascended the stairwell a level to the lower cabin berths. The passageway led amidships then turned fore and aft, with cabins on either side of the hall that extended to the ship's beam.

  With hand gestures, Pitt directed Giordino to check the portside cabins while he searched the starboard berths. Moving aft, he felt like a prowler as he entered the first cabin, which he knew to be Sarghov's.

  Despite being completely submerged, Pitt was surprised to find that the contents of the room had remained largely in place. Only a few sheaves of typewritten papers and sections of a local newspaper drifted lazily about the flooded cabin. Pitt saw a laptop computer sitting open on a desk, its screen long since shorted out from the immersion. A foul-weather jacket, which Sarghov had with him at dinner, was draped over the desk chair. Peeking into the small cabin closet, Pitt found an assortment of Sarghov's shirts and pants hanging neatly on a rack. It was not the reflection of a man who had planned to depart the ship, Pitt observed.

  Exiting Sarghov's cabin, he quickly searched the next three cabins before reaching the final starboard berth. It was the one cabin Gunn had been unable to reach when he searched for the oil survey team.

  Across the passageway, Pitt saw the flickering light from Giordino, who had moved ahead of him and was searching the last port cabin.

  Pitt turned the latch and leaned his body against the door to force it open against the
invisible force of the water. Like the other cabins he searched, its interior appeared orderly, with no obvious disruptions from the flooding. Only, from the doorway, Pitt could see that there was something different about this cabin.

  It still contained its occupant.

  In the restrictive light, it might have been a duffel bag or a couple of pillows lying on the bunk, but Pitt had a feeling otherwise. Taking a step closer, he could see it was a man lying on the bunk, a pale and very dead man at that.

  Pitt slowly approached the prone figure and cautiously leaned over the body, illuminating the corpse with the beam from his spotlight. The open eyes of the surly fishing boat captain stared up at him without blinking, a confused look permanently etched upon the dead man's face. The old fisherman was clad in a T-shirt, and his legs were tucked snugly under the covers. The tight blanket had kept him from floating off the bunk until the air in his lungs had slowly purged.

  Shining his light closely at the fisherman's head, Pitt rubbed a finger across the man's hairline. Two inches above his ear, a slight indentation creased the side of his head. Though the skin had not broken, it was obvious that a heavy blow had cracked the man's skull. Pitt morbidly wondered whether the old fisherman had been done in by the blow itself or had drowned while unconscious when the cabin flooded.

  As Giordino's light suddenly appeared in the doorway, Pitt took a careful look around the floor of the bunk. The carpeted deck was bare. He saw no porcelain pitchers, lead paperweights, or bottles of vodka that could have fallen off a shelf and struck the man by accident. The entire room was bare, a spare cabin given to the fisherman who brought no belongings of his own.

  Pitt took another look at the old man and knew his initial instincts were right. From the first the minute he saw him, Pitt knew the old fisherman had not died by accident. He had been murdered.

  -7-

  "It's gone," Gunn spat, his face flushed with anger. "Someone systematically yanked out our database hardware and disappeared with it. All of our data collection points, everything we've gathered in the last two weeks, it's all gone."

  Gunn continued to fume as he helped Pitt and Giordino out of their dry suits beneath the bridge.

  "What about backups, Rudi?" Pitt asked.

  "That's right. As a good computer geek, I know you save everything on backup disks, probably in triplicate," Giordino admonished as he hung up his dry suit on a hook.

  "Our rack of backup DVDs is missing, too," Gunn cried. "Somebody had an idea of what to take."

  "Our buddy Sarghov?" Giordino asked.

  "I don't think so," Pitt replied. "His cabin didn't have the look of an impending escape artist."

  "I don't understand. The research data would be of value only to the scientific community. We've shared everything with our Russian counterparts. Who would want to steal the information?" Gunn asked, his anguish slowly cooling.

  "Perhaps the intent was not to steal the data. Perhaps they just didn't want us to discover something in the data," Pitt reflected.

  "Could be," Giordino agreed. "Rudi, that means your beloved computer is probably at the bottom of Lake Baikal snagging lures about now."

  "Is that supposed to be a consolation?" he muttered.

  "Don't feel bad. You still made out better than the old fisherman."

  "True. He did lose his boat," Gunn said.

  "He lost more than that," Pitt replied, then told Gunn of the discovery in the cabin.

  "But why murder an old man?" Gunn gasped, shaking his head in disbelief. "And what of the others?

  Were they abducted? Or did they leave willingly, after killing the fisherman and destroying our scientific data?"

  The same questions percolated through Pitt's mind, only there were no answers.

  ***

  By midday, an overhead city utility line was tapped from shore and wired to the Vereshchagin, providing electrical power to the grounded ship and activating the bilge pumps that had been disabled. Auxiliary water pumps were deployed on the aft deck, helping pump dry the flooded compartments under the whine of their attached generators. Slowly but surely, the submerged stern began to creep out of the water at a pace far too sluggish for the few remaining crew members watching from shore.

  Around Listvyanka, residents continued the cleanup from the flood-ravaged waters. The town's celebrated open-air fish market was quickly pieced back together, with several vendors already offering an aromatic assortment of fresh-smoked fish. The sounds of sawing and hammering filled the air as a row of tourist kiosks, taking the brunt of the wave's carnage, were already being rebuilt.

  Word gradually filtered in about other destruction around the lake caused by the quake and wave.

  Extensive property damage had occurred along the southern shores of the lake, but remarkably no loss of life was reported. The Baikalsk paper mill, a landmark facility on the south coast, suffered the most costly damage, its operations forced to close for several weeks while debris was cleared and its flooded structures restored. At the opposite end of the lake, there were reports that the earthquake had severely damaged the Taishet-Nakhodka oil pipeline that skirted the northern shore. Ecologists from the Limnological Institute were already en route to assess the potential environmental damage should an oil spill approach the lake.

  Shortly after lunch, Listvyanka's police chief boarded the Vereshchagin, accompanied by two detectives from Irkutsk. The police authorities climbed up to the ship's bridge, where they greeted Captain Kharitonov in a formal manner. The Listvyanka chief, a slovenly man in an ill-fitting uniform, dismissed with a glance the three Americans who sat reconfiguring their computer equipment on the opposite side of the bridge. A self-important bureaucrat impressed with his own power, the chief enjoyed the perquisites, if not the actual work, required of the job. As Kharitonov relayed the missing crewmen and the discovery of the dead fisherman in the flooded cabin below, a flash of anger crossed the chief's face.

  The missing persons and attempted sinking of the Vereshchagin might be explained away as an accident, but a dead body complicated matters. A potential murder would mean extra paperwork and state officials looking over his shoulder. In Listvyanka, the occasional stolen bicycle or barroom brawl was the extent of his normal criminal dealings, and that was the way he preferred it.

  "Nonsense," he retorted in a gravelly voice. "I knew Belikov well. He was a drunken old fisherman.

  Drank too much vodka and passed out like an old goat. An unfortunate accident," he casually explained away.

  "Then what about the disappearance of the two crewmen and the survey team that was rescued with the fisherman, as well as the attempted sinking of my ship?" Captain Kharitonov added with rising anger.

  "Ah yes," the police chief replied, "the crew members who opened the sea cocks by mistake. Ashamed of their mechanical error, they have probably fled in embarrassment. They will turn up eventually at one of our fine drinking houses," he said knowingly. Realizing that the two Irkutsk men did not appear to be buying his rationale, he continued. "It will, of course, be necessary to interview the crew and passengers for an official accounting of the incident."

  Pitt turned from the egotistical police chief and studied the two lawmen at his side. The detectives from the Irkutsk City Police Criminal Investigation Division were clearly not cut from the same cloth. They were hardened men who wore suits rather than uniforms and carried concealed weapons. No ordinary beat cops, they had an air of quiet confidence that suggested experience and training derived from someplace other than the local police academy. When the three men began a quick round of inquiries aboard ship, Pitt curiously noted that the Irkutsk men seemed more interested in Sarghov's absence than the missing survey team or the dead fisherman.

  "Who says Boris Badenov isn't alive and well?" Giordino muttered under his breath after a brief interrogation.

  When the interviews were completed, the lawmen returned to the bridge, where the police chief gave Captain Kharitonov a last stern admonition, for effect. The Ve
reshchagin's captain glumly announced that at the direction of the Listvyanka police, all crew members would be required to return to the ship at once, where they were to remain in confinement until the completion of the investigation.

  "They could have at least let us make a beer run first," Giordino moaned.

  "I knew I should have stayed in Washington," Gunn grumbled. "Now we're exiled to Siberia."

  "Washington is a miserable swamp in the summertime anyway," Pitt countered, admiring the panoramic lake view from the bridge window.

  A mile and a half away, he noticed the black freighter that he and Al had flown over the night before.

  The ship had moved ashore and was docked at an undamaged pier at the far end of town, its stern cargo hold being picked at by a large wharf-side crane.

  A pair of binoculars dangled from a hook near the bridge window and Pitt unconsciously pulled them to his eyes while studying the ship. Through the magnified lenses, he saw two large flatbed trucks and a smaller enclosed truck parked on the dock adjacent to the ship. The crane was offloading items onto the trucks, a little unusual in that Listvyanka was primarily an outgoing port that provided goods to the rest of the lakefront communities. Focusing on one of the flatbed trucks, he could see that it held a strange vertically shaped item on a wooden pallet that was wrapped in a canvas tarp.

  "Captain?" he asked of Kharitonov while pointing out the window. "That black freighter. What do you know about her?"

  Captain Kharitonov stepped over and squinted in the direction of the ship. "The Primoski. A longtime scullion on Lake Baikal. For years, she made a regular run from Listvyanka to Baikalskoye in the north, carrying steel and lumber for a rail spur being built up there. When the work was completed last year, she sat dead at her moorings for several months. Last I heard she was under short-term lease to an oil company. They brought in their own men to sail her, which upset her old crew. I do not know what they're using her for, probably to transport pipeline equipment."