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.