"And I bet he doesn't know who's buried in Grant's tomb, either," Giordino said.
"Did he happen to reveal his ship's manifest?" Pitt asked.
"Why, yes," Kharitonov replied. "They are transporting agricultural equipment and tractor components from Irkutsk to Baikalskoye."
-8-
The rookie policeman tasked with ensuring that no one left the ship quickly grew bored with his assignment. Pacing the shore tirelessly a few yards from where the Vereshchagin's bow had ground into the lake bed, he had alertly monitored the vessel as the sun went down. But as the evening hour waned without event, his attention began to wander. Loud thumping noises from a bar up the street gradually seized his senses and it wasn't long before he had swiveled around to face the bar's entrance, hoping to catch sight of an attractive tourist or college coed visiting from Irkutsk.
Sufficiently distracted, he had almost no chance of spotting two men dressed in black who quietly slid a small Zodiac over the Vereshchagin's stern rail, then silently dropped themselves into the rubber boat.
Pitt and Giordino eased the Zodiac away from the Vereshchagin, careful to keep the research ship between them and the shore guard.
"A couple of nice friendly drinking establishments are just a short paddle away, and you want to take us on a fishing expedition," Giordino whispered.
"Overpriced tourist traps that hawk warm beer and stale pretzels," Pitt countered.
"Alas, a warm beer is still better than no beer," he replied poetically.
Though they quickly melted into the dark night, Pitt had them row almost a mile from shore before pulling on the starter rope to the boat's 25-horsepower outboard motor. The small engine quickly coughed to life, and Pitt turned the boat parallel to shore as they putted forward at slow speed. Once the boat was moving, Giordino lifted a three-foot-long sonar towfish from the floorboard and slipped it over the side, feeding it out to nearly the full length of its hundred-meter electronic tow cable. Securing the line to the gunwale, he flipped open a laptop computer and initiated the side-scan sonar's operating software.
Within minutes, a yellow-tinted image of the lake bed began scrolling down the screen.
"The picture show has started," Giordino announced, "featuring an undulating sandy bottom one hundred seventy feet deep."
Pitt continued running the boat parallel to shore until he was even with the black freighter. He held his course for another quarter mile before turning the Zodiac around and running back in the opposite direction, a few dozen meters farther into the lake.
"The Primorski looked to be parked in this neighborhood when we flew over her last night," Pitt said, waving an arm toward the southeast. His eyes turned and studied the landmarks on shore to the north, which he tried to recall sighting from the helicopter.
Giordino nodded. "I agree, we should be in the ballpark."
Pitt pulled a compass from his pocket and took a heading, then set it on the bench in front of him.
Tracking the bearing with the occasional flash of a penlight, he held a steady course until he passed a half mile in the other direction, then turned and backtracked again farther to the south. For the next hour, they continued the search, moving farther offshore as Giordino monitored the bottom contours on the laptop computer.
Pitt turned his eyes to shore, preparing to turn at the end of an imaginary lane when Giordino said, "Got something."
Pitt held his course, leaning forward to examine the image on the laptop. A dark linear object began scrolling down the screen, followed by another thin line that angled toward it. The image slowly evolved into a large A shape that had grown a few additional cross-members.
"Length is about forty feet," Giordino said. "Sure looks like the structure we saw sitting on the poop deck of the Primorski last night. Shame on them for littering the lake."
"Shame on them, indeed," Pitt replied, staring off toward the black freighter. "The question is, my dear Watson, why?"
When Pitt leaned over and shut off the outboard motor, Giordino knew they were going to seek the answer. Something had bothered Pitt about the black freighter the first time he saw it. Finding out it was leased by the Avarga Oil Consortium had just sealed the deal. He had little doubt that there must be some connection to the ship and the disappearance of Sarghov and the oil survey team. As he studied the ship from afar, Giordino quickly pulled in the sonar fish and closed the laptop computer, then retrieved the oars for the rowing ahead of them.
The Primorski sat dark and quiet at its still berth near the end of the village waterfront. The large trucks were still parked on the adjacent pier, the two flatbed rigs loaded with their concealed cargo. A tall chain-link fence secured the dock from passing villagers and was enforced by a pair of security guards lounging in a hut at the entrance. Around the trucks, a couple of men milled about studying a map splayed across one of the fenders, though the ship itself appeared devoid of life.
Pitt and Giordino approached the ship's stern silently, drifting slowly under the shadow of its high fantail.
Pitt reached up and grabbed the freighter's stern mooring line, which ran down to the water, and used it to pull them alongside the dock. As Giordino tied a line around a splintered pylon, Pitt climbed from the Zodiac and crept onto the wooden dock.
The trucks were parked at the opposite end near the ship's bow, but Pitt could still hear the voices of the men wafting across the empty pier. Spotting a pair of rusty oil drums, he crept up and kneeled behind them near the dock's edge. A second later, Giordino silently appeared behind him.
"Empty as a church on Monday," Giordino whispered, eyeing the ghostly quiet ship.
"Yes, a little too peaceful."
Pitt peered around the drums and spied a gangway at the far end that ran up to the ship's forward hold.
He then studied the freighter's side deck railing, which stood eight feet above the dock.
"Gangplank might be too grand an entrance," he whispered to Giordino. "I think we can step over from these," he said, pointing to the drums.
Pitt gingerly rolled one of the drums to the edge of the dock, then climbed on top. Bending his knees, he sprang off the drum and across three feet of water, reaching out and grabbing hold of the ship's lower side railing. He hung there for a second before swinging his body to the side, using the momentum to slip himself through the railing and onto the deck. It was a harder jump for the shorter Giordino, who nearly missed the rail and hung by one hand for a moment until Pitt jerked him aboard.
"Next time, I take the elevator," he muttered.
Catching their breath, they hung to the shadows and examined the silent ship. The freighter was small by oceangoing standards, stretching just over two hundred thirty feet. She was built of the classic cargo ship design, with a central superstructure surrounded by open deck fore and aft. Though her hull was steel, her decks were made of teak and reeked of oil, diesel fuel, and a candy store assortment of chemicals spilled and absorbed into the wood fibers over four decades of use. Pitt surveyed the stern deck, which was dotted with a handful of metal containers congregated near a single hold. Moving silently across the deck, he and Giordino crept toward the shadow of one of the containers, where they stopped and peered into the open stern hold.
The deep bay was stacked at either end with bundles of small-diameter iron pipe. The center of the hold was empty, but even in the darkness, the scarred markings where the feet of the mystery trestle had recently stood was etched into the hold's decking. More intriguing was a six-foot-diameter deck cap that sealed an access hole through the deck at the exact center of the footing markers.