Sibley's Secret

by Frank Perry

just in being Chad’s father; raising a baby wasn’t part of his plan. Fortunately, he had been transferred to a distant precinct when they were married, so they didn’t have to associate on the job after the divorce. He never showed any interest in Chad, which probably influenced Chad’s early choice of friends. She was so grateful when he changed completely after moving east.

  Chad was nineteen now and a freshman at the University of New Hampshire. He was studying engineering and on the dean’s list. He was tall, handsome and thin, like his father, and had grown to appreciate the sacrifices and risks his mother had taken for his benefit. He loved her, but wasn’t overt about it. He was still a free spirit but he stayed within legal limits. He had his mother’s coloring, but was otherwise an image of his father, whom he hadn’t seen, nor had wanted to see, since he was five.

  Kiki smiled as they walked together toward the terminal, even though she dreaded being back in the state.

  Baikal

  Ivan Khakimov skillfully maneuvered the miniature submarine almost twelve hundred feet below the surface of Lake Baikal. His heart pounded hard from anticipation; it seemed to resonate inside the slender steel tube. Outside, the world was total darkness without the powerful external searchlights illuminating the silt-covered bottom.

  This was the location recorded by previous dives where a branch of the Trans-Siberian Railroad was rumored to have fallen through the ice during the harsh winter of 1920. Nobody today knows if the story is true, but legend says that the railroad tracks were laid across meter-thick ice during the October Revolution to expedite materials to the White Army as it suffered repeated defeats from the Reds. Prior dives had reported some evidence of metal structures in this location, elevating confidence that the rumors were true. If so, this expedition, financed privately with millions of rubles from a private consortium, could realize treasure that would give the sponsors a return thousands of times greater than their investments. It would be the largest treasure ever discovered. Ivan had seen some evidence that the legend could be true. The bottom was littered with steel girders. He had to navigate carefully, using the small electric motors, to avoid tangling his umbilical cord as he carefully examined the mounds of silt, looking for rail cars or cargo containers.

  In 1920, after Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated his throne and was subsequently murdered, Admiral Alexander Kolchak was appointed by the Siberian Regional Government to lead the huge regional White Army in opposition to the rebellious Bolsheviks as the Reds gained control. He was, in essence, the chief military opponent against Lenin and the rest of his henchmen. When the Tsar and his entire family were butchered in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg, Admiral Kolchak found himself controlling a large part of the country’s gold reserves, about 1600 tons according to some sources, although no known records could be found. As a loyalist, Kolchak saw it as his duty to protect the treasure, although his motives have been questioned over the years, given the immense wealth within his grasp.

  Most records were destroyed during and after the Russian civil war. After the Bolsheviks took control, the Soviet Government chose to rewrite history and scarcely accounted for the gold remaining in their various vaults, but over 480 tons were known to be missing based on pre-war records. There could be no certainty that the records were complete, of course, but it was highly likely that this state wealth was stolen during the bloody war. Almost all administrators and records were eliminated, leaving it entirely to speculation.

  Admiral Kolchak, as Supreme Leader at the end, would have had the most opportunity to control it. Most of the speculations involve the Trans-Siberian Railroad and Lake Baikal. The gold is rumored to have either been lost falling through the ice in an over-loaded train or when it was being transported by a massive White Army caravan that perished in the minus sixty degree winter freeze, sinking into the lake during the spring thaw. There were other stories too, but these two were the most commonly cited.

  Khakimov was a small, thin man, ideal for the sub’s claustrophobic interior. As an engineer, he had helped design the deep submersible vessel he now piloted in the frigid black depths. He could, in theory, escape if the cables to the surface became entangled with debris under water, but it required severing the lines with an untested mechanism, then blowing water ballast from the exterior tanks using his compressed air reserves. The procedure could only be done once and depended on an unobstructed path to the surface. The effects of rapid depressurization had not been calculated.

  He didn’t worry about it, lying on his belly, peering through the thick viewing port. The submarine didn’t have its manipulation arm installed for this dive; instead, Ivan used its thruster motors to blow silt away from anything that looked interesting. He navigated forward slowly, while the mother ship above attempted to follow, leaving a murky path behind the sub. He spoke into the voice-activated microphone, “Nikolai, are you seeing the bottom?”

  After a brief delay, “Yes, Ivan. I can see more than you with the camera, but do you see any train tracks or wheels?”

  “I do not know. It is so dirty down here. I have seen much bent metal, but it looks more like bridge works than rail. As cold as it is, I expect the rail cars to be preserved, but nothing shaped like that is here.”

  Ivan rolled to his right side and stretched momentarily, fighting the effects of the cold steel surrounding him. He was too old for this. It was dark inside the sub, which made it easier to forget that he was basically inside a steel coffin on life support. “Nikolai?”

  After another brief delay, “What, Ivan?”

  “I think I am feeling the effects of the compressed air now, my throat is dry and my head aches terribly.”

  “You have been on the bottom for almost three hours. You must expect some physiological effects.”

  “I can stay a bit longer.”

  Ivan was in his late fifties. He had spent his career as a mechanical engineer, designing pressure chambers for the Navy, but had only been intermittently employed for years when Nikolai approached him about this project. They’d been friends since university days and were a good complement to each other. Ivan was conservative and analytical. Nikolai studied philosophy and was always dreaming up new schemes. When he brought this one to Ivan, it was a time when the engineer was depressed, without work, and no matter how absurd the idea of treasure hunting seemed, it gave him a chance to be working for a couple years, and he was paid for designing the equipment.

  Now, with frustration growing minute-by-minute, the severity of their situation was overwhelming his logical mind. He might as well stay on the bottom at the end of the next dive. In the beginning when they, as a team, developed the plan to raise money for the expedition, they had to stretch the facts with the sponsors to suit their objectives. The Government had abandoned any support after prior expeditions failed, and there were no more exploration societies or treasure-seeking financiers interested. These earlier expeditions had became widely publicized around the world, fueling frenzy amongst treasure hunters. But the prior expeditions had yielded nothing. So, for financing they had turned to some people Nikolai seemed to know. They were fringe characters, new Russian opportunists who scared Ivan. These were not traditional businessmen. Fear of retribution for failure now weighed heavily on his mind. His headache became more intense.

  Kolchak

  Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak was born in 1874 and died February 7, 1920. He was a pre-revolutionary hero in Russia, honored both as an explorer and naval commander who rose to the highest level in the Imperial Russian Navy. He fought nobly in both the Russo-Japanese War, where the Russian fleet was obliterated, and in the First World War. During the Russian civil war that followed, he established a provisional government in Siberia, ultimately assuming the title of Supreme Ruler and Commander-in-Chief of All Russian Land and Sea Forces, even though he had no battle experience on land.

  His father had been a Major General in the Russian Marines. Being from a military family, Kolchak
graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps in 1894, and had pursued a naval career. Early in his career, he also became an Arctic explorer, completing two expeditions to previously unexplored regions, and earning the highest award of the Russian Geographical Society.

  Kolchak married Sophia Omirova prior to the beginning of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. He was highly decorated for his service during the war. He was wounded after taking command of a shore battery during the Siege of Port Arthur and was taken prisoner by the Japanese, but he was released after a few months, suffering the effects of rheumatoid arthritis. After the war, he received the Golden Sword of St. George with the inscription "For Bravery." In 1910 he joined the Naval General Staff, and in 1912 he was assigned to the Russian Baltic Fleet.

  During the First World War, Kolchak led several dangerous operations, laying mines at strategic German ports. He was promoted to Vice-Admiral in August 1916 and commanded the Black Sea Fleet leading operations against the Ottoman Empire.

  After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Kolchak was removed from command of the fleet, then invited to meet with the Provisional Government, where he described deplorable and demoralized conditions in the Russian