Into the Black

by Sean Ellis

  "You were not coerced," the captain replied defensively, startled at Kismet's vehemence.

  "Like hell we weren't. Boarding of our boat was an act of piracy on the open sea. You pointed your guns at us and made it all too clear that we were your hostages. You seized our luggage, kept us under constant supervision, and probably tried to poison us with that godawful vodka. So don't give me any shit about my illegal gun."

  Severin's face was growing red under the heat of Kismet's accusations. "I was only trying to educate you in the laws of the region. You are correct that I did not afford you the opportunity to declare your possession of the gun. That was an unfortunate oversight on my part. I merely seek now to explain to you why your weapon has been confiscated."

  Kismet did not relent. "I think you're the one about to commit a grave offense. The United Nations has authorized me to carry that gun on my person at all times. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Russia is still part of the UN, right? Permanent membership on the security counsel, if I recall correctly. I'll have to report this of course, up my chain of command and down yours. That snowball is going to have a lot of momentum by the time it lands on your head."

  Severin's eyelid twitched uncontrollably. "My apologies. You are correct of course. I will instruct the quartermaster to return your weapon as soon as we make landfall."

  Kismet took another sip of the vile coffee but said nothing more, dismissing the captain with his body language. Severin bristled but before he could speak, a tinny voice scratched from the intercom, summoning him to the bridge.

  "It seems we have arrived. I suggest you make ready to depart." He stood up and walked toward the exit. "One more thing, Mr. Kismet. Despite your impressive performance last evening, I am unconvinced that you have no ulterior motives. Your official status--" He filled the words with contempt-- "notwithstanding, if you attempt to perpetrate any crime or activity that poses a threat to Russia, her people or her interests, I will be there to stop you. Consider yourself warned."

  Kismet matched Severin's smoldering stare without blinking until at last, the Russian took a backward step through the doorway and closed it between them.

  "Same to you pal," Kismet muttered to the empty air.

  EIGHT

  Kismet gazed out across the water at the silhouette of the Boyevoy. The launch that had shuttled Irene and himself to the modestly industrialized harbor at Poti was a barely discernible speck racing back across the dark water to rejoin its mother ship.

  Their arrival hadn't drawn much attention. During the South Ossetia conflict, Russia had destroyed the Georgian naval base in Poti and established a permanent and arguably illegal military facility of their own. The appearance of Russian warships offshore no longer struck anyone as out of the ordinary. A handful of swarthy, rugged locals paused briefly from their work to gaze at the tired couple that stood on the dock, but after a few exchanges amongst themselves they turned back to their errands, untroubled and unfazed by the presence of strangers.

  Kismet looked over at Irene. She had been cool toward him all day, speaking only occasionally, and only then in reference to what a fool he'd made of himself the previous evening. Her statements were troubling, since it was beginning to look as though she had taken his coarse behavior seriously. Under Severin's watchful eye there had been no opportunity to rectify the situation.

  Despite his earlier assurance, Severin reneged on his promise to return Kismet's Glock, claiming that the quartermaster had misplaced the firearm and would of course be disciplined. The captain had then bidden them farewell, assigning his executive officer the duty of shuttling them ashore. Kismet had made a pretense of thanking Severin for speedy passage, and then climbed down into the launch. Irene had accepted his offer of assistance, but did not relent in her silence. Now that they were safely at their destination, away from Severin and his tricks, it was time to set matters straight.

  "Listen Irene. About what happened last night—" He moved his head, trying to make eye contact with her. She dodged his stare at first, and then faced him squarely, cocking her jaw to one side, her dark eyes blazing with fury. The look pained him. "It was all an act. I was trying to—"

  She looked away suddenly, unable to hold her expression. Uncontrollable laughter bubbled from her lips and she fell against him.

  He caught her in a cautious embrace. "What the hell?"

  Irene continued to laugh. Her rage had slipped away like a paper mask revealing a look of pure delight. "Sorry Nick, but as an actor, you make a hell of a good—well, whatever it is that you do."

  Kismet rolled his eyes. "Christ, Irene. Don't ever do that to me again. I thought you were really mad at me."

  "So did Captain Severin."

  Kismet shook his head in disbelief. He hefted their luggage, one bag in either hand. "Next time give me some kind of signal so I'll know it's just an act."

  "You were really concerned, weren't you?"

  "Well, yes. What I said was pretty crude. I was afraid you'd taken me seriously. I don't want you thinking I'm that sort of guy."

  Her humor subsided, and gave way to perplexity. "I don't understand you Nick. You treat me like a child, yet you claim to care about my feelings. Which is it?"

  Kismet suddenly felt very foolish. He had intended only to apologize for the previous night’s drunken act, but had instead opened an entirely different can of worms. "Can we discuss this later?"

  "Why not?" She stalked off ahead of him, leaving him more troubled than at the start.

  "Wait." He ran to catch her. "Where are you going?"

  "My father's closest friend was a fisherman here. He kept his boat at this pier. I'm looking to see if it's... there it is."

  "Irene, we need to keep a low profile. How do we know we can trust this guy?"

  She dismissed his concern with a wave. "Anatoly's like an uncle. He would never betray us."

  "Maybe not intentionally. But Severin let me know in no uncertain terms that we will be watched. I doubt he would have let us go so easily if he didn't have an informant keeping tabs on us. Maybe it isn't your friend, but you can bet they'll be watching him as well."

  "Anatoly can keep a secret, Nick. I trust him, and you should trust me."

  Kismet frowned. "Let's just tread carefully. Don't tell him everything all at once."

  "I'm sure you'll see that he's trustworthy once you meet him." While they were talking, Irene had continued to lead the way toward a large wooden fishing boat. The craft looked to be about forty-five feet in length, considerably smaller than Achmet's vessel, and whereas the Turk's boat was for hauling cargo across open water, Anatoly's boat was clearly designed and equipped to harvest the sea's bounty closer to port. Heavy nets dangled from overhead booms and were spread out across the deck. A shaggy form was hunched down in their midst, performing some intricate operation on a section of netting.

  "Anatoly Sergeievich!"

  The wooly head swung in their direction, whereupon Anatoly rose to his full height and darted toward them. He moved so swiftly that Kismet was startled into dropping their luggage. He was reaching for his bag, intent upon brandishing his only remaining weapon, the kukri, when the bear of a man swooped Irene up in his arms.

  "Irina!" he roared. "My little Petrovna. You've come home to us."

  It took Kismet only a moment to comprehend that he was witnessing a joyful reunion and not an attack, but his instinctive reaction was understandable. Built like an ox, the fisherman was half a head taller than Kismet and positively towered over the shorter Irene. A bushy black beard and an unruly mop of coarse hair shot through with some gray mostly hid his weathered, craggy face. He reminded Kismet of the pictures he had seen of Karl Marx, the German philosopher that had invented Communism, an image that triggered an admittedly irrational wariness toward the big fisherman.

  Anatoly lowered Irene to the dock. "You've grown up, little one. You are the very image of your beautiful mother."

  "And you seem to have grown even larger," she retorted. "Anatoly,
this is—" She hesitated for an instant—"My fiancé, Nikolai Kristanovich Kismet. Nick, meet Anatoly Sergeievich Grishakov."

  "Greetings to you," the fisherman boomed in Russian.

  Kismet frowned and scratched his head. "I'm sorry, but Irene's only taught me a few phrases of your language. Do you speak English?"

  "Nick." Irene was frowning at him for the deception, but he remained unwilling to invest his trust in the big Russian.

  Anatoly simply laughed. "I speak your tongue, like you speak mine, I think." His accent was heavier than Severin's and true to his claim, his pronunciation was very poor. "But, if it makes you happy, I try. I am pleased to know you, Nikolai Kristanovich."

  Kismet offered a half-hearted smile, and stuck out his hand. Anatoly guffawed yet again, causing the pier to tremble, and then scooped Kismet up in his embrace. Before he could react, the fisherman had kissed him squarely on the mouth and set him back down.

  Kismet resisted an impulse to wipe his lips. The fisherman had already turned back to Irene and launched a barrage of questions in their shared tongue. Before she could answer any of them, Kismet cleared his throat to get her attention. "Dearest, before we get carried away, shouldn't we find a place to settle down for the night?"

  "You will stay with us of course," declared Anatoly.

  "Great," Kismet replied, disingenuously.

  Irene glared at him, but it was Anatoly that answered. "Da. Very good. It is very good to see you again, Irina. We have much catching up."

  As he led the way up from the pier, Irene turned on Kismet, barely restraining her ire. "I thought we agreed to trust him."

  "I didn't agree to any such thing.”

  “Then would you at least trust me?”

  “I trust you.” But I don’t necessarily trust your judgment, he didn’t add. “So tell me about Uncle Anatoly.”

  She sighed and gestured for him to follow her. "Anatoly is Russian. Back in the sixties a lot of Russian men—engineers like my father—came here to develop the area; they built railroads and conducted geological surveys and so forth. And like my father, Anatoly fell in love with a local woman and settled down. It’s a whole different world out here."

  Irene's statement about the Georgian community seemed true enough. Although the harbor had kept up with current industrial technology, the rest of the area appeared to have undergone its last period of urban renewal in the 1940's. The dominant structures at the heart of the city, including a spectacular Neo-Byzantine cathedral, built in 1907 as an homage to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, had more visual appeal than the products of Soviet central planning that made up the balance of the cityscape, but were themselves not much older. Poti might have had a long and storied history, but very little of it had been preserved through the ages.

  Anatoly led them to a mongrelized pick-up truck. He shoved aside the haphazard scattering of fishing gear in the bed to make room for their luggage, and then he eased down onto the bench-style seat in the cab beside Irene. Kismet's sense of having surrendered all control of the situation was even more pronounced than when Severin had taken them aboard the Boyevoy, and in the absence of any real choice in the matter, he climbed inside and shut his door.

  Their Russian host drove them away from the harbor and through the maze of city streets until they eventually passed into a rural area beyond the outskirts. The paved road soon gave way to what seemed like a deeply rutted trail through a forest of deciduous trees, denuded by the onset of winter, where they pulled over in front of a large house on an isolated piece of property. There, they were warmly greeted by Anatoly's wife, a hale Georgian woman whose head barely reached her husband's chest. It was only after what seemed like hours of reunion, during which Kismet sat patiently feeling like a third wheel, that he got a chance to speak to Irene in private.

  "Anatoly was the one who found out my father was in danger," she explained, distilling the revelations her old friend had made in the earlier conversation. "He heard a rumor that the local political officer was going to have the KGB arrest father. He passed along the information, and we fled."

  "Arrest him for what? Was your father outspoken about his political views?"

  She shrugged. "I was a child. I don't remember and he never spoke of it."

  "I wonder how Anatoly avoided trouble for having warned your father."

  "Maybe no one ever realized that he is the one who warned us." Irene's answer was offhand, as if she found his line of questioning irrelevant. "Nick, I'm more concerned about what we're going to do next."

  "We're going to do what we came to do: find your father. The longer we wait, the more likely we'll be exposed to whomever Severin sends to watch us."

  "Where do we start looking?"

  "You told me that your father did his surveying in the mountains," replied Kismet. "I'm betting that's where he'll take Harcourt. We need to narrow down the places where your father might have found those artifacts. I want to figure out exactly where they are before we launch our little rescue expedition."

  "Nick, we can't just hike up into the mountains. They're covered in snow. We'd freeze to death before we even got started."

  "I'm open to suggestions.” When she didn’t offer any, he continued. “I’m counting on you to help narrow the field."

  She sighed resignedly. "Father kept extensive survey maps. One of them will likely pinpoint the site in the mountains where he found those artifacts. Anatoly put all our things in storage; that's where we should start looking."

  Anatoly had indeed stored away all of Petr Chereneyev's belongings and equipment in a dim corner of his cellar. Armed with an old kerosene lamp, they commenced the search right away. As soon as Kismet pulled back the sloping wooden hatch, Irene stepped into the darkness.

  Two indistinct shapes suddenly broke from the shadows and flapped soundlessly up at them. Startled, Irene fell back and lost her grasp on the lantern. Kismet reflexively thrust out his hand and caught the base of the lamp, but a splash of fuel suffocated the wick, plunging them into darkness. An instant later there followed the sound of glass shattering on the steps.

  "Nick, I'm sorry." Irene was breathless from being startled. "Was that the lamp?"

  "Just the chimney." A match flared in his hand and he relit the wick.

  "Why don't you go first?" she suggested.

  Without the glass flute, the lamp burned too rich, polluting the cellar's mildewy air with long tendrils of soot. They ignored this inconvenience and finished the descent without disturbing any other denizens—bats, rats or otherwise.

  The cellar was a monument to one man's lifetime of clutter. There was no distinct pathway leading through it all. Rather, they had to pick their way across the heaps and place their feet on the sturdiest objects where the floor was completely obscured.

  Although Kismet had witnessed the discovery of relics from the ancient world, mysterious devices the purpose of which had died with their creators, he found himself hard pressed to identify half of the objects strewn about on the cellar floor. There was an array of mechanical parts, gears and shafts—no two of which seemed to belong to the same machine. There were sheets of metal, flaky from oxidization and corrosion, and an assortment of heavy lead pipe-fittings. Two pieces of equipment in one corner looked vaguely familiar to Kismet; one was definitely an air compressor fitted with an enormous reservoir tank. The other, which also looked like a compressor, had been augmented with a series of mesh screens. Lying haphazardly atop the former was something resembling a folded up canvas tarpaulin, patched in several places and something else that looked vaguely a copper cooking pot, tinted with a patina of green corrosion. Kismet stared at the collection of items for a moment trying to ascertain what their function had been.

  A makeshift workbench dominated the far wall of the cellar. It was there that Irene found her father's survey maps stored in long plastic tubes that had once been used to protect artillery shells. Kismet climbed over to join her, and together they unrolled the maps. Each one overlapped the
next at the edges, piecing together to detail the topography of several thousand square kilometers from Sevastopol to the shores of the Caspian Sea, and south as far as the mountains of Ararat. Irene thumbed through them and selected the one pertinent to their search.

  The map was divided by a grid, spaced approximately at five-centimeter intervals. Kismet reckoned that the reproduction was on the order of one grid equaling one square kilometer—a standard military scale. Irene pointed out their present location relative to the map. The port community did not actually appear on it, but Kismet recognized the sheltered inlet that formed its harbor. The scope of the map extended out into the sea and contour lines illustrated how the seafloor dropped from only about forty fathoms near the coast to almost a thousand fathoms only a few kilometers offshore. By contrast, the land surface went from sea level to over six thousand meters—the highest peak in the Caucasus and what had been designated the tallest mountain on the European continent, Mt. Elbrus in Russia. The latter was a tricky distinction; the border between Europe and Asia was more an intellectual concept than a physical one. The bottom line however, was that in a linear distance of only about a hundred miles, one could go from sea level to the highest point on the continent. Kerns' surveys evidently had not reached as far as Mt. Elbrus, but the maps showed that his explorations had taken him into the lesser peaks of the Caucasus.

  Some of the squares were marked with numbers and Cyrillic letters; a private code detailing Petr Chereneyev's geological survey of the region. Irene pointed to one area marked by a broad circle near the eastern edge of the map,. A dotted line trailed away from it following a narrow gully that wound a vague course toward the coast.

  "That's a dry riverbed, probably the original course of the Rioni River. My father discovered it shortly after we came here. One theory holds that the name Poti comes from an ancient word for 'gold river.' I'll bet that is where he found the artifacts."