It wasn’t until Yusuf reached the railing and was peering through the four feet of space separating him from his two visitors that he finally recognized Arkin Kamsin. He gave a toothless smile, and the two men began speaking in Uzbek. Cabrillo knew how things worked in this part of the world and waited patiently while they went through the longish greeting custom, asking about family, presuming either man had any, commenting on the weather, recent town gossip, and the like.
Ten desultory minutes passed before Juan detected a change in the conversation’s tone. Now they were discussing Cabrillo and his reasons for being here. Occasionally, Yusuf would glance his way, his withered face as blank as a cipher’s.
At last Arkin turned to Cabrillo. “Yusuf says he is willing to help but he himself isn’t certain what had so interested Karl.”
“Did you mention the eerie boat?”
“I did.”
“Please ask him again.”
So Kamsin interrogated the old man further. Yusuf kept shaking his head and holding out his empty palms. He knew nothing, and Juan began to see that this trip had been a complete waste of time. He wondered if somehow his meaning was being lost in the translation. He was well versed in interrogation techniques and knew how to draw details out of the dimmest memories, but without being able to speak Uzbek, he was powerless. And then it hit him, and for a moment he was back aboard the Oregon, cradling Yuri Borodin as he uttered his last words.
He’d spoken in English.
“Eerie boat,” Juan said in the same language. Yusuf shot him a blank look. “Eerie lodka,” he said, this time using the Russian word for “boat.”
All of a sudden that toothless grin was back, and his one good eye glittered piratically. “Da. Da. Eerie lodka.” He turned back to Kamsin and unleashed a long monologue in Uzbek. This time, his skinny arms waved around as though he were being swarmed by wasps, the tip of his walking stick arcing dangerously close to his two guests.
Arkin finally was able to translate the verbal onslaught. “The eerie boat is out on the Aral Sea, a hulk like all the rest, but Karl told Yusuf that there was something special about it, something ‘magical,’ is how he described it. It was a couple of days after they explored the wreck that Karl made his request to go to Moscow.”
Cabrillo asked, “Can Yusuf show it to me?”
“Yes. He said if you two left at first light, you can reach it by the afternoon.”
Juan wasn’t keen on roughing it out in the desert, but he realized that there was no help for it. He had a counterproposal and asked through Kamsin if they could leave now and camp on the way. The old man seemed reluctant until Juan pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket. Yusuf’s one good eye lit up again, and he nodded until Juan thought his head might roll off his scrawny neck.
Twenty minutes later, with Arkin’s help getting provisions, which included a fifth of what passed for premium vodka in these parts and which set Cabrillo back the equivalent of eighty cents, the two of them drove out across a wasteland that had once been the bottom of a lake, a wake of dust, not water, boiling into the air behind them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
As the name implies, the Aral Sea, the “Sea of Islands,” once had thousands that dotted its windswept waves. Today, they poked up from what had once been the seafloor like mesas in the American Southwest, lonely sentinels on an otherwise desolate plain. After a near-sleepless night in which the temperatures plunged into the forties and Cabrillo was forced to wedge himself into the rear cargo area because Yusuf had passed out in the backseat, the empty vodka bottle clutched in a bird-like claw, they were up again shortly after the sun.
Yusuf navigated using his vast knowledge of the islands. He had been a fisherman as the water levels ebbed and recognized the shape of each one even now as he had to look up at them from their very bases. As they passed each former island, he would point to a new heading, as sure of himself as if he were reading a map and consulting a compass. There was no need for GPS in your own backyard, and for sixty-plus years all of the Aral Sea had been the old fisherman’s domain.
Again, Juan was struck by the surrealism of their situation each time they drove by what remained of a sunken ship. Often they would be surrounded by debris fields of fishing gear and kitchen utensils. One wreck was a car ferry, and, judging by the shapes of the rusted-out cars still atop her deck and strewn around her keel, she had sunk sometime in the 1960s or ’70s. The vehicles had that boxy, no-frills utilitarianism that the Soviets so coveted. Yusuf pointed out that they should go slower, so Cabrillo guided their UAZ until they were abreast of one particular car, a sedan that had once been tan but now showed more rust than anything else. Its tires were deflated puddles around each wheel, though remarkably all the glass was still intact.
Yusuf swung his skinny body out of the SUV and indicated Juan should follow. Not knowing the old man’s interest, Cabrillo moved cautiously, scanning the distant horizon and the hump of what had once been an island a mile to the west. Out here, the bitter taste of salt swirled up by the wind was even harsher than it had been back in Muynak. He took a pull from a water bottle before leaving the truck and had to spit out the first mouthful. It tasted of the ocean. The second was brackish, and it was only the third swig that tasted fresh.
The old Uzbek stood next to the sedan’s driver’s-side window. He’d used the sleeve of his robe to clear a small opening in the dust that crusted the car and peer inside. He was motionless for a minute before gesturing for Juan to take his place. Juan felt a chill of superstitious dread climb his spine. He pressed his face to the hot glass. Enough light filtered through the filthy windshield for him to see the remnants of a body laid out on the passenger seat. Not much was left but bits of cloth and bleached white bones. The skull remained intact but was at such an angle he could only see the rounded hump of its occipital lobe.
Cabrillo shot Yusuf a questioning glance. He said something in his native language and then dredged up the Russian word. “Brother.”
Juan grunted, thinking what it must have been like to lose a brother at sea only to find his body years later as the waters that had claimed him slowly evaporated to nothing. He wondered too why Yusuf hadn’t given the remains a proper Muslim burial but realized that this had been his tomb for decades and to disturb him now would be a sacrilege. There were no words he could say, so he gave the old man’s bony shoulder a squeeze and walked back to their idling truck. Yusuf joined him a minute later, giving his brother what Cabrillo sensed was one last long look, and pointed off to the north.
For six more hours, as the temperature climbed and the sun beat down harder and harder, they pinballed their way toward their destination, zigging and zagging from one island to the next as they followed the map Yusuf carried in his head. At least once an hour they had to shut down the UAZ and let the engine cool. At one such stop, Cabrillo prudently added a gallon of water to the radiator at the same time he topped up the gas tank from the spares they carried.
Of course he couldn’t understand a word of what Yusuf said as they drove along, but the old man kept up a running monologue. He could only assume the Uzbek was recounting stories of fishing trips he had taken to the spots off the islands they passed. He pointed out a great depression in the ground that had once been an undersea trench. At its bottom were dozens of rocks, and fanning away from them were the remains of countless large fishing nets spread across the ground like fallen spiderwebs.
Yusuf spoke passionately about the spot, his voice terse with anger until he couldn’t help himself, gave one final curse and spat. Juan understood that he must have lost more than one trawling net to the trench’s traitorous bottom. He couldn’t help but smile. Yusuf caught the grin, and his scowl deepened until he too saw the lunacy of blaming unseen rocks for lost catches from so long ago.
The laugh they shared was bittersweet at the prospect that no fisherman would ever lose a net there again.
The desert stretched forever.
A little past noon, a shape starte
d to form on the horizon, shimmering out of the desert heat. Beyond it was another island, a palisade of rock that rose sheer and vertical like the walls of a fortress. As they drew nearer, the image resolved itself from an amorphous lump on the desert floor to yet another ship, this one a little larger than the typical fishing boats they’d stumbled upon, though smaller than the car ferry. Judging by its condition, it was older than many others too. The sea had been given much more time to erode steel, and the underwater creatures had had plenty of time to eat their way through the ship’s wooden decking. Yusuf thrust a crooked finger at the derelict with finality.
“Eerie lodka?” Juan asked.
“Da.”
Cabrillo swung the truck until it was parallel to the old ship, which he judged to be a hundred feet in length and quite beamy. She would have handled the seas well, and he wondered what had sunk her. The island was close enough that on a moonless night a careless navigator could have slammed into a rock peaking above the surface and holed the hull.
This side showed no such damage. Some plates were buckled from when she hit the seafloor, but that was all. She had the remains of an A-frame crane over her rear deck and a sloping stern that would have allowed her to deploy and then reship her nets. The bridge was a glassless cube hunched over the bows, the open window frames like mouths caught in a terrible scream.
Juan killed the UAZ’s engine and stepped to the ground. At his foot, embedded in the salt and dust, was a ceramic coffee cup, a substantial piece of pottery befitting the harsh life aboard a fishing boat and the big hands of the men who worked her.
Yusuf joined Cabrillo, and together they walked around the ship, inspecting its hull. On the far side, Juan saw the evidence he thought he would, a long gash below the waterline that ran for nearly a third the ship’s length. She had hit some rocks near the island, and this amount of damage would have capsized her in moments. It might have been possible that some of the crew managed to swim to the island a quarter mile distant. It all depended on the weather. A rough sea would have crushed them against the unforgiving stone.
The old Uzbek suddenly threw up his hands and made a strangling sound in his throat. He jerked a thumb at the fishing boat. “Nyet eerie lodka.”
He pointed to a long depression in the ground a hundred yards farther on. Like some mythical monster climbing out of the earth, the remains of another ship looked like they were rising from the shallow trench as though the rim was a wave and the vessel was struggling to crest it. “Eerie lodka,” Yusuf announced.
This one looked to be much older than the ship behind them. Her length was impossible to determine because only her first thirty or so feet rose above the lip of the trench. She was narrow in the beam. She had a good amount of foredeck, which was surprising for a fishing boat since all the work took place at the stern, and her superstructure looked more befitting a yacht than a commercial vessel.
Rather than circle back around to the truck, Cabrillo strode across the desert toward the other ship. Yusuf trailed him, using his walking stick to steady his uneven gait.
The old ship had a sharp prow and dual anchors still tucked tight against their hawseholes. Her entire skin was of a uniform rust color, not a fleck of her original paint remained. Juan reached the edge of the ravine and looked down. Her single funnel rose out of the sand ten feet from where her hull disappeared into it, the metal flakey from erosion. Using the funnel as a reference, Cabrillo guessed she was about seventy feet long in total. She had the straight vertical lines of a ship much older than the nearby fishing boat. She reminded him of a turn-of-the-century luxury cruiser, something out of the end of the Victorian age.
This wasn’t the workboat of the local fishing industry or a ferry to bustle peasants across the Aral. This was a rich man’s toy, perhaps belonging to a member of the old royal family who vacationed along the inland sea’s shores. But that made little sense. Why would the tsar and tsarina want to vacation in this backwater of their kingdom?
A local oligarch? Someone from before the revolution who made a pile of money and had the ship built on the Aral? The boat was much too big to have been transported here whole, even by rail, and there were no oligarchs left after the Bolsheviks were finished.
Juan suddenly saw this ship as an anomaly. There was something to her presence here that had piqued Karl Petrovski’s interest, and he felt it too. This wasn’t the type of vessel to be plying these waters. He looked around at his surroundings. She shouldn’t be here in a desert either, he thought.
The ship’s bow was undamaged, so he had to assume that whatever had sunk her showed up in the parts of the hull that the sands had swallowed.
Yusuf finally shuffled up and tapped Cabrillo on the arm to guide him around the prow to where someone, presumably Petrovski, had piled stones up against the hull high enough for him to climb over the gunwale. Juan scaled the cairn and gripped the metal skeleton that was all that remained of the rail and pulled himself up, twisting his fists as he pivoted and leaving skin behind as he managed to throw a leg over and gain the deck.
There was little left of the original wood — teak, he supposed — so he was forced to step across the metal ribs that had survived the ravages of time. Below him he could see an empty space that had once carried cargo, or it could have been a forward cabin. Now it was a mound of windblown dust.
A narrow passage between the rail and superstructure allowed him to gain access to a single watertight door that had been wrenched from its hinges and lay drunkenly against its jamb. Crawling through was a tight fit, and halfway into the ship itself Cabrillo paused, his back pressed against the sandy floor. Yuri Borodin was a lot of things, but he was not a details man. He embraced the big picture, the larger view, the grand scope. He saw strategy, not tactics. Minutia bored him. Why the hell would he waste his last words leading Cabrillo to drag himself into a derelict ship in a barren no-man’s-land?
This was wrong on so many levels that Juan skidded himself back out so that he was hard against the gunwale again. Yusuf stood below him, looking up with his one good eye.
The shot hit perfectly, blowing a cone of tissue out of the old man’s neck so that his head fell to his chest and then obscenely dropped again as if there were nothing holding it to his body. A cloud of blood hung in the air, the sniper’s proverbial pink mist. Yusuf folded to the ground. It was as if he had dropped to his knees in prayer, but with his face planted in the sand there would be no supplication to Allah. He was dead long before he hit the ground.
Then came the sharp whipcrack of a rifle shot and the echo of the round as it passed through Yusuf’s throat and pinged off the ship’s hull.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A second later, Juan was back under the ajar door, all thoughts of doubt erased. He went from being contemplative and analytical to survival mode in as much time as it took the auditory aspect of the gunshot to catch up to the visual.
He was in a narrow space no bigger than a phone booth with an iron ladder that led up to the bridge. Sunlight filtered down from above, showing how exposed he would be up there as well, but, with no choice, he climbed. A layer of sand coated the deck when he emerged in the wheelhouse. Most of the fittings had long since been scavenged. The wheel and binnacle were gone, as were the engine telegraph and the chart table. What little brightwork remained behind was blackened and pitted, and what he assumed had been teak paneling was nothing more than a papery veneer turned gray with age.
Cabrillo stayed low under the large window openings that ringed three sides of the bridge. The fourth wall was blank except for some metal brackets, which had perhaps held a fire extinguisher or other such gear, and a door leading aft. He crawled to it and peered into the hallway beyond. The passage was also lined with blanched wood, and there were bits of rotted carpet still attached along the crease where wall met floor. A mere three feet aft of the bridge door, the entire space was filled with sand all the way to the ceiling.
He was trapped.
He went back out
to the bridge and cautiously peeked over a window frame in hopes of spotting the sniper. A round slammed into the metal an inch from his head, punching a hole through the eroded steel as though it were no more solid than gauze. Four sizzling holes appeared where Cabrillo had crouched a second before. And four tiny geysers of sand erupted from the floor next to his prone form as the bullets struck the deck.
Cabrillo slithered to a new position, knowing the sniper couldn’t see him because he’d figured out the man was halfway up the side of the nearby island/mesa, though he wasn’t sure of the exact location.
Another fusillade raked the bridge, punching holes through its thin metal skin, as the sniper hoped for a lucky shot hitting his quarry. Juan had tucked himself up close to the forward wall, where the corner frame member offered better protection. The hot air on the bridge was filled with dust kicked up by the rounds plowing into the floor.
He remained motionless, not thinking yet about the why of his predicament. That would come later. Now all that was on his mind was survival. The rounds were coming in from the port side of the ship, so he could leap through the starboard window and hide behind the bulk of the ship, but a hundred yards of open desert separated him from the 4×4. He’d be picked off the instant he emerged from under the vessel’s shadow.
He had nothing he could use to distract the sniper. His bag was back in the UAZ, and the artificial limb he had was basically a commercial model since he hadn’t thought the risk of smuggling a weapon through Moscow was worth it.
He considered waiting out the other man until nightfall. Cabrillo was an excellent shot but lacked a sniper’s special training. He knew from talks with Franklin Lincoln, the ex-SEAL crewmate who was the Corporation’s sniper, that a skilled marksman could remain immobile in a blind for days. The man above him wouldn’t just pack it in, and with a thermal scope Juan’s body heat would appear like a vaporous apparition against the desert backdrop. If anything, an easier shot at night than during the day.
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