Into the Black (20 page)

"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."

Kismet leaned forward, placing his palms at the lower corners of the representation.  He counted off the squares separating Poti from the site in the mountains.  "The roads will get us most of the way, but it looks like we'll have to go about twenty-five miles overland."

"As the crow flies," Irene countered.  "But you've got the change in elevation to contend with.  And it's virtually impossible to travel in a straight line up there."

Kismet nodded.  The contour lines illustrating relative elevation showed the site to be more than a thousand meters up—well above the snow line.  "Well, I suppose it could be worse."

Before he could opine further on the trials that lay ahead, a booming sound rolled through the cellar.  It was unmistakably the voice of Anatoly Grishakov, calling out to Irene.  Kismet hastily gathered up the maps and rolled them into a tight tube, which he folded over and slipped into the side pocket of his jacket.

Irene frowned.  "We need his help, Nick.  To get up that mountain, if for no other reason."

"
Are you down there, Irina
?"

"All right," Kismet whispered.  "But not a word about the Fleece.  I still don't trust him."

The Russian's voice grew louder as he tramped down the steps.  He poked his head out from the stairway, catching sight of them.  "Did you find what you were looking for?"

Irene turned to face him.  "Anatoly, old friend, we need your help."

* * *

Kismet pulled his heavy leather bomber jacket tight across his chest, trying in vain to shut out the permeating chill.  While the landscape around him was blanketed in snow, it was the altitude that made the air so unbearably frigid.  He found himself wishing that he had worn an extra shirt, but his duffel was back at Anatoly's house, now several kilometers away.  His black waist pack held only his
kukri
and a few other utilitarian items, nothing that would fend off the cold.

Anatoly's assistance had proved to be more than worth the risk of trusting him.  The big Russian had in fact closed his ears to the details of their quest, staunchly proclaiming that it was better for him not to know.  As matters stood, Anatoly knew only that Irene and Kismet needed to trek into the mountains.  To that end, he had supplied them first with a hearty meal and a good night's sleep; and secondly, with transportation into the foothills.  At dawn, the big man had awakened them, stuffing yet another feast into them before loading them into his truck.  Although the vehicle was lacking in creature comforts, the brief ride on the primitive roads that carved up toward the mountains cut their trip in half and Anatoly delivered them to a snow-covered farm at the base of the Caucasus in time for lunch.

The farmer, one of Anatoly's wife's many relatives, required even less convincing than Anatoly before volunteering his help.  After dining, Kismet and Irene were taken to the barn where the farmer stabled his horses.