"There is much that I do not understand," intoned the Russian. "You tell me that my old friend Petr is alive, but was a prisoner of these spies? And that they have brought him back here?"
"Until we rescued him yesterday," Irene supplied.
"Foreign agents — soldiers-moving illegally through my country. Very bad. Worse that they have threatened my friends in my own house. Why have they done this?"
Kismet sublimated a nagging urge to withhold the full explanation from Anatoly. It was time to show a little trust. "Grimes — the unpleasant fellow you met last night — believes that there is treasure hidden up on the mountain."
"Ah, yes. The Golden Fleece. He spoke of it to you. And do you also believe?"
"It's not where he thinks it is. Peter — Petr — knows where it is. He told me where to find it, and how to get to it. That's where you come in."
Anatoly raised a hand. "A moment, please. If you have rescued Petr Ilyich, then where is he now?"
"Safe. And probably already on his way home."
"And how was this accomplished?"
Kismet abruptly realized there were still a few things he wasn't ready to give up. Before Irene could reply, he answered in a decisive tone: "Petr Chereneyev is a problem solver. He escaped once before. It's probably better that we don't know where he is, or how he plans to get out."
Anatoly nodded slowly. "Of course. A pity though that I could not see my old friend."
"After we recover the Fleece, you could leave with us," Irene suggested. "You could start a new life for yourself in America."
Anatoly chuckled at the idea, but offered no comment. Instead, he turned his attention back to Kismet. "So, where do I, as you say, come in?"
"The artifacts that Petr Ilyich discovered weren't up on the mountain. There was an old camp up there, probably a mining camp, but it was abandoned. The relics came from the sea. Petr showed me where he found them."
"I do not understand. From the sea? Did he drag the bottom with hooks and nets?"
"No. He used an old diving apparatus and walked on the bottom of the Black Sea."
Anatoly registered disbelief. "It would appear that my old friend had more talents than even I was aware of."
"The suit and compressor are in the cellar. He told me how to use the equipment, but I need a boat to operate from. That is where, as I say, you come in."
The big Russian stroked his shaggy beard thoughtfully. "Well then. We should get started."
Had anyone paused to notice, they would have observed their neighbor Anatoly, along with his two visitors, shuttling between the dock and his home. By midday the equipment was loaded and tested, and Kismet announced his readiness to commence. Anatoly cast off the moorings, coaxed his trawler out of its slip and headed for open water.
The fisherman navigated according to the chart Kismet had given him, while the latter remained in the bow, fastening air lines to the compressor. Despite their age, both the suit and the compressor proved to be in remarkably good repair. Chereneyev might have been a daredevil in his own way, but he took pride in his work and apparently valued safety. The suit was a little tight, but not uncomfortably so, and Kismet donned it with help from Irene.
The journey to the dive site was brief. The weather was clear and the sea calm when Anatoly went aft to drop anchor. Kismet scanned in all directions, assuring himself that no one was watching. The shoreline and the towering mountains stretched across the eastern horizon, but the village was an indistinct speck. No other boats were visible, although Kismet knew that the fishing fleet had departed from the harbor hours before.
To give the illusion that they were simply fishing in the remote area, Anatoly lowered his nets into the water. Meanwhile, Kismet made the final step in putting on his aquatic suit of armor: the helmet. Cast of solid copper, the critical piece of headgear was typical of the hard-hat dive rigs that had been in use before the invention of the Aqualung and self-contained breathing apparatus. Its creators had simply called it tryokhboltovoye snaryazheniye, literally "three-bolt equipment" because of the fact that the helmet was secured to the chest piece by three bolts spaced evenly around the apparatus at roughly chin level. The helmet and chest plate together weighed nearly eighty pounds. It looked like something Jules Verne might have dreamed up, and in fact an earlier version of it had been in use during Verne's lifetime. Nevertheless, for extended dives with long decompression periods, the old hardhat system was superior to SCUBA, and the three-bolt suits had served the Russian Navy's purposes well into the twentieth century.
As soon as the metal globe enveloped his head, Kismet experienced a wave of trepidation. The helmet was a tangible manifestation of the fact that he was about to plunge into a wholly foreign and potentially fatal environment. His only means of communicating with the surface took the form of three small orange floats, which he would release to signal either his need for a gradual ascent, or an emergency withdrawal from the depths. The words Kerns had uttered the night before now echoed in his head with ominous finality. The thought of being trapped below and suffocating, or being forced to make an ascent too rapidly and suffering the painful effects of the bends, or of losing his cognitive abilities to nitrogen narcosis, now seemed not simply to be requisite risks, but unavoidable certainties.
Kismet had SCUBA dived before and would have preferred the independence of carrying his own supply of air, relying only on himself to survive the unpredictable variables of a descent, but that just wasn't practical. Not only was there the obvious problem of acquiring the equipment, but the depth to which he would be diving was at the limit of what was termed recreational diving. At the depth Peter Kerns had indicated, bottom time for a SCUBA diver using compressed air was measured in mere minutes; in fact, with decompression stops, the dive would more than exceed the capacity of what he could bring along in two tanks. Most deep diving of this sort was now done with helium-oxygen mixtures, which were much safer but required even more in the way of specialized equipment and topside support. Like it or not, Peter Kerns' old school diving technique, despite the inherent risks, was simply the only option under the circumstances.
A tapping on the left porthole distracted him from his rising apprehension. It was Irene. "Are you going to be alright?"
Kismet turned his head to face her. The barrier between them muffled her voice. Her concern was evident, yet Kismet could see that she really had no idea of the dangers he was about to confront. He wanted to scream, to tear the metal and rubber from his body. Instead, he forced a smile and nodded. Anatoly started up the compressor and a rush of oily smelling air filled the helmet.
"Great," he murmured to himself. Without further delay, he ambled across the deck to the nets and lowered himself into the water.
As soon as he was beneath the surface, he felt better. Though the dampness from the water could not penetrate his suit, its cold quickly seeped in, calming his nerves.
Underwater, everything was different. The compressor was still audible, chugging and hissing to provide him with breathable air, but the undersea world was a place of perpetual green twilight and serenity. He released his hold on the net and allowed himself to sink. Anatoly was controlling his descent from the boat. A cable attached to a winch was gradually played out to provide him with a measured rate of descent, as well as a lifeline back to the surface. Even so, the bottom quickly rushed up to greet him.
At this depth, darkness reigned; very little light from the surface could penetrate. When he looked up, Kismet had no difficulty seeing the keel of Anatoly's trawler, with its nets spread out behind it like drably colored plumage. But that light could not pierce to the shadows around him. When his booted feet touched down, sinking several inches into the sediment and kicking up a tremendous cloud of silt, he discovered even greater respect for Petr Chereneyev, who had made this same journey without support from allies on the surface. When the cloud finally settled, Kismet looked around at the alien landscape where he was the intruder.