In the days that followed, Admiral Rankov worked tirelessly in pursuit of an American mistake. He thought he was onto something when his investigators discovered five executives of a Florida citrus fruit company had entered Russia on a commercial jet through St. Petersburg, and had apparently not left on the date specified on their entry visas.
He did not know that the five Americans had left on a mysterious fishing boat on the very night of their entry, in the small hours, out of the little port of Kurgolovo, on a remote headland eighty miles east of the city. In time their passports and visas would be used by five other Americans, who between them knew nothing about growing fruit.
It came to light that the five Americans had indeed left Russia, twenty-four hours late, on a private corporate jet from St. Petersburg to London. There were no other US citizens in the last couple of months who had overstayed their welcome, or were otherwise unaccounted for.
It was not until June 19 that something came to light involving the missing Americans. Apparently four men from the Minneapolis area, and a woman from Chicago, had disappeared from a tour ship, the Yuri Andropov, in the northern reaches of Lake Onega. Furthermore they had gone missing two evenings before the barges had been blitzed in the canal. Rankov discovered this through the US embassy in Moscow as a result of a formal complaint filed by the State Department.
It was a classic Arnold Morgan preemptive strike, putting the Russians on the defensive over something that was ostensibly their fault. The State Department complaint caused huge consternation among the shipping tour operators, but such incidents are always played down, to prevent the notoriously edgy US vacationers from canceling en masse.
None of this fooled Vitaly Rankov, who sensed the hand of Admiral Morgan. He immediately summoned the ex-KGB man, Colonel Borsov, to his cavernous office in the Kremlin.
The senior executive from the Andropov was more than helpful. He had met and spoken to the Americans, indeed he had discovered them missing and had ordered the search of their suites.
“What kind of men were they?” asked the head of the Russian Navy.
“Old.”
“Old? How old?”
“Very old.”
“Like what? Sixty? Ninety?”
“Well, sir, I’d say one of them, Mr. Andrews, was close to eighty. He walked with a cane, very slowly. Mr. Maklov was older, must have been eighty, did not walk well at all, but he was a nice man. The other two were a little younger, but not much, both in their mid-seventies. It’s a complete mystery to me what happened to them.”
“How close did you get to them?”
“As close as I am to you, sir.”
“No doubt in your mind they were that old?”
“Absolutely none, sir. They were that old. I saw them often, twice a day at meals, once up in their sitting area, a few times in the bar.”
“Did they look like they might be good swimmers?” Rankov said, smiling.
“SWIMMERS! No, sir. They were old men, perhaps having the final vacation of their lives. They all had ancestors from Russia.”
“How about the fifth person in the party?”
“Oh, she was their nurse. Edith Dubranin. A woman of over fifty, certainly. Looked after them, told me she was from Chicago, worked in a big hospital there for many years.”
“Do you think there was a possibility they might have been terrorists?”
“TERRORISTS? I wouldn’t think so. Two of them could scarcely walk across the deck.”
“Any theories about what might have happened to them?”
“No. None, sir. And we had a further mystery…two of our staff went missing on that voyage, in the same place, on our Green Stop on Lake Onega. These were young men — Pieter, the steward in the very busy stern coffee bar, and Torbin, the head waiter. They had gone out in a small boat and have never been seen since.”
The crisp, factual replies of Colonel Borsov pleased Admiral Rankov. He had to accept the description of the Americans, and he willingly accepted the word of the Andropov’s senior executive that he would keep him posted the moment he heard anything about any of the missing seven.
He walked the Colonel out to the street, and on his way back along the stark, military corridors he found himself piecing together the incontrovertible coincidences of the events on the Andropov on the night of June 10 and the events less than 135 miles away up the Belomorski Canal, twenty-nine hours later. He had little choice but to accept the word of a former officer in the KGB that the elderly Americans could not have committed such a crime.
As for the steward and the waiter, both Russian citizens who had worked for the shipping line for over four years and who were well known to many people in the tour boat business…well, Vitaly Rankov did not suspect them of treason against the State. Nonetheless, he would have them investigated.
Two days later, on June 22, a steward from another tour ship anchored at the Green Stop found the Andropov’s missing inflatable outboard. He was driving an identical boat and carrying six American ladies on a short tour of the lake, when he saw the white engine reflect the bright sunlight, about five feet below the surface, visible from the water, but not from the land. He swerved in close, and saw a name on the crushed rubber hull, too deep to read, but possible to grab with an anchor hook.
The steward decided to drop off his paying passengers and return with couple of crew members to conduct a salvage operation, and recover what looked like an expensive outboard and inflatable hull.
They set off after 11 PM, the sharp-eyed wine steward, Alek, assisted by the main dining room waiter, Nikolai, and the engineer, Anton, made their way quietly through the shallows near the shore in one of the ship’s gray Zodiac inflatables. They were searching for the submerged shape of a 150 horsepower outboard engine similar to their own.
The three young Russians were armed with three sacks and a couple of large boat hooks. They planned to raise the engine, hide it in the hold of their tour ship, the Aleksandr Pushkin, and then get it home to St. Petersburg. They could dry it out, Anton could recondition it, and then sell it for possibly as much as $4,000—a sizable sum of money in Russia for young men earning less than $60 a week.
The trouble was Alek had not marked the spot with a landmark on the shore, and it was taking a long time. But at least it was still light. Finally, at fifteen minutes before midnight, Nikolai spotted the white engine bright beneath the clear water right in the shadow of the reeds. Alek maneuvered them in close, and the other two locked the boat hooks onto the engine and heaved. The engine was sitting in about five feet of water and started to move, but not enough. It kept weighting itself back down to the bottom. “The damn thing’s attached to a boat,” said Anton. “One of us may have to go over the side and free it up — we’ll never pull the whole lot off the bottom.”
“Get going, then,” said Alek. “I’m in charge of the boat, and Nikolai’s the biggest and strongest of us…he’s got to pull the engine in…I bet it weighs a ton.”
The six-foot-three-inch Anton grumbled a bit, kicked off his boots, removed his shirt, socks, and trousers, and eased himself over the side into the cold water. He took a deep breath and somersaulted down to the white engine, spotting the problem instantly. The metal point of the casing below the propeller had gone through the wooden floor of the Zodiac and jammed as it fell.
Anton surfaced and told Nikolai to pull the engine to an upright position so he could free it. Then he went back under and pushed the engine clear of the thin wooden decking. By the time he surfaced, Alek and Nikolai were pulling it on board.
With the weight of the engine now removed, the deck and the rubberized hull began to slowly float upward. Anton, hanging onto their own boat, kicked it away and slammed his foot down to keep his balance. As he did he let out a yell of revulsion. “SHIT! I’m treading on a dead dog or something…pull me out…”