Alek laughed. “It’s just weeds. Lake water is full of plants and stuff,” he said.
“Forget weeds,” replied Anton. “I was treading on something furry and dead…horrible.”
“Well, I’ll show you what you were treading on,” said Nikolai, plunging his eight-foot boat hook into the water, and casting around for a “catch.” “Here, help me pull this up.”
Both men heaved again, and they felt whatever it was squelch free of the thick bottom silt. It was big, bigger than a dog and it turned turtle as it rose like a long muddy log. Except this log had eyes, white staring eyes, which peered out of the thick mud covering the face and hair.
It was a slimy, oozing carcass from hell, decorated with a small gaping red scar, about two inches long, set like a thin hideous line of combat medals to the left of the central area of the chest.
Anton thought he might throw up, so he let go of the boat hook and turned away. But Nikolai was made of sterner stuff and he peered down into the water, making out the shape of another log on the bottom, this one with a distinctive blue cast.
He seized the other boat hook and dragged it around below the surface until it grabbed. Then he heaved a second body out of the mud, but this one did not roll. It came up cleaner, with the muddy side downward, and the discolored back of a denim jacket clung tightly to the corpse.
The peculiar aspect was, it too was decorated with an identical stark, thin red slit, but this one was about halfway down the back, on the left side of the body.
It was as if in life the cadavers had fought some kind of a monstrous duel with long hunting knives.
Or, alternately, had run into a skilled killer, who wielded a blade with the precision of an open-heart surgeon.
Alek and his friends had salvaged the remains of Pieter and Torbin. The River Police arrived inside forty-five minutes, and the plot seemed to become more obscure.
Colonel Borsov heard the news on his ship’s telephone, and he called Admiral Rankov immediately to inform him that he now had only five people missing, rather than seven. The two crew members were accounted for.
Rankov was truly mystified. In the back of his mind, he had considered the possibility that the two Russians might have murdered the old American men for their money and then taken off. He realized it was a somewhat outlandish thought, but it happened to be the only one he had at present.
Now he lacked even that unpromising lead. And there were yet more questions. Who killed the crew members? And could the aged Americans have had anything to do with the wrecked Kilos? Admiral Rankov was beginning to think not. How could they? The submarine convoy had been parked a mile offshore, and the party from the Midwest was comprised of elderly tourists, not trained frogmen.
The Admiral decided this was a blind alley, but he wondered whether the gallant Colonel Borsov might have been guarding his back when he was so completely certain about the ages and infirmities of the four American men and their nurse. And he made a note to check out the backgrounds of all five missing midwesterners. The Americans might conceivably have blundered in their cover story. But he knew, in his soul, that Arnold Morgan would have spun his tangled web too skillfully for that, and a feeling of despair settled in the pit of his stomach.
He turned his attention back to the papers on his desk. Before him was a somewhat short list of aircraft that had come out of the Arctic and journeyed south, high above the Russian mainland toward Turkey and the Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf. Generally, these were commercial aircraft from the West Coast of the USA and Canada that were taking the shortcut across the North Pole to the Middle East. Rankov’s men had turned up eight such flights in the past two months. All of them checked out, and all of them had arrived at their destination as recorded on their flight plan. Except for one.
The list in front of the Russian Admiral showed an American Airlines flight AW294, out of Los Angeles on May 1 (Russian Time), a Boeing 747, according to its flight plan bound for Bahrain international airport right on the Gulf. “Well,” mused the Admiral, “everything went according to plan as far as Russia…they arrived in our airspace on schedule over Murmansk at around 2230—just a few minutes late — and then flew more or less straight down longitude 34 degrees. According to this they were at around thirty-five thousand feet, making 440 knots and never slowed down.
“According to our men on the ground in the Emirates, however, that aircraft was never recorded at Bahrain. And was never scheduled to do so. They did not have a Boeing 747 in there anytime that morning. Not according to the records.”
The Admiral ran his finger farther down the report. “Here we are…American Airlines say they landed in Bahrain on time…the commercial flight was a charter for Arab businessmen…and they can’t understand why the Arabs have no record of it.”
Surprisingly, the Russian agent had also provided a verbatim report of his phone conversation, in which the American official mentioned they couldn’t “give a shit one way or another, since the aircraft is safely back in LA…and why anyone should want to fuck around checking the unbelievably unreliable Middle East airport data beats the hell out of me. Sorry I can’t help more. G’bye.”
“That,” said Admiral Rankov, “is the end of that. The aircraft didn’t even come to Russia. Just flew straight over. We don’t have any rights here. And anyway we’ve no reason to think that Flight AW294 was doing anything more than transporting Arab businessmen. That’s a real dead end…. I suppose it could have been a US aircraft heading for their Air Force base at Dahran, but there’s no chance of getting anything more out of them…still, I’d never be surprised if that bastard Morgan…”
Every time the giant ex-Naval Intelligence officer came up with a possible lead, any lead, he seemed forced to discard it as either too unlikely or just plain impossible. And yet…he still sensed the hand of Arnold Morgan behind all of this. He was not done trying yet. Rankov was developing an uneasy feeling that he was never going to prove anything, that the birds he sought had already flown the coop. Leaving not a feather behind.
On June 24 an initial report came to his office from the Naval Lieutenant Commander in charge of the salvage operation up in the canal. Work was proceeding slowly because barge hulls one and three were deeply embedded in the silted bottom of the waterway. Hull two, however, the back end of the articulated Tolkach, the one that had flipped right over, gave the evidence. The divers had found a succession of eight gaping holes, between four and five feet long, on the starboard side right where the bilge keel joins the underside of the ship. They had been evenly placed, fifty feet apart.
“Neat,” grunted Admiral Rankov, scanning the rest of the report, which he knew before he read it. “Burn marks plainly showing…hull metal taken out with oxyacetylene underwater cutters and forwarded to the old KGB forensic laboratories in Moscow…results not in.”
“And when they do arrive,” murmured the Chief of Russia’s Naval Staff, “They’re going to say, ‘SEMTEX’ and then, ‘Made in Czekoslovakia’…Neat, neater, neatest. Fuck it.”
It was now his duty to inform his superior, the C in C and Deputy Defense Minister, Admiral Karl Rostov, that in strictest confidence, the Navy now knew the barges had been professionally blown and sunk by persons unknown. The question would be, how to present this unpalatable truth to the people? If at all.