Cassie quickly learned to appreciate the scout’s adeptness as a travel coordinator. She not only acted as their interpreter, but she also understood the intricacies of Russian bureaucracy as it pertained to riding the rails. The pythia realized it was only due to Olga’s savvy that they’d been able to secure first class tickets on such short notice. Rather than enduring the free-for-all nightmare of third class bunks or the only-slightly-more-private second class billets with four strangers to a cabin, the team could enjoy the luxury of sleeping compartments designed for two passengers only.
Unlike trains in America, the Trans-Siberian wasn’t primarily ridden by tourists. Even in the jet age, Russians still used it to journey through the country’s inaccessible heartland. As a result, the train carried a ragtag cross-section of society. Frazzled young mothers with multiple screaming infants and toddlers. Rowdy teenage military conscripts returning from their first tour of duty. Shady characters sporting coded prison tattoos. Businessmen calling on customers in the hinterland.
All of them were looked after by the provodnik and provodnitsa—each car’s male and female carriage attendant, respectively. The attendants combined the duties of conductor, porter, janitor, maintenance crew, and wait staff. A major duty of the provodnitsa was to fill the huge samovar in each car with boiling water. This was useful not only for dunking tea bags and making instant soup but as a source of hot water in case the bathroom tap went cold. The provodnik held the equally important duty of locking the bathrooms twenty minutes before each station stop and keeping them locked for another twenty minutes after leaving the station. Since the toilets flushed their waste directly onto the train tracks, the necessity for this lock-out was self-explanatory. The carriage attendants of both sexes had a reputation for being surly, even to native Russians, though they were slightly more polite in first-class.
The Golden Eagle tour trains were rumored to have friendly staff. These luxury trains were also equipped with pay showers. However, the Arkana team wasn’t riding a Golden Eagle train. Cassie decided not to cavil about the shared bathrooms or lack of shower facilities. She was lucky that Olga had been able to secure them the best this train could offer.
“We sleep now, yes?” The scout didn’t wait for an answer but switched out the light on her side of the compartment and climbed up to the bunk above her sitting area. “The time for talk will be tomorrow.”
“Fine by me.” Cassie switched out the other light and climbed up to her own bunk. Griffin and Daniel were getting themselves settled in another cabin. The team had agreed to meet in the dining room car at noon to map out a plan.
Their tardy start the next day could be attributed to the train’s odd schedule. The Trans-Siberian ran on Moscow time which was seven hours earlier than Vladivostok. This translated into unusual departures. The Arkana team’s train didn’t leave the station until nearly two AM. This was less disorienting than it might seem since summer twilight lasted until eleven o’clock in this far northern latitude. As a result, Cassie was still wakeful when she turned off the light, but the relative silence of the darkened cabin and the clickety-clack of the wheels on the track helped her unwind.
The pythia didn’t mind sleeping through the first leg of their journey. There wasn’t much to see around Russia’s easternmost port city of Vladivostok. Shipyards, heavy industry, baroque architecture, and statues of muscular Bolsheviks in heroic poses didn’t appeal to her.
Initially, Griffin had suggested taking the more northern Baikal-Amur route, or BAM for short, since its name contained two places of immediate interest to the team—Lake Baikal and the Amur River. That plan was discouraged by the Jomon trove keeper. He explained that although the spur line began at the mouth of the Amur River right across the strait from Sakhalin Island, its route soon diverged from the great waterway. BAM trains made for the northern shore of Lake Baikal which offered limited amenities and no airport. Instead, Ken urged the Arkana team to take the main Trans-Siberian line departing from Vladivostok and arriving in Irkutsk—a sizeable city which had an airport that could fly them quickly to Moscow should their quest prove successful. The main line also ran parallel to the Amur River for several hundred miles. Cassie hoped the river’s proximity might help her get a lock on the route the Minoans had taken.
It would require four days of continuous travel to cover the 2,500-mile trip to Lake Baikal. The pythia marveled at the fact that their destination only marked the railroad’s halfway point. The full journey from Moscow to Vladivostok would be equivalent to traveling from New York to San Francisco twice. She flashed back to Griffin’s lengthy lecture on the subject earlier that day.
At over 5,700 miles, the Trans-Siberian was the longest railroad on the planet, and it was constructed over the world’s worst terrain. The project had nearly bankrupted the Russian government. Begun in the spring of 1891, the railway wasn’t completed until the fall of 1916. Not only did engineers have to cope with tunneling through mountains and building bridges over innumerable rivers, their work season only lasted four months during Siberia’s brief annual warm-up. The permafrost of the pine forests, or taiga, presented additional challenges as the swampy top layer of earth tended to swallow entire sections of track during the summer melt. Despite overwhelming obstacles, when the main line was completed it succeeded in connecting the whole
