intensity behind her dark eyes that seemed to take everything in life with harsh seriousness.
'I had no idea that Siberia was so beautiful,' Theresa replied. 'The lake is breathtaking. So calm and peaceful.'
'She is a calm jewel at the moment but can turn wicked in an instant. The Sarma, sudden winds from the northwest, can burst onto the lake with the force of a hurricane. The local graveyards are filled with fishermen who failed to respect the forces of Baikal.'
A slight chill ran up Theresa's spine. The locals seemed to constantly speak of the spirit of the lake.
Baikal's pristine waters were a proud cultural resource to the Siberians, and protecting the lake from industrial pollutants had fostered an environmental movement that had grown globally. Even the Russian government was surprised at the widespread outcry when it had first decided to build a wood-cellulose-processing plant on its southern shores fifty years earlier. Theresa just hoped that a Greenpeace rubber boat armada would not appear to assail their presence on the lake.
At least her involvement was relatively harmless, she convinced herself. Her employer, Royal Dutch Shell, had been contracted to survey a section of the lake for reported oil seeps. Nobody said anything about drilling or exploratory wells, and she was confident that would never happen on the lake anyway.
The company was just trying to cozy up to the owners of some exploratory Siberian oil fields in hope of landing more significant business.
Theresa had never heard of the Avarga Oil Consortium before traveling to Siberia but knew there were a variety of oil companies clamoring in the Russian marketplace. A few of the government-sponsored companies, like Yukos and Gazprom, grabbed all the headlines, but, like anywhere in the world, there were always some little wildcatters owning a smaller piece of the pie. From the looks of what she'd seen so far, the Avarga Oil Consortium didn't even have a piece of the crust.
'They're obviously not pumping their revenues into R & D,' she joked to the two Shell technicians that accompanied her as they climbed aboard the leased survey boat.
'Clever how they designed her to resemble a decrepit fishing boat,' cracked Jim Wofford, a tall, friendly geophysicist from Arkansas who wore a thick mustache and a ready smile.
The high-prowed black fishing boat looked like it should have been scuttled years earlier. The exterior paint was peeling everywhere and the whole vessel reeked of wood rot and dead fish. It had been decades since the brightwork had been polished, and only the occasional rainstorm accounted for any washing of the decks. Theresa noted with unease that the bilge pump ran continuously.
'We do not possess our own sea vessels,' Tatiana said without apology. As the representative from Avarga Oil, she had been the sole interface with the Shell survey team.
'That's all right, for what it lacks in space it makes up for in discomfort.' Wofford smiled.
'True, but I bet there's some caviar hiding aboard someplace,' replied Wofford's partner, Dave Roy, a fellow seismic engineer who spoke in a soft Boston accent. As Roy knew, Lake Baikal was the home to enormous sturgeon that could carry up to twenty pounds of caviar.
Theresa helped lend a hand as Roy and Wofford lugged aboard their seismic monitors, cable, and towfish, organizing the equipment on the cramped stern deck of the twenty-eight-foot fishing boat.
'Caviar? With your beer tastes?' Theresa chided.
'As a matter of fact, the two make an excellent combination,' Roy replied with mock seriousness. 'The sodium content of caviar produces a hydration craving that is perfectly fulfilled by a malt-based beverage.'
'In other words, it's a good excuse to drink more beer.'
'Who needs an excuse to drink beer?' Wofford asked indignantly.
'I give up.' Theresa laughed. 'Far be it for me to argue with an alcoholic. Or two.'
Tatiana looked on without amusement, then nodded toward the boat's captain when all the equipment had been stowed aboard. A dour-faced man who wore a jacquard tweed hat, the captain's most notable feature was a wide bulbous nose tinted red from a steady consumption of vodka. Ducking into the small wheelhouse, he fired up the boat's smoky diesel engine, then released the dock lines. In calm waters, they chugged away from their berth at the small fishing and tourist village of Listvyanka, located on the lake's southwest shoreline.
Tatiana unrolled a map of the lake and pointed to an area forty miles north of the town.
'We shall survey here, at Peschanaya Bay,' she told the geologists. 'There have been numerous surface oil slicks reported by the fishermen in this area, which would seem to indicate a hydrocarbon seepage.'
'You're not going to take us sniffing around in deep water, are you, Tatiana?' Wofford asked.
'I understand the limitations of the equipment available to us. Though we have a number of potential seeps in the center of the lake, I realize the depths are too great for us to survey in those regions. Our research objective is focused on four locations in the south of Lake Baikal that are all near the shoreline, presumably in shallow water.'
'We'll find out easy enough,' Roy replied as he plugged a waterproof data cable into a three-foot-long yellow towfish. In addition to providing an acoustically derived image of the lake bed, the side-scan sonar sensor would also indicate the relative bottom depth when towed.
'Are the sites all located on the western shoreline?' Theresa asked.
'Only the target area in Peschanaya Bay. We must cross the lake to the other three sites, which are on the eastern shore.'
The old fishing boat motored past the docks of Listvyanka, passing a hydrofoil ferry slicing into port on its return from a transport run to Port Baikal on the opposite shore of the Angara River. The sleek enclosed passenger ferry looked out of place beside the small fleet of aged wooden fishing boats that filled Listvyanka's waters. Escaping the small harbor, the fishing boat turned north, hugging the craggy western shore of the cold lake. Deep, rich forests of taiga marched down to the shoreline in a carpet of green, interspersed with rolling meadows of thick grass. The rich colors of the landscape against the crystal blue lake made it difficult for Theresa to picture the stark bitterness of the region in the dead of winter, when a layer of ice four feet thick covered the lake. A shiver at the thought made her glad she was visiting when the days were longest.
It was of little matter to Theresa, though. The petroleum engineer's true love was traveling and she would have gladly visited the lake in January just for the experience. Bright and analytical, she had chosen her career less for the intellectual challenge than for the opportunity to travel to remote places around the globe. Extended stints in Indonesia, Venezuela, and the Baltic were broken up by the occasional two-week assignment like this one, where she was sent to survey an offbeat prospective oil field.
Working in a man's field proved to be no setback, as her vivacious personality and humorous outlook on life easily broke down barriers with men who weren't already attracted to her athletic build, dark hair, and walnut eyes.
Forty miles north of Listvyanka, a shallow bay called Peschanaya cut into the western shoreline, protecting a narrow sandy beach. As the captain nosed the boat's prow into the bay, Tatiana turned to Theresa and proclaimed, 'We will start here.'
With the engine thrown into neutral and the boat drifting, Roy and Wofford lowered the side-scan sonar towfish over the stern as Theresa mounted a GPS antenna onto the side rail and plugged it into the sonar's computer. Tatiana glanced at a fathometer mounted in the wheelhouse and shouted, 'Depth, thirty meters.'
'Not too deep, that's good,' Theresa said as the boat moved forward again, towing the sensor a hundred feet behind. A digitally enhanced image of the lake bed scrolled by on a color monitor that captured the processed sound waves emitted from the towfish.
'We can acquire meaningful results as long as the depth stays under fifty meters,' Wofford said.
'Anything deeper and we'll need more cable and a bigger boat.'
'And more caviar,' Roy added with a hungry look.
Slowly the fishing boat swept back and forth across the bay, its hardened captain spinning the ship's wheel lightly in his hands as the four visitors on the stern hunched over the sonar monitor. Unusual geological formations were noted and their positions marked, as the experienced oil surveyors looked for lake bed features that might indicate a hydrocarbon seep. Further studies, using core sampling or geochemical analysis of water samples, would still need to be undertaken to verify a seep, but the side-scan sonar would allow the surveyors to zero in on future geological points to examine.
As they reached the northern edge of the bay, Theresa stood and stretched as the captain swung the boat around and aligned it for the last survey lane. Toward the center of the lake, she noticed a large dirty-gray ship
