Treasure of Khan

Pitt had been asleep for four hours when suddenly he sprang awake, bolting upright in his bunk. Though all was quiet, his senses told him something was wrong. Flicking on a reading light, he swung his feet to the floor and stood up but nearly fell over in the process. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he realized that the ship was listing at the stern, at an angle of almost ten degrees.

Dressing quickly, he climbed a stairwell to the main deck, then moved along its exterior passageway. The passageway and open deck before it were completely deserted, the whole ship strangely quiet as he walked uphill toward the bow. The silence finally registered. The ship's engines were shut down and only the muted hum of the auxiliary generator in the engine room throbbed through the late night air.

Climbing another set of stairs to the bridge, he walked in the doorway and gazed around the compartment. To his chagrin, the bridge was entirely deserted. Wondering if he was the only man aboard the ship, he scanned the bridge console before finding a red toggle switch marked TREVOGA. Flicking the toggle, the entire ship suddenly erupted in a clamor of warning bells that shattered the night silence.

Seconds later, the Vereshchagin's sinewy captain charged onto the bridge like an angry bull from his cabin below.

'What is going on here?' the captain stammered, fighting to recollect his English in the middle of the night. 'Where is the watch, Anatoly?'

'The ship is sinking,' Pitt said calmly. 'There was no watch aboard the bridge when I entered just a minute ago.'

A wide-eyed grimace appeared on the captain's face as he noticed the ship's list for the first time.

'We need power!' he cried, reaching for a phone to the engine room. But as his hand gripped the receiver, the bridge suddenly fell black. Mast lights, cabin lights, console displays — everything — went dark throughout the ship as the electrical power vanished in an instant. Even the alarm bells began dying with a wounded bellow.

Cursing in the dark, the captain fumbled with his hands along the bridge console until finding the emergency battery switch, which bathed the bridge in low-level lighting. As the lights flickered on, the Vereshchagin's chief engineer burst onto the bridge, gasping for air. A heavyset man with a neatly trimmed beard, he gazed through sky-blue eyes that were tinged with panic.

'Captain, the hatches to the engine room have been chained shut. There's no way to gain entry. I fear she may well be half flooded already.'

'Someone has locked the hatches? What has happened ... Why are we sinking while moored at anchor?' the captain asked, shaking away the cobwebs in search of an answer.

'It appears that the bilges have flooded and the lower deck is taking on water quickly at the stern,' the engineer reported, his breath finally slowing.

'You better prepare to abandon ship,' Pitt advised in a logical tone.

The words still cut the captain to the bone. For a ship's captain, the order to abandon ship is like volunteering to give away one's own child. There is no order more searing on the soul. The pain of answering to the shipowners, the insurance companies, and the maritime inquiry boards after the fact would be difficult enough to face. But harder still was seeing the crew scramble off in fear, then watching as that inanimate mass of wood and steel actually vanishes before one's eyes. Like a favorite family car, most ships take on a persona of their own for the captain and crew, with nuances, quirks, and personality traits unique to that vessel. Many a captain has been accused of having a love affair with the vessel he commanded, and so it was with Captain Kharitonov.

The tired captain knew the truth but still couldn't utter the words. With a grim look, he simply nodded at the chief engineer to pass the order.

Pitt was already out the door, his mind churning over solutions to keep the ship afloat. Retrieving his dive gear and accessing the engine room was his first temptation, but he would have to defeat the chained hatch first and then what? If the flooding was from a gash to the hull beneath the engine room, there would be little he could do to stem the tide anyway.

The answer struck him when he ran into Giordino and Gunn on the suddenly bustling middeck.

'Looks like we're about to get wet,' Giordino said without alarm.

'The engine room is locked and flooding. She's not going to stay afloat a whole lot longer,' Pitt replied, then gazed down the sloping aft deck. 'How quickly can you get that whirlybird warmed up?'

'Consider it done,' Giordino replied, then sprinted aft, not waiting for Pitt's reply.

'Rudi, see that the survey team we picked up is safely on deck and near a lifeboat. Then see if you can convince the captain to release the anchor line,' Pitt said while Gunn stood shivering in a light jacket.

'What's up your sleeve?'

'An ace, I hope,' Pitt mused, then disappeared aft.

***

The Kamov bounded into the night sky, hovering momentarily above the stricken research vessel.

'Aren't we forgetting 'Women and children first'?' Giordino asked from the pilot's seat.

'I sent Rudi to round up the oil survey team,' Pitt replied, reading Giordino's real concern about Theresa. 'Besides, we'll be back before anyone gets their feet wet.'

Gazing out the cockpit, they observed the full outline of the ship illuminated more from the shore lights than the emergency deck lights, and Pitt silently hoped his words would hold true. The research ship was clearly going down at the stern and sinking fast. The waterline had already crept over the lower deck and would shortly begin washing over the open stern deck. Giordino instinctively flew toward Listvyanka, while Pitt turned his gaze from the foundering Vereshchagin to the scattered fleet of vessels moored off the village.

'Looking for anything in particular?' Giordino asked.

'A high-powered tug, preferably,' Pitt replied, knowing no such vessel existed on the lake. The boats whisking by beneath them were almost exclusively small fishing vessels of the kind that the oil survey team had leased. Several were capsized or washed ashore from the force of the seiche wave.

'How about that big boy?' Giordino asked, nodding toward a concentration of lights in the bay two miles away.

'She wasn't around when we came in last night, maybe she's on her way in. Let's go take a look.'

Giordino banked the helicopter toward the lights, which quickly materialized into the outline of a ship. As the chopper zoomed closer, Pitt could see that the ship was a cargo ship of roughly two hundred feet.

The hull was painted black creased with brown patches of rust that dripped to the waterline. A faded blue funnel rose amidships, garnished with the logo of a gold sword. The old ship had obviously plied the lake for decades, transporting coal and lumber from Listvyanka to remote villages on the northern shores of Baikal. As Giordino swung down the ship's starboard side, Pitt noted a large black derrick mounted on the stern deck. His eyes returned to the funnel, then he shook his head.

'No good. She's moored here, and I see no smoke from her stacks, so her engines are probably cold.

Take too long to get her in play.' Pitt tilted his head back toward the village. 'Guess we'll have to go for speed over power.'

'Speed?' Giordino asked as he followed Pitt's nod and aimed the helicopter back toward the village.

'Speed,' Pitt confirmed, pointing to a mass of brightly colored lights bobbing in the distance.

***

Aboard the Vereshchagin, an orderly evacuation was already under way. Two lifeboats had been loaded with half the crew and were in the process of being lowered to the water. Gunn threaded his way past the remaining crowd of scientists and ship's crewmen toward the rear quarters, then dropped down a deck. Incoming water had risen above the deckhead at the far end of the passageway but sloshed only to ankle depth at the higher point where Gunn stood. The guest cabins were closest to him, where, to his relief, the water had yet to rise much higher.

Gunn shuddered as he approached the first cabin shared by Theresa and Tatiana, the icy water swirling about his calves. Shouting and pounding loudly on the door, he turned the unlocked handle and pressed against it. Inside, the cabin was bare. There were no personal effects about, which was to be expected, since the women had come aboard with little more than the clothes on their back. Only the ruffled blankets on the twin bunks indicated their earlier presence.

He closed the door and quickly moved aft to the next cabin, grimacing as the cold water sloshed around his thighs. Again he shouted and knocked on the door before forcing it open against the resistance of the water. Roy and Wofford were sharing this cabin, he recalled as he stepped in. Under a dim emergency light he could see that