by Frank Perry
Shit!
He got the ship leveled again, using more compressed air, which was now dangerously low. There might not be enough pressure to blow the tanks again!
The umbilical spiraled into the murkiness. It was no longer streaming in a straight line, so might have dislodged. The mother ship would be moving along its course and should be taking up the slack. It was much too slack! There was something vague appearing in the darkness ahead. It didn’t register immediately as the ghostly shape of a man. It was floating with arms and legs outstretched like a cliff diver beginning his leap. But this man was hovering, unmoving, inches above the bottom. Ivan moved closer and could see chains wrapped in circles around the man and extending into the silt, out of sight.
It struck him like a bolt of lightning. Nikolai! His friend had dived in to help. At this depth? But no, he wasn’t moving, suspended in a death pose. His flesh was eerily white in the lights. His friend was dead, eyes and mouth agape. He’d been bound with weights and thrown into the lake. Ivan threw up, realizing his fate. Nikolai had been drowned, deliberately. Goodbye my friend, life has been short, but that has always been the story of people in the end.
Ivan began levering controls madly, trying to cut the cord that had tangled somewhere after being dropped from the ship. The emergency shear knife on top of the submarine was operating weakly under depleted battery power. Oh God, I have been using batteries for hours without knowing it when the umbilical was cut!
In Moscow, Gregori Jelavich listened on his mobile phone, responding, “Excellent Tomorrow, you may resume normal shipping operations.” Gregory was satisfied, thinking about his ship, now moored again at its berth, less one submarine.
No record of the private expedition for Kolchak’s gold in Lake Baikal would be reported. Jelavich was convinced that there had now been enough wasted effort made to find the phantom train, which had probably never existed. It was difficult to believe in the coincidence of train tracks built across a frozen lake, carrying billions in gold bullion, then crashing through. Even the idea of an Army caravan across the lake in the heart of Siberian winter was absurd for anyone familiar with the region. The caravan story undoubtedly grew out of the lost train theory. Rumors of the treasure had grown over the decades around the lake, not around the realities facing Admiral Kolchak during the winter of 1919-1920 when the Reds were overrunning the Whites.
As appealing as the story was, and the fact that the government had funded searches of the lake, it would divert fortune seekers for years as they tried to gather enough money to search the lake again. Finding anything in the deepest and largest lake in Siberia during the few navigable months of the year would be a tasty diversion, keeping competition away from his effort to actually find the gold. He didn’t know where it was hidden yet, but he was closer than anyone else, and it would eventually be found through detailed, thorough detective work, not through chasing myths. Karina was his secret weapon.
The Writer
Damn! She hit the keyboard hard enough to pop some of the buttons off. Jackie Dickson was blocked. It was stormy and cold in the Colorado mountains where she lived, and she wasn’t in the mood for this. She just couldn’t get beyond the first paragraph of her new book, the eighth in a series of romance novels. All I have to do is get this bitch to fuck her way into the Tsar’s bed chamber! Her genre was unique. In college, she was mesmerized by the history of the rise and fall of the Russian monarchy, rich in opulence and intrigue. Tsar Nicholas II was reputedly worth over $300 billion and lived a luxurious lifestyle patterned after his predecessors. The Romanovs, like the other monarchies of Europe, formed alliances by marrying across sovereign boundaries. She found the early twentieth century Russian history fascinating. It all came to an end abruptly for many countries during the turmoil and slaughter of the First World War, but nowhere more savagely than the grotesque upheaval in Russia with the compounding debacle of the Bolshevik revolution. In hindsight, the Russian aristocracy could have learned from the fate of Louis XIV that peasant populations cannot be endlessly exploited.
When the end of the Russian monarchy came, it came fast and hard. The Tsar and his entire family, women, children, even their servants, died screaming in a basement torture chamber, killed with bayonets. According to some of the letters from soldiers ordered to be on the squad that night, the girls pleaded for several minutes, thrust after thrust, finally quieting after heavy boot stomps to their heads before their throats were cut. The terror spread with the formation of Leninist and Stalinist regimes when millions of people were murdered ruthlessly and whole towns obliterated. No other events in recorded history equaled the depraved subhuman horror of the Russian revolution and the subsequent terror under Stalin.
Just as the mob behaviors of the revolution exceeded human understanding, this period also yielded intense, passionate love stories. Some stories were known, but most were recreated through inference and imagination. Most Russia history records were destroyed and the history was rewritten by the communists. Jackie had been recovering whatever facts could be documented and writing romance novels for ten years, mostly about real or imaginary characters from this period. By studying the immense tragedy affecting so many people, mostly the nobility, she was able to create love stories that embodied the intensity of the emotions from the period. She wrote from her imagination, but many of the people and places were real.
Now, after eight best-selling books, her agent had negotiated her first large advance payment for a project they had proposed to her publisher together. The problem for Jackie was that she never followed an outline. A projected work wasn’t necessarily how the story would unfold in her mind. To her, writing involved discovery for her, just as much as for the readers. She usually had no idea how it would end when starting a new book. She just began writing with a general plot in mind, but it often changed as characters developed and events presented themselves along the way. She enjoyed the evolution as much as someone reading her novels, and generally had no more idea of the outcome than the reader while she was writing. Now, she had a contract and payment to produce a work with a pre-defined plot and storyline. She couldn’t function.
Her phone rang and she snubbed her cigarette, another habit she’d acquired with her success. “Hello.”
“Jackie, it’s Bev.” Beverly McGilvery was Jackie’s agent.
“Bev, if you keep calling me, I’ll never get this started.”
Beverly had learned over thirty years as an agent how far she could push her talent without breaking them. “Jackie, honey, you need to give me the first three chapters this week or the publisher might pull the plug.”
“What does that mean, Bev – pull the plug?”
“It could mean a lot of things. For one, they could sue to get their money back.”
“Bev, you need to lay off and let me work. This isn’t helping. Now do your goddam job and keep them off my back.”
Jackie heard the beginning of a protest, but slammed the phone down. She would screen calls for the rest of the day. She normally wrote for several hours in the morning, sometimes until noon, then acted in her other role as wife and mother. It was early, but she was done for today.
She was always on the lookout for leads to new stories and some letters that had been owned by Anna Vasilyevna Timiryova had become available on eBay a couple years earlier. Anna’s story had been written in countless ways in conjunction with novels about Admiral Kolchak, and her personal story of extreme love and tragedy seemed like perfect subject matter for Jackie. She didn’t need many facts because her novels were works of fiction and only needed a few tidbits for inspiration. There were almost no personal facts available on any of the aristocrats or bourgeois, anyway. Anna’s story, at least what she knew of it, was the thing movies were made of. By owning some of her papers, Jackie could get closer than authors preceding her to understanding Anna as the lonely yet unbreakable woman -- her singular love, her passion for a man who died yo
ung, her failings and her secrets. Surprisingly, there were no other bids for the letters, and she bought them far cheaper than she had anticipated.
But first, she was commissioned to write the latest book in her series about the last Tsarina of Russia, Alexandra Feodorovna. Alexandra had been the daughter of Princess Alice, daughter of Queen Victoria. Her story was a classic weaving of complex political alliances that made for rich storytelling. Some of Jackie’s stories contained factual material, but in the final analysis, they were historical fiction, aimed at her particular niche market. When she finished this latest commission, she would begin a new series with Anna as the central figure.
Odd Job
He sat typing on his laptop on his penthouse-floor deck, overlooking Lake Michigan. His response, confirming his latest commission was: “Your deposit has been verified, I plan to fulfill the contract within six weeks. Thank you, Odd Job.” He closed the computer and resumed his morning routine. Chicago was hot and projected to be hotter during the afternoon when massive storms would reach them from the southwest.
Rack Angelis was amused by the column he’d been reading earlier in the Sun Times. It was another