“Yours obediently,
“Sir Leigh Hunt, Special Envoy to Russia,
“The Foreign Office”
“My, my,” Perlmutter said. “That certainly sounds like they were up to something, if this Pelikan is a Russian vessel.”
“Quite so. Let me see what I can find on these two ships.” Trehorne walked to the other room, perused his library for a few minutes, and returned with a pair of hardcover books and an old atlas of the Mediterranean.
“Let’s start with vessels of the Russian Imperial Navy.” He opened the first book. “The Pelikan. Yes, here it is. It was actually a submarine. One of the Bars class, the largest of the Russian subs, at sixty-eight meters and six-hundred-and-fifty-ton displacement. Her hull was laid down in September 1915 and she entered service the following April, assigned to the Black Sea Fleet. The Pelikan supported the Caucasus Campaign and saw action off the Danube in 1916. She was listed as missing in action and presumed sunk by Turkish warships off Chios in February 1917.”
“Chios, Greece?” Perlmutter said. “She must have snuck through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.”
?
?A risky move during the war,” Dirk said. “Prompted by special cargo?”
“She was a large boat for the day, so theoretically she could have carried a sizable cargo of bullion,” Trehorne said. “A crafty move, if that’s what it was, sliding it right under the nose of the Ottomans.”
“Nicholas may not have had much choice,” Perlmutter said. “The Imperial gold reserves were held in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Perhaps he knew that St. Petersburg was about to fall, and that it was too risky to send the gold north. There was still the overland route to Vladivostok, but I believe his loyalist forces were strongest in the south.”
“That is true,” Trehorne said. “The rise of the loyalist White Army was centered in what is now Ukraine. So in the waning hours of Nicholas’s reign, that may have been the safest route.”
“Where is this Epanohoron Cape, the designated rendezvous point?” Summer asked.
Perlmutter consulted the atlas. “It’s the northern point of the Greek island of Chios. The same region where the Pelikan was listed as sunk,” he said with a raised brow.
“If she sank in February, then it is questionable whether she made her rendezvous with the Sentinel,” Dirk said.
Trehorne opened the second book. “Let’s see what the Royal Navy has to say about our second vessel. Here it is. The HMS Sentinel was a scout cruiser built in 1904. She served in the Mediterranean Fleet during much of the war, based out of Malta. She struck a mine and sank off Sardinia in March 1917.”
“A couple of unlucky vessels,” Summer said.
“She sank in March,” Dirk said. “That means she came nowhere close to sailing to Liverpool after the rendezvous.”
“Quite right,” Perlmutter said.
“Which means the gold is still on her—or, more likely, the Pelikan,” Summer said, excitement in her voice.
Trehorne nodded. “It would seem to be a strong possibility.”
Summer looked at her brother. “What do you say? It’s a nice time of year to take a visit to the Mediterranean.”
“That sounds good to me, but there’s one problem.” Dirk gazed at the picture of the Russian submarine. “We’re not likely to be the only ones making the trip.”
47
Sixty miles east of Odessa, a mud-splattered pickup turned off a narrow dirt road and into a pasture. The flat property was no different than the neighboring farms that stretched as far as the eye could see except for two vehicles parked behind a strand of trees. One was a large green semi-trailer truck, the other a sleek Peregrine unmanned aerial vehicle.
Martin Hendriks emerged from the trailer with an assistant and greeted the driver. “You are right on time.”
“Colonel Markovich sends his regards.”
“Was the delivery made without incident?”
The driver, an overweight man with a thick beard, nodded. “Yes, the Russians handed them over to us in Sochi. They thought we were dockworkers putting them on a ship to Africa.” He laughed. “They have no idea that they’ll be seeing them again.”
He walked to the back of the pickup, removed a tarp, and uncovered four Vikhr laser-guided antitank missiles, commonly deployed on Russian attack helicopters. “We accepted delivery of twelve missiles and, per your directive, kept eight for our use.”