Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

A little past noon, a shape started to form on the horizon, shimmering out of the desert heat. Beyond it was another island, a palisade of rock that rose sheer and vertical like the walls of a fortress. As they drew nearer, the image resolved itself from an amorphous lump on the desert floor to yet another ship, this one a little larger than the typical fishing boats they’d stumbled upon, though smaller than the car ferry. Judging by its condition, it was older than many others too. The sea had been given much more time to erode steel, and the underwater creatures had had plenty of time to eat their way through the ship’s wooden decking. Yusuf thrust a crooked finger at the derelict with finality.

“Eerie lodka?” Juan asked.

“Da.”

Cabrillo swung the truck until it was parallel to the old ship, which he judged to be a hundred feet in length and quite beamy. She would have handled the seas well, and he wondered what had sunk her. The island was close enough that on a moonless night a careless navigator could have slammed into a rock peaking above the surface and holed the hull.

This side showed no such damage. Some plates were buckled from when she hit the seafloor, but that was all. She had the remains of an A-frame crane over her rear deck and a sloping stern that would have allowed her to deploy and then reship her nets. The bridge was a glassless cube hunched over the bows, the open window frames like mouths caught in a terrible scream.

Juan killed the UAZ’s engine and stepped to the ground. At his foot, embedded in the salt and dust, was a ceramic coffee cup, a substantial piece of pottery befitting the harsh life aboard a fishing boat and the big hands of the men who worked her.

Yusuf joined Cabrillo, and together they walked around the ship, inspecting its hull. On the far side, Juan saw the evidence he thought he would, a long gash below the waterline that ran for nearly a third the ship’s length. She had hit some rocks near the island, and this amount of damage would have capsized her in moments. It might have been possible that some of the crew managed to swim to the island a quarter mile distant. It all depended on the weather. A rough sea would have crushed them against the unforgiving stone.

The old Uzbek suddenly threw up his hands and made a strangling sound in his throat. He jerked a thumb at the fishing boat. “Nyet eerie lodka.”

He pointed to a long depression in the ground a hundred yards farther on. Like some mythical monster climbing out of the earth, the remains of another ship looked like they were rising from the shallow trench as though the rim was a wave and the vessel was struggling to crest it. “Eerie lodka,” Yusuf announced.

This one looked to be much older than the ship behind them. Her length was impossible to determine because only her first thirty or so feet rose above the lip of the trench. She was narrow in the beam. She had a good amount of foredeck, which was surprising for a fishing boat since all the work took p

lace at the stern, and her superstructure looked more befitting a yacht than a commercial vessel.

Rather than circle back around to the truck, Cabrillo strode across the desert toward the other ship. Yusuf trailed him, using his walking stick to steady his uneven gait.

The old ship had a sharp prow and dual anchors still tucked tight against their hawseholes. Her entire skin was of a uniform rust color, not a fleck of her original paint remained. Juan reached the edge of the ravine and looked down. Her single funnel rose out of the sand ten feet from where her hull disappeared into it, the metal flakey from erosion. Using the funnel as a reference, Cabrillo guessed she was about seventy feet long in total. She had the straight vertical lines of a ship much older than the nearby fishing boat. She reminded him of a turn-of-the-century luxury cruiser, something out of the end of the Victorian age.

This wasn’t the workboat of the local fishing industry or a ferry to bustle peasants across the Aral. This was a rich man’s toy, perhaps belonging to a member of the old royal family who vacationed along the inland sea’s shores. But that made little sense. Why would the tsar and tsarina want to vacation in this backwater of their kingdom?

A local oligarch? Someone from before the revolution who made a pile of money and had the ship built on the Aral? The boat was much too big to have been transported here whole, even by rail, and there were no oligarchs left after the Bolsheviks were finished.

Juan suddenly saw this ship as an anomaly. There was something to her presence here that had piqued Karl Petrovski’s interest, and he felt it too. This wasn’t the type of vessel to be plying these waters. He looked around at his surroundings. She shouldn’t be here in a desert either, he thought.

The ship’s bow was undamaged, so he had to assume that whatever had sunk her showed up in the parts of the hull that the sands had swallowed.

Yusuf finally shuffled up and tapped Cabrillo on the arm to guide him around the prow to where someone, presumably Petrovski, had piled stones up against the hull high enough for him to climb over the gunwale. Juan scaled the cairn and gripped the metal skeleton that was all that remained of the rail and pulled himself up, twisting his fists as he pivoted and leaving skin behind as he managed to throw a leg over and gain the deck.

There was little left of the original wood—teak, he supposed—so he was forced to step across the metal ribs that had survived the ravages of time. Below him he could see an empty space that had once carried cargo, or it could have been a forward cabin. Now it was a mound of windblown dust.

A narrow passage between the rail and superstructure allowed him to gain access to a single watertight door that had been wrenched from its hinges and lay drunkenly against its jamb. Crawling through was a tight fit, and halfway into the ship itself Cabrillo paused, his back pressed against the sandy floor. Yuri Borodin was a lot of things, but he was not a details man. He embraced the big picture, the larger view, the grand scope. He saw strategy, not tactics. Minutia bored him. Why the hell would he waste his last words leading Cabrillo to drag himself into a derelict ship in a barren no-man’s-land?

This was wrong on so many levels that Juan skidded himself back out so that he was hard against the gunwale again. Yusuf stood below him, looking up with his one good eye.

The shot hit perfectly, blowing a cone of tissue out of the old man’s neck so that his head fell to his chest and then obscenely dropped again as if there were nothing holding it to his body. A cloud of blood hung in the air, the sniper’s proverbial pink mist. Yusuf folded to the ground. It was as if he had dropped to his knees in prayer, but with his face planted in the sand there would be no supplication to Allah. He was dead long before he hit the ground.

Then came the sharp whipcrack of a rifle shot and the echo of the round as it passed through Yusuf’s throat and pinged off the ship’s hull.

A second later, Juan was back under the ajar door, all thoughts of doubt erased. He went from being contemplative and analytical to survival mode in as much time as it took the auditory aspect of the gunshot to catch up to the visual.

He was in a narrow space no bigger than a phone booth with an iron ladder that led up to the bridge. Sunlight filtered down from above, showing how exposed he would be up there as well, but, with no choice, he climbed. A layer of sand coated the deck when he emerged in the wheelhouse. Most of the fittings had long since been scavenged. The wheel and binnacle were gone, as were the engine telegraph and the chart table. What little brightwork remained behind was blackened and pitted, and what he assumed had been teak paneling was nothing more than a papery veneer turned gray with age.

Cabrillo stayed low under the large window openings that ringed three sides of the bridge. The fourth wall was blank except for some metal brackets, which had perhaps held a fire extinguisher or other such gear, and a door leading aft. He crawled to it and peered into the hallway beyond. The passage was also lined with blanched wood, and there were bits of rotted carpet still attached along the crease where wall met floor. A mere three feet aft of the bridge door, the entire space was filled with sand all the way to the ceiling.

He was trapped.

He went back out to the bridge and cautiously peeked over a window frame in hopes of spotting the sniper. A round slammed into the metal an inch from his head, punching a hole through the eroded steel as though it were no more solid than gauze. Four sizzling holes appeared where Cabrillo had crouched a second before. And four tiny geysers of sand erupted from the floor next to his prone form as the bullets struck the deck.

Cabrillo slithered to a new position, knowing the sniper couldn’t see him because he’d figured out the man was halfway up the side of the nearby island/mesa, though he wasn’t sure of the exact location.

Another fusillade raked the bridge, punching holes through its thin metal skin, as the sniper hoped for a lucky shot hitting his quarry. Juan had tucked himself up close to the forward wall, where the corner frame member offered better protection. The hot air on the bridge was filled with dust kicked up by the rounds plowing into the floor.