no such man that I know of.”
“Of course it wasn’t written in 1942,” said Kapustin. “So it must be code of some type—perhaps something in that newspaper clipping? But why, my friend? What is Volsky trying to pull with this stunt? He must have suspected we were watching him, and all the other senior officers. Is this his way of thumbing his nose at us? Saying he’s on to us?”
“Admiral Volsky is a very serious man, Gerasim. And given the situation in the Pacific I can hardly believe he would have time for such games.”
“Well there is more. We saw several armed men accompanying this Anton Fedorov to the Primorskiy Engineering Center across the bay early this evening. Fedorov is the Starpom aboard Kirov. We left a man there to keep an eye on the place, and he reported that the Chief Engineer from the ship and a party of five technicians moved a long container into a truck and took it to the airport.”
“A weapon of some kind? Was it a missile?”
“We thought as much at first, but who knows? Well I should know. Yes? I am the Inspector General of the Russian Navy! I should know, but they had Marines crawling all over the place.”
“And this Fedorov returned to the ship as well?”
“We could not confirm that. He must have slipped out somehow, because we had men search the entire Engineering Center, and it was empty. The ship left two hours later, a little before midnight. The whole damn fleet has deployed!”
“It was inevitable, Gerasim. So you won’t have any ships to inspect for a while and you can take that vacation you’ve been missing.” He smiled, and Kapustin folded his arms, frowning. Kamenski took a more serious tone.
“This Orlov referred to in the note. Who is he?”
Volkov spoke up now, sounding like the perfect tattletale. “He was the Chief Operations Officer aboard Kirov, and was listed as a casualty.”
“Yes,” said Kapustin. “The only man Moscow confirmed from the Naval Records Bureau. When you called to ask about that old photo of the Japanese with that missile part I wondered what you were up to, Kamenski. So now you can wonder what we are up to. This Orlov was reported missing in action. Now we have a Marine sent from the Naval Headquarters at Fokino to the Logistics Building and he retrieves this strange letter from a dusty old storage bin. Volsky obviously sent the man. What is this about?”
“The third man mentioned in the letter…Who is he?”
“Bukin? We found out that he is a Marine Corporal assigned to Kirov’s detachment. He was one of the men accompanying Fedorov to the Engineering Center tonight.”
“Well this is very curious. The note says the Starpom is headed to Kizlyar to look for this missing Operations Chief. That’s a very long trip.”
“The ship’s Captain Karpov and the others were very evasive when I began sniffing around that casualty list,” said Kapustin.
“Yes,” Volkov put in. “I had to haggle with that doctor to even get the list!”
“Let me ask you something, Inspector General. I don’t suppose you bothered to check on anything in the ship’s library while you were aboard Kirov.”
“Library? You mean the books? I was there to count men and missiles, not books, Pavel.”
“Of course. But I am willing to bet there were books in that library when that ship left Severomorsk that are not there now tonight as it leaves Vladivostok. Did you not find it even passing strange that all the ship’s logs and records were mysteriously damaged by this accident, but not the ship’s fire control systems and communications? They all just had a flutter and now they work fine again? Did you bother to confiscate any hard drives from the ship’s computer to see if they had been tampered with?”
“That thought occurred to me, but there was very little time with this business brewing up in the Pacific. The damage control teams were working all over the ship to get it ready for operations again. I couldn’t start ripping computers apart. The IT personnel said they had restored those drives and had vital ship information re-written to them.”
“How convenient. And then your time ran out.” Kamenski finished his friend’s next thought.
“I assure you that I pressed on this matter very firmly.”
“It was the ship’s Captain,” said Volkov. “He was an obstruction from the first moment we set foot aboard Kirov. In fact, he flatly refused to answer our questions about these missing men, not to mention