Arkin finally was able to translate the verbal onslaught. “The eerie boat is out on the Aral Sea, a hulk like all the rest, but Karl told Yusuf that there was something special about it, something ‘magical,’ is how he described it. It was a couple of days after they explored the wreck that Karl made his request to go to Moscow.”

Cabrillo asked, “Can Yusuf show it to me?”

“Yes. He said if you two left at first light, you can reach it by the afternoon.”

Juan wasn’t keen on roughing it out in the desert, but he realized that there was no help for it. He had a counterproposal and asked through Kamsin if they could leave now and camp on the way. The old man seemed reluctant until Juan pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket. Yusuf’s one good eye lit up again, and he nodded until Juan thought his head might roll off his scrawny neck.

Twenty minutes later, with Arkin’s help getting provisions, which included a fifth of what passed for premium vodka in these parts and which set Cabrillo back the equivalent of eighty cents, the two of them drove out across a wasteland that had once been the bottom of a lake, a wake of dust, not water, boiling into the air behind them.

Chapter Seven

As the name implies, the Aral Sea, the “Sea of Islands,” once had thousands that dotted its windswept waves. Today, they poked up from what had once been the seafloor like mesas in the American Southwest, lonely sentinels on an otherwise desolate plain. After a near-sleepless night in which the temperatures plunged into the forties and Cabrillo was forced to wedge himself into the rear cargo area because Yusuf had passed out in the backseat, the empty vodka bottle clutched in a bird-like claw, they were up again shortly after the sun.

Yusuf navigated using his vast knowledge of the islands. He had been a fisherman as the water levels ebbed and recognized the shape of each one even now as he had to look up at them from their very bases. As they passed each former island, he would point to a new heading, as sure of himself as if he were reading a map and consulting a compass. There was no need for GPS in your own backyard, and for sixty-plus years all of the Aral Sea had been the old fisherman’s domain.