"Mmmmm,," Napoleon moaned as he came to in total darkness. He had no idea where he was. Then it hit him… where was his partner?

He remembered they were together when they stepped out of a salty old bar located along the docks in the port city of Vancouver in Canada.

Napoleon reached to his aching head and felt the sizable lump on the back it.

"Illya? You here buddy?"

"Yes, and would you get your leg off me please?"

"Both my feet are on the floor."

A second passed before Kuryakin responded.

"Beg pardon, we appear not to be alone, though the leg that I just removed from my stomach belongs to someone who is quite cold, and I would therefore assume is dead."

"Peachy," Solo mumbled. "Where do you think we are?"

"I would presume from the smell salt water as well as the motion, which is making me a bit nauseous, that we are possibly in the cargo hold of a ship. My head is throbbing; do you have a lump on your head, as I certainly do."

Solo exhaled before grumbling, "Yes and that makes me venture a guess that we were shanghaied

"Agreed. Shall we try to find a way out of here my friend?"

"I thought you'd never ask tovarisch."

They very carefully moved forward in the dark, feeling their way along in complete darkness; they touched what felt like stacks of furs until they could finally see a red emergency light over an exit. The door wasn't locked but it moaned as it was opened making Napoleon cringe. All they could do was hope no one heard it.

Stepping out into a corridor; there was no sign of anyone.

They could hear the sounds of the ship's engines and as they climbed upwards, taking several metal staircases, they found their way to the crew's quarters and then the galley with no one in sight. At last they exited to the deck.

It was frigid as the winds blew, they were surrounded by nothing but water with no land in sight. The ship was apparently moving full steam ahead but where was the crew?

"There is the bridge," Illya pointed. "Someone has to be there piloting the ship."

They had been relieved of their guns and feeling the need for defensive weapons they grabbed an axe that had been secured to the wall near an emergency fire hose. Illya found a crowbar laying nearby on the deck.

Both men thought it odd the tool seemed abandoned there but then this whole situation seemed odd. The two of them being shanghaied, a dead body in the hold and now not a living soul in sight on a mysterious ship.

Though once in a while they craned their necks as they swore they heard voices, in the end it may have just been the wind.

They arrived at the bridge and like the rest of the ship they found it empty. No one was at the controls piloting the vessel.

"Should we power it down?"Illya asked.

"Yes, yes that's a good idea," Napoleon didn't sound sure of himself, which was unusual."That will require one of us going down to the engine room, assuming no one is there."

Illya felt uncomfortable with the idea of separating from his partner.

"Let's just try doing this first, what the heck," Napoleon said. He grabbed the handle of the brass chadburn, turning it to stop, normally that would signal the engineers to power the vessel down.

The agents both felt it, the cargo ship was slowing, until it indeed came to a stop.

"I'd say that means someone is still on board," Napoleon said.

"I have a very bad feeling about this, I say we gather some supplies and launch a lifeboat."

Illya wasn't happy about the prospect of doing that as he knew he'd probably get seasick, but it seemed a better option than staying where they were. He was holding back about how unsettled he really felt. Part of him said it was a ghost ship, but the realist in him squelched those feelings.

Napoleon had learned a long time ago to trust his wily partner's gut instincts. So they waited a few minutes until it was clear that no one was coming to the bridge. Napoleon decided then to go along with Illya's plan.

After loading supplies that consisted tins of what seemed like freshly baked loaves of bread, large cans of fruits and vegetables, water and rain gear as well as a portable radio, they launched the lifeboat.

As they rowed away from the ship Illya asked for a piece of the bread to help settle his stomach, but when Napoleon reached for it the loaves of bread crumbled into dust. The once shiney tin cans were rusted and swollen as if they were about to explode. The water was rancid.

Luckily it wasn't long before they were picked up by the Coast Guard, but when Illya told them the name of the cargo ship on which they'd found themselves, he was laughed at and looked at like he was off his rocker.

"The Baychimo? You've got to be joking!" The Coast Guardsmen wouldn't elaborate.

It wasn't until Solo and Kuryakin had returned to New York where they learned the story of the SS Baychimo after Illya's curiosity had been piqued and he researched the vessel.

"Napoleon," he read his findings to his partner, "the Baychimo had apparently started out as a German trading vessel before being given to Great Britain after World War I as part of reparations. It came under the ownership of the Hudson Bay Company, and made many voyages across the Atlantic from Scotland to Canada to trade with local Inuit tribes."

"In 1931 while journeying to Vancouver with a cargo of furs, the Baychimo fell victim to an early winter, as ice surrounded the ship and locked it in its grip. The crew escaped and fled across the ice floes to safety,"

"Some of the crew returned a few days later to try to rescue the ship and its valuable cargo. After a month of braving the weather in a flimsy camp, a blizzard hit and the remaining crew lost sight of the ship. Once the storm had cleared, the had Baychimo disappeared."

"It was assumed it had sunk without trace but a week later the ship was spotted by an Inuit hunter. The captain decided the ship was too badly damaged to be seaworthy and abandoned the idea of retrieving it, thinking it would soon break apart.

"Over the years, the Baychimo had been sighted a number of times, sometimes caught fast in ice, other times floating ghost-like across the water… there are claims that people have been taken aboard it against their will, never to be seen again."

"You really believe that tovarisch?" Napoleon snickered. "I thought you didn't hold store in anything supernatural."

"Supernatural? I do not know...still there is no plausible explanation for what happened to us, nor who it was who shanghaied us either."

Napoleon was shocked; he'd never seen his partner stymied before. Maybe Illya was finally starting to believe…

A/N: the legend of the ghost ship Baychimo II is a true story….though I added the bit about people being shanghaied. mwa-ha-haaaa!