Beard
Yeah.. Some Stalker reported a strange glow on the dredger at night - it's weird, even for the Zone. Go there and check it out. Just be careful and remember! The place is heavily irradiated, so take antirads with you. Don't be careless.
Reward
3000 RU and Cache Coordinates.
Notes
As soon as you pick up the artifact, three Stalkers will spawn outside. One of them, called Tuna, will confront you as you're leaving the tug and ask for the artifact. If you give him the artifact, he'll sprint to Skadovsk and give it to Beard, failing the quest and robbing you out of the Pioneer achievement.
- If you're nice(i.e. don't threaten him) he'll give you 1500RU to cheer up.
- If you're lucky, he can die on the way to mutants or bandits, but this is very random.
If you refuse to give him the artifact for whatever reason, he'll let you go but ambush you with his two buddies seconds later, demanding the artifact back. You can either give it up(holster your weapon and wait) - see above - or fight your wait out, which can be very dangerous, especially at higher difficulty levels.
- Killing Tuna and immediately hiding back inside the Tug seems to be easiest wait out of this. First, talk to him and refuse to give up the artifact. Now take out the weapon in the second slot and walk away. As soon as they ambush you, turn around 180 degrees, shoot Tuna in the face then sprint back inside. Wait for the other two Stalkers to stop spamming grenades then take them out.
- For some reason, having first slot weapon out as they ambush you makes them shoot you as soon as the cutscene ends.
- Of course, if the player is not above metagaming, he can kill Tuna and his buddies as soon as he sees them. One of them can be taken out from inside the room with the artifact itself before you even see Tuna, for example.
- There seems to be no way to avoid Tuna alltogether; as soon as you jump inside the Tug only way out is through him, there's even an invisible wall to stop you from jumping over the railing outside.
The Anomalous Steering Wheel is more or less useless, as all it does is irradiate you. It can't even be used as a flashlight, despite the fact it's supposed to emit a lot of light.