Clive Cussler - Spartan Gold
“Along with the blueprints?”
“Those, too.”
“The problem is,” Remi said, “that was forty years ago. A lot could have changed in that time. Who knows what the new owner has done since you were there.”
Bohuslav held up a finger in triumph. “Hah. You are wrong. This man, Bondaruk, last year he hired me to come to Khotyn and consult on restoration. He wanted help making it look more like Zaporozhian Cossack period. I spent two weeks there. Except for decoration, nothing has changed. I went almost anywhere I wanted, mostly without escort.”
Sam and Remi exchanged oblique glances. Upon hearing about Bohuslav’s offer from Selma, their first concern was that Bondaruk was setting a trap for them, but upon further contemplation they’d decided this was unlikely, primarily because of Sam’s Inverse Law of Power and Assumption of Invulnerability, but also because of a suspicion that had been nagging at them since their journey had begun: Was Bondaruk, having had little luck unraveling the riddle on his own, letting them run free in hopes that they would lead him to what they’d dubbed Napoleon’s Gold? It was possible, but still it didn’t change their options: Keep going, or quit.
But, however unlikely the trap scenario, they were still curious about Bohuslav’s motivation. The amount he was asking for—fifty thousand Ukrainian hryvnias, or ten thousand U.S. dollars—seemed a paltry amount given what Bondaruk would do to him should his betrayal be discovered. Sam and Remi suspected desperation, but about what?
“Why are you doing this?” Sam asked.
“For the money. I want to go to Trieste—”
“We heard. But why cross Bondaruk? If he’s as bad as you say he is—”
“He is.”
“Then why risk it?”
Bohuslav hesitated, his mouth twisting into a frown. He sighed. “You know about Pripyat, yes?”
“The town near Chernobyl,” Remi replied.
“Yes. My wife, Olena, was there when she was younger, when the nuclear plant exploded. Her family was one of the last to get out. Now she has cancer—of the ovaries.”
“We’re sorry to hear that,” Sam said.
Bohuslav gave a fatalist shrug. “She has always wanted to see Italy, to live there, and I promised her we would someday. Before she dies I’d like to keep my promise. I’m more afraid of breaking my promise to Olena than of Bondaruk.”
“What’s to keep you from simply turning around and selling us out to Bondaruk for a higher price?”
“Nothing. Except that I am not a stupid man. What would I do, go to him and say, ‘I was going to betray you, but for more money I will not’? Bondaruk does not bargain. The last man who tried that—a greedy policeman—disappeared, along with his family. No, friend, I would rather deal with you. Less money, but at least I will be alive to enjoy it.”
Sam and Remi looked at one another, then back to Bohuslav.
“I’m telling you the truth,” he said. “You give me money, and I promise: You will know more about Khotyn than Bondaruk does.”
CHAPTER 35
Leaning over the chart table under the dim red glow of the lamp above it, Remi used the compass and dividers to plot their current position. She used the pencil clamped between her teeth to jot a few calculations along the chart’s margin, then circled a spot on the course line and whispered. “We’re there.”
In response, Sam, standing at the helm, throttled down the engines and turned off the ignition. The fishing trawler coasted through the fog, the water hissing along her sides until she slowed to a stop. Sam ducked out the pilothouse door, dropped the anchor overboard, then came back inside.
“It should be off our port bow,” Remi said, joining him at the window. He lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the darkness off the bow, at first seeing only fog and then, faintly in the distance, a slowly pulsing white light.
“Nicely done,” Sam said.
This point three miles off the lighthouse had been the critical waypoint for tonight’s journey, and as their rented boat had not come equipped with a GPS navigation system, they’d had to rely on dead reckoning, using their course, speed, and the occasional recognizable landmark picked out by the short-range radar to guide their way.
“If only that were the hard part,” Remi replied.
“Come on, let’s get suited up.”
The night before, after agreeing to Bohuslav’s price and calling Selma to approve the money transfer to his account, they’d followed the Ukrainian to the Balaclava train station and waited in the car while he retrieved a leather satchel from one of the rental lockers. A quick scan of the satchel’s contents seemed to confirm Bohuslav was on the level—either the sketches, notes, photos, and blueprints inside were genuine or they were dealing with a professional forger.
Back at their hotel in Yevpatoria, fifty miles up the coast from Sevastopol, they laid the contents of the satchel out on the bed and went to work, with Selma watching on via webcam. After an hour of cross-checking what they already knew about Bondaruk’s estate, they were sure Bohuslav’s material was the real deal. Every entrance, every stairwell, and every room in the mansion was accounted for, but more importantly so, too, were the rumors about Bogdan Abdank’s smuggling tunnels. Khotyn was riddled with miles of them, starting in the cliff face below the mansion, where cargo was unloaded, and branching into myriad storage chambers and exits, some of which emerged from the earth almost a mile beyond the estate’s grounds.
More surprising was the discovery that the Zaporozhian Cossack had not been the only one to take advantage of the tunnels. Every subsequent occupant, from the Crimean War’s Admiral Nakhimov to the Nazis to the Soviet Red Army, had used them for a variety of purposes: ammunition depots, fallout shelters, private brothels, and in some cases as vaults for their own spoils of war.
However, the one piece of information they most needed was missing from Bohuslav’s information—where precisely Bondaruk might be keeping his bottle from Napoleon’s Lost Cellar.
“Of course, there’s another possibility,” Remi said. “Perhaps he’s got it locked away somewhere else.”
“I doubt it,” Sam replied. “Everything about Bondaruk’s personality suggests he’s a control freak. He didn’t get to where he is by leaving the important stuff to chance. Something he’s this obsessed about he’d want to have close at hand.”
“Good point.”
“Assuming that’s right,” Selma said over the webcam, “there might be some clues in the blueprints. If he’s a serious collector—and we know he is—then he’s going to keep his most prized pieces in an environmentally controlled area—that means separate air-conditioning units, humidity-control systems, backup power generators, fire suppression. . . . And he’ll probably have it separated from the rest of the mansion. Check Bohuslav’s notes for any mention of those things.”
It took an hour of work, picking their way through Bohuslav’s chicken-scratched notes, which were written in both English and Russian, but finally Remi found a room in the mansion’s western wing that was labeled SECURE UTILITY ROOM.
“The location fits,” Selma said.
“Here’s something else,” Sam said, reading from another note: “ ‘Denied access western side.’ Add that to the secure utility room and we may have found our X.”
Ironically, the mansion itself was laid out in the shape of a peace symbol, with the main portion of the house in the center, two wings radiating out to the southeast and to the northeast, and a third wing to the west, and all encircled by the low stone wall.
“The problem is,” Remi said, “the plans show the smuggler’s tunnels merge with the mansion in two places—at the stables a couple hundred yards north of the house and in the southeast wing.”
Sam replied, “So we either have to hoof it—no pun intended—across the open ground to the west wing and hope we find a way in, or come up on the southeast wing and pick our way through the house and pray we’re able to dodge the guards.”
Surprising neither of them, Selma had found them a reliable equipment source in Yevpatoria, an old Soviet Red Army surplus store run by a former soldier turned body-shop mechanic. Their outfits for the evening were a pair of Cold War-era naval commando camouflage coveralls; their transport a five-foot rubber dinghy complete with a battery-powered electric trolling motor.
Suited up, their faces streaked with black face paint, they inflated the raft, affixed the motor to the transom, then lowered the raft over the side of the fishing boat, donned their backpacks, and climbed in. Remi pushed the trawler’s gunwale and within seconds it disappeared in the fog. Sam turned the motor’s ignition and it hummed to life. Sitting on the bow, Remi aimed her compass at the lighthouse, then lifted her hand and pointed into the fog.
“Damn the torpedoes,” Sam said, and throttled up.
The trolling motor was quiet, but slow, pushing them along at three knots, barely a walking pace, so it was an hour before Remi, who had kept a steady fix on the lighthouse’s pulsing beacon, raised her hand, calling a halt. Sam throttled down.
All was quiet save the waves lapping at the raft’s sides. Fog swirled around them, obscuring all but a few feet of black water around them. Sam was about to speak when he heard it: in the distance, the muffled crash of waves. Remi looked at him, nodded, and pointed again.
Ahead lay their first hurdle. Given the nature of the Black Sea’s currents they’d decided to approach from the south; while they wouldn’t be fighting the tide, they would have to pick their way through the spires of rock that jutted from the bay beneath Bondaruk’s estate, a dicey proposition in the dead of night, let alone in the fog. Worse still, assuming Bondaruk had guards posted on the cliffs, they’d decided against flashlights. On their side they had Remi’s keen hearing and Sam’s quick reflexes.
Moving at half throttle he aimed the raft’s nose in the direction Remi had indicated for thirty seconds then throttled down. They listened. To their left and right, distantly, came the hiss of waves. Eyes closed, Remi turned her head this way and that, then pointed a few degrees left off the bow. Sam throttled up and kept going.
After twenty seconds, Remi’s hand shot up. Sam let up on the throttle, keeping on just enough power to hold position. In the sudden quiet they heard the crash of waves, very close, to the right. Then more on the left. And behind. They were surrounded.
Suddenly dead on the bow, a towering rock wall veined with rivulets of whitewater appeared in the fog. The waves, stacking atop one another in the shoals beneath them, lifted the raft and shoved them forward.
“Sam!” Remi rasped quietly.
“Hold on! Drop flat!”
The spire loomed before the bow. Sam waited until the raft dropped into a trough, then twisted the throttle to its stops and pushed it hard right. The propeller bit down, shooting them toward the spire before veering away. The rock swept past on the left and disappeared in the gloom. Sam drove on for a ten count, then throttled down again. They listened.
“Closer on the right, I think,” Remi whispered.
“Sounds closer on the left to me,” Sam replied.
“Toss a coin?”
“No chance. Your ears are better than mine,” he said, and steered left.
“Stop,” Remi called ten seconds later. “Do you feel that?”
“Yeah,” he replied, looking around.
The raft was moving sideways, and gaining speed. They felt their stomachs rise into their throats as the raft was lifted on another crest. Ten feet to the right they caught a glimpse of jagged rock and then it was gone, lost in the fog.
“Paddles,” Sam called, and grabbed his from the floor of the raft. In the bow, Remi did the same. “Sharp eyes . . . ” Sam muttered.
“Behind you!” Remi called.
Sam turned, paddle coming up in his hands like a spear.
The spire was right there, within arm’s reach.
He slammed the tip of the paddle into the rocks, then leaned all his weight into it and pushed, but the wave was too powerful and the raft simply rotated around the pivot point the paddle created.
“Coming around,” he called between clenched teeth.
“Got it!”
Remi was already moving, turning on her knees to face the other side, her paddle raised and ready. With a splintering thunk she slammed it into the rocks. The raft, its momentum slightly slowed, bounced off the rock and spun again.
Sam leaned back, dropping his center of gravity back into the raft, and reached for the throttle. His hand was halfway there when he felt his stomach rising again and heard the suddenly unmuffled whirring of the motor as the raft’s tail end came out of the water.
He had only a fraction of a second to call “Remi” before he felt himself tossed into the air. Knowing the rock was close, but not how close, he turned his head, looking for it. Then out of the fog he saw it rushing toward his face.
CHAPTER 36
Seconds or minutes or hours later Sam felt his mind groping back toward consciousness. One by one his senses started to return, beginning with a feathery sensation on his cheek, followed by the distinct and familiar smell of green apples.
Hair, he thought, hair brushing my face. Coconut and almonds.
Remi’s shampoo.
He forced open his eyes and found himself staring into her upside-down face. He looked around. He was lying in the bottom of the raft, his head resting on her lap.
He cleared his throat. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Am I okay?” Remi whispered. “I’m fine, you dummy. You’re the one that almost drowned.”
“What happened?”
“You slammed headfirst into the spire, that’s what happened. I looked over just as you started to slip into the water. I threw you the line. You hadn’t blacked out yet. I shouted at you to grab the line and you did. I reeled you in.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Twenty, twenty-five minutes.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “My head hurts.”
“You’ve got a gash in your hairline; it’s pretty long, but not very deep.”
Sam reached and probed with his fingertips, finding a stretchable bandage wrapped around the upper part of his forehead.
“How’s your vision?” Remi asked.
“Everything’s dark.”
“That’s a good sign; it’s night. Okay, how many fingers am I holding up?”
Sam groaned. “Come on, Remi, I’m fine—”
“Humor me.”
“Sixteen.”
“Sam.”
“Four fingers. My name is Sam and you’re Remi and we’re floating in a raft in the Black Sea trying to steal a bottle of wine from Napoleon’s Lost Cellar from a mafia kingpin. Satisfied?”
