Spartan Gold - Clive Cussler

“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?”

She gave him a quick peck on the lips. “You’re right on all counts except the raft part.”

“What?”

“After I pulled you in, I beached us. I’m not sure where we are.”

“You navigated through the rest of the spires? Heck, you should have been driving the whole time.”

“Dumb luck and desperation.”

“Sounds like a good name for a boat. How is it, by the way? The raft, I mean.”

“No leaks that I could find. We’re still seaworthy.”

“What time is it?”

“Just after midnight. Feel up to having a look around?”

More remarkable even than Remi having picked her way through the spires without suffering so much as a scratch was that she’d found the patch of shale beach on which the raft now rested. Measuring no more than ten feet deep and twenty feet wide, the beach narrowed in both directions to stone paths no more than two feet wide.

Once Sam was on his feet and had shaken out the cobwebs, they first set out to the south, but found the way blocked by a rock wall after only a few hundred yards. To the north they fared better, walking almost a half mile before coming across a rickety wooden stairway set into the cliff. They climbed to the top and looked around.

Here, high above the ocean’s surface, the brisk wind had driven the fog away, but far below, the ocean was still shrouded in mist. Using the compass, they got their bearings. Sam said, “Well, you either headed farther south of the estate or past it to the north. How long was it until you found the beach?”

“Twenty minutes. But I made several loops, I’m sure, so don’t count on that.”

“How was the current?”

“For the most part, choppy and almost dead on the bow.”

“Probably headed south, then.” Sam lifted the binoculars and started scanning. “Do you see the light—”

“In fact, I do. There it is,” she replied and pointed. Sam looked down her outstretched arm. “Wait for it,” Remi whispered.

A few seconds passed, then in the darkness a single white light pulsed.

“No more than two miles away,” Sam said. “We’re still in business.”

Ten minutes later they were back in the water and motoring north, taking care this time to keep within hearing distance of the waves hissing against the cliff face. It was slack tide now and the swells were slow and rolling, but still Sam and Remi were keenly aware that somewhere to their left were the spires. Ebb tide or not, neither of them wanted to risk another run through the labyrinth.

After thirty minutes of travel, Sam throttled down and let the raft coast forward. Remi looked over her shoulder, a questioning look on her face. Sam held a cupped hand to his ear and pointed off the bow and whispered, “Boat.”

The rumble of a high-powered engine at near idle echoed through the fog, seemingly crossing from left to right somewhere ahead of them. There came the squelch of a radio, then a tinny voice saying something neither Sam nor Remi could make out.

Ten seconds passed.

To their right, a spotlight glowed to life in the haze and began tracking over the water nearer the beach. After thirty seconds the light popped off and the boat began moving off, heading back the way Sam and Remi had come.

“Bondaruk’s guards?” Remi whispered.

“Or a Ukrainian navy coastal patrol,” Sam replied. “Either way, they’re someone we don’t want to run into. If it is part of Bondaruk’s security, we can take it as a good omen.”

“How’s that?”

“If we’d been spotted, they would have sent more than one boat.”

For the next hour they continued moving north along the coast while playing cat-and-mouse with the mystery patrol boat, which continued to move unseen through the fog around them, engines gurgling and spotlight occasionally glowing to life, scanning over the water, then disappearing again. Three times Sam had to use the trolling motor to circle slowly away from the panning light.

“It’s on a schedule,” Remi said. “I’ve been timing it.”

“That will come in handy,” Sam replied. “Do your best to keep track of it.”

“It has to be Bondaruk’s. If it were the navy, why would they be patrolling this same patch of water?”

“Good point.”

After a few more minutes the boat’s engine noise once again faded and Sam put the raft back on course and before long they saw the glow of lights to their right, high up on the cliff. Remi took a bearing on the lighthouse and said, “That’s it. That’s Khotyn.”

With Remi perched in the bow, eyes scanning ahead, Sam steered toward shore. Remi’s hand came up, pointing left. Sam veered that way and saw to their right the cliff face materialize out of the fog. He turned parallel to it and kept going.

The hum of the trolling motor changed its tone, echoing off stone walls as they slipped inside the bridge beneath the estate. From the drawings and blueprints of the island, they knew it was a cavernous open-ended tunnel, measuring eighty feet high and two hundred yards wide and running parallel to the shore for a hundred yards. Large enough to accommodate a medium-sized cruise ship.

“We have to risk a light,” Sam whispered.

Remi nodded and pulled from her pocket a cone-nosed flashlight, which she clicked on and began playing over the passing rock.

“Now we see if Bohuslav is the real deal or a con man,” Remi said. The words had no sooner left her mouth when she murmured, “Well, speak of the devil. Call me a believer. There, Sam, right under my beam. Back up, back up.”

Sam eased up on the throttle, then reversed, inching backward until they drew even with the spot from Remi’s flashlight.

Jutting from the rock face at chin height was what looked like a rusted railroad spike; a foot above it was another, then another. . . . Sam leaned his head back as Remi scanned the flashlight upward, revealing a ladder of staggered spikes.

CHAPTER 37

If they stick to their schedule they’re already headed back this way,” Remi said. “Four or five minutes away at most.”

The presence of the patrol boat had dramatically changed the linchpin to their exit strategy: the raft. If they left it here it would almost certainly be found and the alarm would be raised, and there was no time to find a place to stash it, which left only one option.

They donned their backpacks and then Sam found a pair of handholds in the rock face and held the raft steady as Remi used his shoulders as a step stool to the first spike. Once she had ascended high enough to make room for him, he flipped open his Swiss Army knife and slit the raft’s side tube from bow to stern, then gripped the spike and pulled himself onto the face as the raft sank below him with a soft hissing sound.

“Time?” Sam asked.

“Three minutes, give or take,” Remi replied, and started climbing.

They were halfway to the top when Sam heard the rumble of the outboard engines to their right. As had the raft’s trolling motor, the tone of the patrol boat’s engines suddenly changed, echoing through the arch.

“Remi, company’s arrived,” Sam muttered.

“I’ve got a tunnel opening here,” she replied. “It goes horizontally into the face, but I can’t see how far—”

“Any port in the storm. Just go.”

“Right.”

The gurgle of the boat’s engine was directly below them now, skimming along the face. Sam looked down. While the boat itself was invisible in the fog, he could see the mist cleaving before it like smoke around an object in a wind tunnel. The spotlight popped and began playing over the cliff, zigzagging upward.

“I’m in,” Remi whispered from above.

Eyes alternating between the spikes above him and the rapidly ascending pool of light below him, Sam climbed the last few feet then suddenly felt Remi’s hand on his own. He coiled his legs beneath him and pushed off while simultaneously pulling with his arms. He rolled into the tunnel and jerked his legs inside as the spotlight hovered over the opening for a moment then continued on.

They lay huddled together in the darkness, Sam trying to calm his breath as they listened to the boat make its way through the arch and the engine noise finally faded.

“Is this the place?” Sam asked, pushing himself up onto his elbows and looking around. The tunnel was roughly oval in shape, roughly five feet tall and six feet wide.

“I’d say so,” Remi said, pointing.

Bolted to the ceiling at the mouth of the tunnel was a crisscross bulwark of thick tar-covered oaken beams supported by vertical timbers bolted to the walls. Dangling from the center of the bulwark was a rusted block-and-tackle pulley system linked by thick hawser rope to a hand-crank winch affixed to the uprights. A pair of narrow-gauge rails sitting atop wooden cross ties and crushed gravel ballast stretched into the darkness.

“Well, the winch isn’t original, that’s for sure,” he said. “Unless, that is, Zaporozhian Cossack technology was way ahead of its time. See here . . . those bolts are precisely machined. This might go back to the Crimean War, but my guess is World War II. Just look at the mitered joints . . . this thing could have lifted thousands of pounds.” He stepped up to the mouth of the tunnel and peered over the edge. “Ingenious. See how they placed this, just above this natural bulge in the face? Even in daylight it would’ve been invisible from the water.”

“I see it.”

“Wow, look at this—”

“Sam.”

“What?”

“I hate to stifle your imagination, but we’ve got a bottle of wine to steal.”

“Right, sorry. Let’s go.”

Having used Google Earth to draw up their own overhead sketch of Bondaruk’s estate, complete with angles and distances, as well as annotations from Bohuslav’s notes, they kept track of their steps as they headed into the tunnel.

Under the moving beam of their flashlights Sam could see signs of limited blast work along the walls, but it appeared most of the tunnel had been carved out the old-fashioned way, by hammer, chisel, and backbreaking labor.

Here and there on the floor were wooden toolboxes, coils of half-rotted rope, rusted pickaxes and sledgehammers, a pair of half-rotted leather boots, canvas coveralls that partially disintegrated when Remi nudged them with her shoe. . . . Attached to the right-and left-hand walls every ten feet were oil lamps, their glass globes black with soot, their bronze reservoirs and handles covered in a scabrous green patina. Sam tapped one with his index finger and heard sloshing inside.

After fifty yards of walking, Remi stopped, studied the sketch, and said, “We should be just under the outer wall. Another hundred yards or so and we should be directly under the main house.”

She was off by only a few yards. After another two minutes they reached a widened intersection, the tunnel and tracks continuing straight as well as to the right. Five old-fashioned ore carts sat in a line against the left-hand wall, while a sixth sat on the north-south tracks.

“Straight ahead to the stables, and right to the east wings,” Sam said.

“I think so.”

He checked his watch. “Let’s check out the stables first and see what we can see.”

After another half mile or so of walking, Remi stopped suddenly and placed her index finger to her lips and mouthed, Music. They listened in silence for ten seconds then Sam leaned in and whispered in Remi’s ear, “ ‘Summer Wind’ by Frank Sinatra.”

She nodded. “I hear voices. Laughing . . . singing along.”

“Yeah.”

They continued on and soon the tunnel came to a dead end at a set of stone steps leading upward to a wooden trapdoor. Sam lifted his head and sniffed. “Manure.”

“Then we’re in the right place.”

The music and laughter were louder now, seemingly coming from directly above their heads. Sam placed his foot on the lowermost step. At that moment, there came the thunk of a footfall on the trapdoor. Sam froze. Another foot joined the first, followed by two more, these lighter, somehow more delicate. Through the gaps in the trapdoor shadows moved, blocking and unblocking the light.

A woman giggled and said in Russian-accented English, “Don’t, Dmitry, that tickles.”

“That’s the idea, my lapochka.”

“Ooh, I like that. . . . Stop, stop, what about your wife?”

“What about her?”

“Come on, let’s get back to the party before someone sees us.”

“Not until you promise me,” the man said.

“Yes, I promise. Next weekend in Balaclava.”

The couple moved off and moments later there came the banging of a wooden door. Somewhere above a horse whinnied, then silence.

Remi whispered, “We’ve managed to stumble into one of Bondaruk’s damned parties. Talk about bad luck. . . .”

“Maybe good luck,” Sam replied. “Let’s see if we can make it work for us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Chances are decent that Bondaruk is the only one who knows what we look like.”

“Oh, no, Sam.”

He grinned. “Remi, where are your manners? Let’s mingle.”

Once certain there was no one about, Sam climbed the steps, lifted open the hatch, and had a look around. He turned back to Remi. “It’s a closet. Come on.”

He climbed up and held the hatch for Remi, then closed it behind her. Through the open closet door was another space, this one a tack room dimly lit by theater-style lights along the baseboards. They stepped through and out the opposite door and found themselves on a gravel alleyway bordered on both sides by horse stalls. Overhead was a high vaulted ceiling with inset exhaust fans and skylights through which pale moonlight filtered. They could hear horses snorting softly and shuffling in the stalls. At the far end of the stable, perhaps thirty yards away, was a set of double barn doors. They walked to them and peeked out.

Before them lay an acre-sized expanse of lush lawn surrounded by chest-high hedges and flickering tiki torches. Multicolored silk banners fluttered on cross wires suspended over the lawn. Dozens of tuxedoed and evening-gowned guests, mostly couples, stood in clusters and strolled about, chatting and laughing. Waiters in stark white uniforms moved through the crowd, occasionally pausing to offer hors d’oeuvres and cocktails. The source of Sinatra’s “Summer Wind,” pole-mounted loudspeakers strategically placed around the lawn, now emitted a soft jazz number.

To Sam and Remi’s right they could see the upper floors of Bondaruk’s mansion, its onion-domed minarets silhouetted against the dark sky. To the left, through an entrance gap in the hedges Sam could see a gravel parking lot packed with several million dollars’ worth of Bentleys, Mercedeses, Lamborghinis, and Maybachs.