Spartan Gold

CHAPTER 34

SEVASTOPOL

Sam pulled their rented Opel coupe off the dirt road and coasted to a stop a few feet from the cliff’s edge. Sunset was an hour away and the sun was already dropping toward the western horizon, cast ing the surface of the Black Sea in tones of gold and red. Directly below them the palisades of Cape Fiolent plunged directly into the blue-green water and just offshore dozens of spires of jagged rock jutted from the water, each surrounded by a whirlpool of churning surf.

In the distance, a gull cawed, then went silent, leaving only the sound of wind rushing through Sam’s open window.

“A little foreboding,” Remi murmured.

“Just a tad,” Sam agreed. “Then again, it does suit his reputation.”

The “he” in question was Hadeon Bondaruk. Knowing that without another bottle with which to complete the next lines of the cipher, Sam and Remi had chosen the only course open to them: stealing Bondaruk’s bottle.

It was a dangerous if not foolish idea, but their adventures had taught them a number of things, one of which Sam had dubbed the Inverse Law of Power and Assumption of Invulnerability. Given Bondaruk’s power and notoriety, who in their right mind would try to steal from him? Having reigned as Ukraine’s mafia kingpin for so many years, Bondaruk, like many powerful men, had likely begun to believe his own press. Certainly he and his property were well guarded, but, like muscles that haven’t been exercised for many years, there was a fair chance his security had grown lax—or at least that was the theory.

Of course, neither of them were ready to risk such a venture on guesswork alone, so they had asked Selma to do a feasibility study: Were there any exploitable weaknesses in Bondaruk’s home security? There were, she found. One, he kept his antique collection on display at the estate, along with a small team of experts who maintained and supervised the pieces. Two, the estate itself was sprawling and steeped in history, a piece of which Selma felt certain might offer them a way in.

They climbed out of the car, walked to the edge, and gazed north. A mile away along the undulating coast, perched before a rock bridge jutting from the cliff face, was Bondaruk’s hundred-acre estate, officially named Khotyn. The bridge, undercut by millennia of erosion, extended to a pillar of rock that rose from the ocean like a skyscraper.

Bondaruk’s home was a five-story, thirty-thousand-square-foot Kievan Rus-style castle, complete with steeply pitched slate roofs, deep-set gabled windows, and onion-domed copper minarets, all surrounded by a low white-stuccoed stone wall and serpentine groves of evergreen trees.

Khotyn began its life in the mid-eighteenth century as home to a Crimean Khanate chieftain whose line had split from the Mongol Golden Horde in the sixteenth century to settle in the area. After a hundred years the chieftain’s clan was ousted by Muscovite Russian forces led by a Zaporozhian Cossack hetman who claimed it as a spoil of war only to have it taken from him thirty years later by a yet more powerful hetman.

During the Crimean War, Khotyn was commandeered by Tsar Nicholas II’s most prominent Black Sea Fleet admiral, Pavel Stepanovich Nakhimov, to serve as a retreat, after which its role changed four times, first as a museum dedicated to the Siege of Sevastopol; then as a Wehrmacht headquarters during World War II; then again as a military summer house for Soviet high commanders after the city was liberated. From 1948 to the fall of the Soviet Union Khotyn fell again into ruin, sitting mostly abandoned until Bondaruk purchased it from the money-starved Ukrainian government in 1997.

Given the estate’s rich history, Selma had had little trouble finding plenty of tantalizing research trails to follow, but in the end it was one of the basest of human motivations—greed—that gave away the chink in Khotyn’s armor.

“Give me the story again,” Sam told Remi as he stared at the estate through his binoculars.

“His name was Bogdan Abdank,” Remi replied. “He was the Zaporozhian Cossack who took it over from the Mongols.”

“Right.”

“Seems Abdank was only a part-time Cossack. The rest of the time he was a smuggler—fur, gems, liquor, slaves—anything he thought he could sell on the black market, he trafficked. Problem was, there were plenty of other Cossack clans and Kievan Rus warlords who wanted to take over Abdank’s action.”

“But old Bogdan was crafty,” Sam replied, warming to the subject.

“And industrious.”

According to the online archives Selma was able to unearth in the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kiev, Abdank had used slave labor to dig into the cliffs and hills surrounding Khotyn a series of tunnels in which to hide his illicit goods. Cargo ships laden with Romanian sable or Turkish diamonds or Georgian prostitutes bound for the West would weigh anchor in the waters below Khotyn for off-loading into launches, which would then disappear into the night, ostensibly for further off-loading into the smuggler’s tunnels beneath the mansion.

“So, more caves in our future,” Remi said now.

“Looks like it. The question is, how familiar is Bondaruk with Khotyn’s history? If the tunnels exist, does he know about them, and has he sealed them up?”

“Better still: Has he followed in Abdank’s footsteps and put them to use?”

Sam checked his watch. “Well, we’ll know shortly.”

They had a contact to meet.

As it turned out, Selma’s research into Khotyn became something of a one-stop shopping trip, giving them not only a hint about how they might sneak into Khotyn, but also, hopefully, a road map of exactly how to go about it.

The archive curator at Taras Shevchenko University, a man named Petro Bohuslav, hated his work with a passion and he desperately wanted to move to Trieste, Italy, and open a bookstore. After some parrying, he’d made his pitch to Selma: For the right price he was willing to share a set of rare, as yet unarchived blueprints of Khotyn, as well as his personal knowledge of the grounds.

They found him in a mom-and-pop restaurant overlooking the Balaclava marina, a few miles down the coast. Night had fully fallen by the time they arrived and the interior of the café was dimly lit by hurricane lamps on each table. Soft kobza folk music played over loudspeakers hidden by hanging ferns. The air smelled of sausage and onions.

As they entered, a man in a corner booth lifted his head and studied them for five long seconds, then put his face back into his menu. A hostess in a bright red shirt and white blouse approached them. Sam smiled and nodded at the man and they made their way through the tables to the booth.

“Mr. Bohuslav?” Remi asked in English.

The man looked up. He had receding white hair and a bulbous drinker’s nose. He nodded. “I am Bohuslav. You are Mr. and Mrs. Jones?”

“That’s right.”

“Sit, please.” They did. “Something to eat? Drink?”

“No, thank you,” Remi said.

“You want into Khotyn, yes?”

“We didn’t say that,” Sam replied. “We’re writers doing a book on the Crimean War.”

“Yes, your assistant told me. Tough woman, that one.”

Remi smiled. “She is that.”

“So, this book you are writing—it is about the Siege of Sevastopol or the war?”

“Both.”

“You need special details. You are willing to pay?”

“Depends on the details,” Sam replied. “And how special they are.”

“First, tell me: You know who lives there now?”

Remi shrugged. “No, why?”

“A bad man bought Khotyn in the nineties. A criminal. His name is Bondaruk. He lives there now. Many guards.”

“Thanks for the information, but we’re not planning an invasion,” Sam lied. “Tell us about you. How do you know so much about the place? Not just from the blueprints, I hope.”

Bohuslav grinned, displaying a trio of silver front teeth. “No. More than that. You see, after the war, after we drove the Germans out, I was stationed there. I was a cook for the general. After that, in 1953, I moved to Kiev and worked at the university. Started as a janitor, then became research assistant in the history department. In 1969 the government decided to make Khotyn a museum, and they asked the university to head the project. I went with others from the department to do a survey. Spent a month there, mapping, taking photographs, exploring. . . . I have all my original notes and sketches and photos, you see.”

“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.”