Spartan Gold

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?”

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.