The Forbidden Territory

by Dennis Wheatley

  Simon nodded. “I thought as much.”

  “Yes, that’s who he was, tho’ he didn’t let on about it that first meeting. Just said he was a Russian émigré, down and out. We talked a bit, mainly as to what sort of damages he’d get out of our Dago friend. He was a gentleman all right—got all het up ’cause he couldn’t offer me any hospitality when I called. Well, then, you know how it is when you’ve done a chap a sort of kindness; you feel he’s your baby, in a way, and you’ve got to go on. So I saw the American representative about getting his case pushed on, and of course I had to call again to tell him what I’d done.”

  “Was the Dago worth going for?” inquired the cautious Simon.

  Rex shrugged his broad shoulders. “He wasn’t what you’d call a fat wad, but he was agent for some fruit firm. I thought we might sting him for a thousand bucks. Anyhow, in the meantime, I became great friends with old wicked face—used to go to the hospital every afternoon for a yarn with the old man. Not that I really cottoned to him, but I was fascinated in a kind of way. He was as evil as they make ’em, and a lecherous old brute, but I’ll say he had charm all right.”

  “Surely,” remarked the Duke, “Shulimoff must have had investments outside Russia before the Revolution. How did he come to be in such a state?”

  “He’d blown every cent; got no sense of money. If he’d got a grand out of the fruit merchant he’d have spent it next day. But money or no money, he’d got personality all right; that hospital was just run for him while he was there. He tipped me off he was pretending to be a Catholic; all those places are run by nuns, and he knew enough about the drill to spoof them all; they fairly ran round the old crook! After I’d been there a few times he told me his real name, and then the fun started. He wouldn’t open his mouth if anyone who could speak a word of English was within fifty yards; but, bit by bit, he told me how he’d cheated the Bolshies.”

  “Are you sure he was not amusing himself at your expense?” asked the Duke. “He seems just the sort of man who would.”

  “Not on your life. He was in deadly earnest, and he’d only tell a bit at a time, then he’d get kind of nervous, and dry up—say he’d thought better of it—if the goods stayed where they were the Bolshies would never find them till the crack of doom; but if he told me, maybe I’d get done in after I’d got ’em, and then the Bolsheviks would get them after all.”

  “And where had he hidden this famous hoard?” De Richleau asked with a smile.

  “You’ve hit it.” Rex threw up his hands with a sudden shout of mirth.“Where? I’m damned if I know myself!”

  “But, Rex—I mean,” Simon protested. “You—er—wouldn’t risk getting into all this trouble without knowing where they were?”

  “I’ve got a pretty shrewd idea,” Rex admitted. “They’re at Romanovsk all right, and I was getting right down to the details with the old prince, when—”

  “What happened? Did he refuse at last to tell you?” The Duke’s shrewd grey eyes were fixed intently on Rex’s face.

  “No, the old tough just died on me! Rotten luck, wasn’t it? He seemed all right, getting better every day; but you know what old men are like. I blew in one morning and they told me he was dead. That’s all there was to it!”

  “Surely, my friend,” De Richleau raised his slanting eyebrows, “you hardly expected to find the jewels at Romanovsk on so little information. Remember, many people have been seeking this treasure on all the Shulimoff estates for years.”

  “No, it’s not all that bad,” Rex shook his head “When things blew up in Leningrad in 1917, Shulimoff didn’t wait to see the fun; he cleared out to this place here, bringing the goods with him. He thought he’d be safe this side of the Urals till things quietened down, or if they got real bad, he meant to go farther East. What he forgot was that he was the most hated man in Russia. The Reds sent a special mission to hang him to the nearest tree, and they did—as near as dammit! Took the old fox entirely by surprise. He’d have been a dead man then if some bright boy hadn’t cut him down for the fun of hanging him again the next day! It was the old man’s cellar that saved him. The bunch got tight that night, and they’d locked him in the foundry without any guards outside.”

  “The foundry? In the village was this?” asked the Duke.

  “Lord, no, in his own house. He seems to have been a bit of a metallurgist—made locks, like Louis XVI, in his spare time, when he wasn’t out beating peasants or hitting it up with chorus girls from the Folies Bergère.

  “This foundry was a kind of laboratory and study all in one. I reckon they chose it as his prison because it was one of the only rooms that had strong iron bars to the windows. That let them all out for the drunk! All being equal in the Red Army, no one wanted to miss a party to do sentry-go.”

  “How did he get out, then,” Simon asked, “if the windows were barred?”

  “Easy; he had all his gear in the foundry, so he cut those bars like bits of cheese with an oxy-acetylene lamp. But the old man kept his head—as luck would have it, the jewels were in the foundry. He wouldn’t risk taking them with him, in case he was caught, so he occupied the time while the Reds were getting tight in making something at his forge to hide ’em in.”

  “What was it?” came Simon’s eager question.

  “Now you’ve got me,” Rex shook his head. “That’s just what I never squeezed out of the old fox before he went and died on me.

  “It was some sort of metal container, and he put the stones inside. It was something that’d look like part of the fittings of the foundry, and something that nobody would trouble to take away. He soldered it in, too, I gathered, so that nobody could shift it without breaking the plant. You should have heard that wicked old devil chuckle when he thought how clever he’d been!”

  “I can hardly imagine that it can still be there,” said De Richleau, thoughtfully; “the place must have been ransacked a dozen times. They would not have overlooked the plant in the foundry, especially a portion which had been newly forged!”

  “Old Shulimoff was an artist. I’ll bet it’s there to this day among a mass of rusty machinery. He realised they’d spot the new bit, so he had to make it all look alike. What d’you think he did?”

  “Don’t know,” said Simon.

  “Set fire to the house, and then legged it through the snow. That foundry can’t have been much to look at, even if there were any Reds left to look at it next day. He reckoned that he’d get back there when things were quieter, but he never did. He was lucky in falling in with a party of ‘White’ officers, and later they all got over the Persian frontier together. I’ll bet—”

  But they were never to know what Van Ryn meant to bet. The crack of a whip brought them scrambling to their feet. Twenty yards away the sleigh had leapt into motion. They had all been so interested in listening to Rex that they had forgotten to keep an eye on their prisoner. He had stealthily harnessed the horses while their backs were turned. The Duke drew his automatic and fired over Simon’s shoulder; the bullet hit an intervening tree and ricocheted with a loud whine. He ran forward, firing again and again, but the sleigh was rounding the bend of the track at full gallop on the road to Tobolsk. Rex snatched up the prisoner’s rifle, but he threw it down again in disgust. Nobody could hit a moving target through those trees.

  They looked at each other in real dismay. They were now utterly helpless in the depths of the Siberian forests, an easy prey to the hunters who would soon be on their tracks. It could only be a matter of hours until they were captured, or dead of cold and exhaustion in the wastes of these eternal snows.

  Chapter XIV

  The Secret of the Forbidden Territory

  It was Rex who broke the unhappy silence. “If we’re not the world’s prize suckers,” he declared bitterly, “I’d like to know who are!” And he began to roar with such hearty laughter that the Duke and Simon could not forbear joining in.

  “This is no laughing matter.” De Richleau shook his head. “What the devil are w
e to do now?”

  “Walk,” said Simon, the ever practical, and in truth it was the only thing they could do.

  “Good for you,” Van Ryn exclaimed, patting him on the shoulder with one large hand while with the other he picked up the rifle and the strap of Simon’s rucksack. His cheerful face showed no hint of his quick realisation that the pace of the party must be that of the slowest member, or his anxiety as to how many hours it would be before Simon’s frail physique gave out under the strain. He only added: “Come on, let’s beat it.”

  De Richleau collected his things more slowly. “Yes,” he agreed, “we must walk—at least, until we can buy or steal horses. But which way?”

  “To Romanovsk,” said Rex. “That way’s as easy as any other, and I’d sure like to have a cut at those jewels before I go back home.”

  “As you wish.” The Duke gently removed the ash from his cigar. “We have had no time to tell you our own adventures, Rex, but there is one little episode which makes me particularly anxious to avoid capture.”

  “Give me that sack and let’s hear the worst,” Rex remarked casually, as he slung the Duke’s rucksack over his shoulder next to Simon’s.

  “My dear fellow, you can’t carry two!” De Richleau protested, “particularly after having driven all night.”

  “I certainly can,” Rex assured him. “I’d carry a grand piano if I felt that way, but I’ll give ’em back quick enough if I get tired, don’t you worry. Let’s hear just how you blotted your copybook!”

  “An agent of the Ogpu followed us as far as Sverdlovsk. If his body should chance to be discovered, and we are captured, it might prove a little difficult to explain,” said the Duke mildly.

  Rex whistled. “You gave him the works, eh? Great stuff; but if that’s so, they’ll not be content to put us behind bars this time; it’ll be we three for the high jump!”

  “We—er—hid the body,” Simon remarked; “if we’re lucky they won’t find it till the spring.”

  Side by side they walked down the cart-track, and turning into the road set their faces to the north. “I’ll say we’re lucky today anyhow,” Van Ryn threw out; “if it had snowed last night we’d not make a mile an hour without snowshoes, as it is the going won’t be too bad on the frozen crust.”

  They trudged on for a long time in silence; there was no traffic on the long, empty road, and the intense stillness was only broken by a hissing thud, as a load of snow slid from the weighted branches of the firs, and the steady drip, drip, as the hot sun melted the icicles hanging from the trees.

  It must have been about half past nine when Rex suddenly stopped in his tracks—he gripped the others tightly, each by an arm, as he exclaimed: “Listen—what’s that?”

  A faint hum came to their ears from the westward. “ ’Plane,” said Simon, quickly. Even as he spoke Rex had run them both into the cover of the trees at the roadside.

  “It’s a ’plane all right,” he agreed, “but that engine’s like no other that I’ve ever heard—and I know quite a considerable piece about aeroplane engines.”

  All three craned their necks to the sky from the cover of the larches—the deep, booming note grew louder, and a moment later the ’plane came in sight, It was a small, beetle-shaped affair, flying low and at very high speed; it turned north when it was over the road, and passed over their heads with a great roar of engines. In a few seconds it was out of sight, and in a few minutes out of hearing.

  “The hunt is up, my friends,” laughed the Duke, a little grimly. “These will be more difficult to throw off the trail than bloodhounds.”

  “Somehow, I never thought of being chased with ’planes,” Rex admitted. “That certainly puts us in some predicament!”

  “We must stick to the forest,” Simon answered. “Follow the road as long as there are trees, and leave it when there aren’t.”

  As they journeyed on other ’planes came over; that it was not the same one going backwards and forwards was certain—since the numbers on each were different. Each time one came over Rex strained to catch a glimpse of the design, so different to anything he had seen before. The others cursed the necessity of stopping every twenty minutes, and often having to make long detours to keep under cover when the trees left the road.

  Simon talked little. He was not used to exercise, and knew that if he were to come through he must husband all his energy. De Richleau, in spite of the fact that he was far older than either of the others, walked briskly. It seemed that in this new adventure he had regained something of the vitality of his earlier years; even if he was a little out of training, his body was free of any superfluous flesh, and his tough sinews were rapidly regaining their elasticity.

  It was Van Ryn who kept up the spirits of the party. Two months in prison—far from quelling his natural exuberance—seemed to have made him relish his freedom all the more. He told them of his capture when hidden in a coal truck on the military train from Turinsk to Tobolsk—of how he had used the lumps of coal for missiles when they had tried to arrest him. There must have been quite a number of sore heads and aching limbs among that detachment of Red Guards on the following morning, but in the end he’d had to throw in his hand; being sniped from four different angles with the snipers a hundred yards away was no fun for a man only armed with lumps of coal—however big that man happened to be.

  Then De Richleau gave an account of his and Simon’s activities since their arrival in Russia.

  Simon was thinking of Valeria Petrovna—would he ever again, he wondered, behold her wonderful exotic beauty—touch the warm, golden softness of her skin, or feel her faintly perfumed breath on his cheek. Never would he forget those marvellous nights in Moscow, with a million stars shining in the frosty darkness from her window that overlooked the Moskawa River. It seemed absurd to think that he had only spent a week in Moscow. His well-ordered office in London, with its quiet, efficient routine, its telephones and typists—all seemed incredibly remote, like people and things in some former life. What would his able, unimaginative partners think if they could see him now? An accessory to a murder—on a forced march to escape capture by the police—and going where? After some absurd treasure buried by some mad prince. He gave one of his quick, sideways glances at his two companions. Surely the whole thing was a dream—a nightmare—and he would wake up in his comfortable bedroom at his club! Even as he turned his head the slight pressure of Valeria Petrovna’s ikon against his chest assured him that it was all very real indeed.

  They had halted in sight of the first houses of a small village. De Richleau and Van Ryn began to discuss the advisability of raiding some lonely farmhouse for horses and a sleigh; the Duke was for an immediate attempt to obtain them at all costs—by purchase, if possible, and if not, by force.

  Van Ryn was against this—he argued that if they were to get a sleigh now, in the early afternoon, they would almost certainly be spotted by the aeroplanes, since they would be forced to remain on the road. By comparing a big sweep in the river with their map, he pointed out that it could not be more than five miles to Romanovsk, so he proposed that they should stick to the woods and walk the remaining distance. By nightfall they would be safe from aeroplane observation. He was willing enough to beat up any farm if need be—but let it be after dark!

  Simon sided with Rex, and so it was settled; they made a wide detour, leaving the village on their right. The forest was of larch and pine, with little undergrowth, and in its shelter they found walking easier, for the heat of the sun had started to thaw the frozen crust of the road, and progress on it had become increasingly difficult.

  It was during this detour that they saw the first flight of big ’planes. They were crossing a wide clearing at the time, and dodged hastily back among the trees. Six giant ’planes, flying in perfect formation, and at less than a thousand feet, roared over their heads—they were followed by six more, and yet another six, in quick succession.

  De Richleau looked at the other two. “This is very strange; the sm
all ’planes which we saw all the morning may have been searching for us, but we can hardly suppose that they would turn out flights of bombera on our account!”

  “Must be an air-park somewhere around,” suggested Rex.

  “Jack Straw told us to keep our eyes open for anything military up this way,” nodded Simon.

  “If it is,” drawled Rex, “it’d sure interest the secret service folks in Washington.”

  “An air-park,” murmured the Duke. “And you say, Rex, that these ’planes are of a completely different type to those generally used in Europe and America?”

  “Sure, the wings are set at a different angle, and they’re shorter—you can see how much more like dicky-birds they look than ours.”

  They continued their way through the forest, but after they saw the first squadron of big bombers, the hum of innumerable aeroplanes was always in the background, loud or faint, breaking the silence of the afternoon.

  In threes or in sixes, or singly, the sky was rarely free of them as they swooped or hovered, practising their evolutions.

  They had just breasted a slight rise when they first saw the fence; it stretched away on either hand, some fifty yards in front of them, the height of a man, and formed of six strands of copper wire, which shone brightly in the sunlight—the wires stretched taut throughout steel uprights. It looked innocent enough, but De Richleau, at least, had seen fences of that type before—on the enemy frontiers during the War.

  As they walked up to it, he laid his hand on Simon’s arm: “Be careful, it is almost certain to be electrified—it would be instant death to touch it!”

  Rex pointed to a dead ermine that lay a few feet away. “Sure thing, that poor feller crashed it. I guess he never knew what hit him. I’ll say they’re mighty keen to keep people out of their backyard in these parts.”