by K. T. Tomb
“Same plan?” she asked. “Or do you want to search to the north this time?”
“Let’s try the north tonight.”
“And then tomorrow night we’ll split up?” Nora grinned.
“We’ll see,” he answered. “Maybe we’ll find the cache tonight.”
The plan they’d laid out with Miko had been for her to be with Andrik for three nights and, later, fly to Miko in the Gatali and work one night with him. That would allow her to gather information from both agents before returning to Bucharest to make her weekly report, which would be telegraphed to Alfred in London.
Despite Andrik’s iciness, Nora was excited to do her job.
No, she was exhilarated. This, she knew, was the life she’d always dreamed of.
Dreams do come true, she thought, and followed Andrik out of the hotel room.
Chapter Twenty-six
Miko was looking forward to the evening before him.
Nora would be coming to him soon and he had every intention of working his seductive prowess upon her. It wasn’t the same as seducing a mortal, of course; vampires were much more challenging, but he was up to the challenge. Since he’d departed from her in Bucharest, he had obsessed over her. Over and over again, her blazing, coppery hair haunted him to the point of madness.
He’d enjoyed the sweet fruit of mortals, they were a tasty snack and a delightful way to feed, but the delicious, savage and erotic pleasure of joining with another MI… ah, well, it was otherworldly. He imagined every inch of the pale skin of Nora’s curvaceous body. What would it be like to touch it, caress it, kiss it and drink in its delights?
In only a few hours, perhaps he would find the answers to his questions. Until then, he had unfinished business to tend to. It was business that wasn’t without its own pleasures. With the wings of a bat, he made his way across the Prout River, through a thick forest and to a stone monolith that rose up out of the slope of one of the walls of a narrow valley. Within that stone monolith was a cavern, within which he entered, dodging the thousands of authentic bats who were going out to find their nightly sustenance.
Miko came to the deepest portion of the cavern, alighted on its stone floor and quickly transformed back into his natural, MI state. Immediately, he heard the man’s cries struggling in the darkness, which, to Miko, was not darkness. He turned toward the sound, seeing his quarry in glowing infrared. He approached and delighted in the terrified screams as the man called out in the darkness.
“Please, please,” the man begged, his cold, Russian demeanor having been altered drastically by spending almost 24 hours within total darkness. Where he had once been a stern, disciplined colonel of the Russian army when Miko had obtained the opportunity to snatch him, the man was now to the point of madness. “I have a wife. I have children. Please, don’t leave them without a father. Please, I beg of you.”
“A father?” Miko asked. Had the man been able to see him, he would have noted the sneer. “All I see is a traitor.”
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know! Please!”
“Your tune has changed, Colonel.”
“Please. I’ll do anything.”
Miko grinned without warmth. He could hear the man’s pulse and smell his hot blood. Last night, the man had been belligerent and hostile. “Very well. I want you to tell me where you’ve cached the weapons in Wallachia.”
“We’ve cached no weapons in Wallachia.”
“Let’s try again. And please remember, you could very well die here alone, in the darkness, and never see your family again. A terrible tragedy, yes?”
“Please! I’m not lying to you. The weapons... they passed through Wallachia by way of the river, but they are not cached in Wallachia.”
“They’re not stockpiled on Balta Ialomitei?” Miko asked.
“No, we unload them on the other side of the river.”
“In Dobrudzha?”
“Yes,” the man replied.
“Impossible!” Miko snapped. The Russians would never be so bold and the Ottomans would never allow such a breach of their border security, even the border with Wallachia.
“There is a man there,” said the colonel. “He is a very powerful man. He has a place to hide them and he cannot be touched by the Ottomans. I swear that I am telling you the truth.”
“If what you say is true, then how do you unload the weapons?” Miko growled.
“There is a hidden channel from the river. The boats follow it into Lake Bugeac. At the far end of Bugeac, there is a hidden dock where the Esechioi Forest comes all the way down to the shore of the lake. We unload there and the weapons are carried up to a large cavern deep in the forest.”
Miko knew of the lake and of the forest, but he had never dreamt that the Russians would be so bold or even be able to cache weapons so close to an Ottoman stronghold. They were less than ten miles to the south and east of Silistra. A decent-sized force from there, making use of the element of surprise, would capture Silistra without breaking a sweat. It was boldly brilliant and Miko couldn’t help but admire the Russians for attempting it. It would fail, of course, he would see to that, but it was admirable for them to try.
“Can I go now?” the man asked. “I’ve given you everything I know; everything you wanted.”
“Not everything,” Miko responded. The throbbing vein in the man’s neck had been too much for Miko to resist. He plunged his fangs deep into it and began to feed on the sweet, warm sap that shot deep into his mouth. The man struggled against his bonds and screamed—oddly, this was one of the most pleasurable parts of feeding for Miko—but he finally ceased to move and fell quiet as the flow began to stream into the vampire’s mouth rather than plunging forcefully. Miko satisfied his hunger until the last trickle and then rose up from his lifeless victim.
“I have to ask to be excused,” he chuckled. “I have a very important meeting to attend.”
Transformed into a bat once more, Miko left the cavern, retraced his path through the forest, back across the Prout River and entered into Galati. In a secluded alley he’d used many times for the purpose, he transformed to his natural form again and made his way back to the hotel, noting his belly was still full.
“The delicious Nora will be here soon,” he muttered to himself. “I must prepare for her.”
In his room, he dressed in his finest attire, using the reflection from the water in the washbasin, since the silver in the room’s mirror made the object useless to him. He was admiring how he looked when he heard Nora’s soft tapping at his door.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Nora wasn’t happy with herself as she left Miko’s hotel the following evening, transformed into an owl and hurried back toward Bucharest. After all, she had an urgent message, which she’d just learned about, to telegraph to Alfred in London. Their theory had been confirmed and they now had an exact location. She ought to have been excited, but because she had given in to the powerful, seductive charm of Miko, she felt nothing but great regret and the enormous weight of her shame.
At first, she had resisted his advances, but Miko had a way about him. His touch had been like fire on her skin. The moment she felt it burning, in spite of her will to resist, the deeper instincts of her feminine essence overcame her. He caressed her and drank in every inch of her skin in a way that she had never experienced before. It aroused in her something that seemed helpless to resist.
Nora had allowed his kisses to travel all over her body, to cover even her pale breasts, her smooth stomach and flow further below. His kisses... released something savage within her, something unexpected and wild, and she found herself lost in a raging passion of a primeval nature that went well beyond the act of touching and of uniting their bodies. She had never known the sweet release of her body, mind, and spirit the way she did last night with Miko. She had never known that such pleasure even existed.
Once hadn’t been enough for her. She had gone with him, entering those erotic gates over and over until they had both colla
psed from exhaustion and drifted off into peaceful slumber.
When she awakened, she no longer stood before those gates and she was instantly adrift in an ocean of shame. Her first instinct was to flee. Without making a sound, Nora kept her eyes focused on Miko, gathered up her clothing, dressed, and quietly moved toward the door. She had her hand on the knob, ready to leave her shame behind.
“You might want to take my report before you go,” Miko called out.
“I have to go… I can’t…” She couldn’t seam the words properly.
“I understand,” he responded. “But I have important information for you to pass on to Alfred and to share with Andrik.”
“What information?”
“I know the exact location of the cache—and I know how they’re moving it there.”
In spite of her most urgent need to be away from him, Nora could not bring herself to ignore what he had to tell her. Without moving back toward him, she pressed her back against the door and listened to him as he revealed what he had learned from the Russian colonel. The ordeal of staying in the room and listening to his report had been difficult, but it was doubly so because he seemed to be taking so much time, leisurely prolonging his account and increasing her discomfort... and her desire for him.
“Is it so urgent for you to report? Can’t you stay a while longer?” he asked, rising up from the bed and displaying his nude body for her inspection as he strolled toward her.
Nora’s response had been to quickly turn around, open the door, and rush through it. Immature, certainly, but she had to be away from that man! She’d scurried down the hall, rushed out of the hotel and transformed, not caring if anyone happened to see her do it.
Now, she pushed the images and sensations out of her head. She was close to Bucharest and she needed to start organizing herself in order to send the message that she needed to send. It was not the scheduled time to send the message, which would, necessarily, encourage a great deal of urgency on the part of Alfred when he received it.
Realizing that she had been foolish to transform so publicly in Galati, she took more caution in Bucharest. When she was back in her natural form, she hurried to the telegraph office. There, the clerk was surprised to see her at such an early hour, but she quickly explained it away.
“I have an urgent message to send to my husband in London,” she lied. She would learn that all good spies lied as easily as breathing.
“Go ahead,” the clerk responded. He was poised with pen and paper to copy down what she dictated to him.
“First, look at me,” said Nora.
The man did, frowning, and once she had eye contact with him, she had him. He stayed frozen in that posture, with pen raised, hunched over the loose paper, as Nora moved around him and telegraphed the message herself. After all, it wouldn’t do to give the clerk state secrets. She would have to kill him, and she didn’t want to do that.
Nora took the pen and paper from him, snapped her fingers, and said, “Thank you for all your help. I will be at the Wallachia Inn. When the response comes, please send it to me with the utmost urgency. And, of course, you will not read it.”
“I will not read it,” he said, blinking and shaking his head.
Settled in her bed in her hotel room, she found sleep impossible. Not only was she anxious concerning the information she’d just forwarded to Alfred, but she was eager to rejoin Andrik so that they could confirm the information Miko had gotten out of the Russian colonel. She made an earnest attempt to push both of those worries out of her mind in the hope that she might relax and get some rest, but when she did, the image of Miko hovering over her with eyes burning with intense passion, and the sensation of pleasure that had coursed through her, slipped back into her mind. She threw back the covers and stepped out of bed.
Determined to focus on the mission, she pulled out a pen and paper provided in the desk by the window and sketched a map of the area at the south end of Balta Ialomitei. She recalled it from Andrik’s map, but she was also drawing on what she had seen with her own owl eyes as they had made their wide, turning circle over Silistra and had started to follow the Danube back toward Fetesti. She remembered the large lake and had marveled how it seemed to stand alone with no inlet or outlet to the river. That had to have been Lake Bugeac.
The mental exercise made her drowsy and, just before dawn, she slipped back under the covers of the bed. With a heavy sigh, she drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Twenty-eight
With Nora away, Andrik’s own searches had provided him with nothing.
It was safe to assume that the smugglers wouldn’t have been active every night, so patience would be the key. Now, he decided to approach this next night with a different strategy. Instead of flying high above the river, he would search along the surface; in particular, within the boats themselves. As a moth, he could eavesdrop on the conversations that were taking place onboard. Though he wouldn’t necessarily understand what they were saying, he did know the difference between the Slavic dialects of the region and Russian.
In the form of a bat, he flew to the river, landed in a tree and transformed into a moth. He saw the lantern on the first boat coming up the river and flew down to dance around it amongst a swarm of other moths. Alighting on the warm, wire handle, he paused and listened as crew members spoke to each other. After just a few phrases, he recognized the language as German. He remained on the lantern and watched the light of another boat coming down the river. When the boat drew alongside the one he was on, he fluttered across to the lantern on the other boat. In that way, throughout the night, he was able to eavesdrop on the conversations of nearly two dozen boats.
It was the early hours of the morning before he finally heard very distinct Russian being spoken on a boat that was heading up river.
This could be promising.
He stayed on the boat as it continued past the lowest point of Balta Ialomitei, where the eastern and western branches of the Danube split to form the island. The boat continued up the river for a short time and gradually began to slow and pull toward the Ottoman side of the river. Damn. There would be no reason for the Russians to be offloading weapons on the Ottoman side. He started to leave the lantern when he noticed that the boat was now pushing through some thick foliage. When the boat didn’t strike land after several, long counts, he started to grow curious.
Could the Russians be so bold?
Hidden from above by a thick canopy, the boat continued to follow the narrow channel through the thick undergrowth until it emerged in a lake.
Is this Bugeac? he wondered.
Since there was no fear of losing the vessel as it moved along alone, Andrik fluttered off of the boat and out into the darkness. Behind the tree line, he transformed into an owl so that he could gain some height and a better sense of where he was. As he rose above the lake, he instantly realized that the boat had passed between the Danube and the lake via a hidden channel that he and Nora would never have seen from the air. He wanted to grin.
Andrik continued to circle the lake, keeping his keen eyes on the boat as it continued the length of the waterway and began to slow as it neared the western shore. He noted that the forest on that side of the lake came all the way down to the very edge of the water and he wondered if there might be another channel, perhaps a dock, hidden in the thick woods, as well. He flew to a point in the dense brush, alighted on a stump, transformed into a fox and trotted through the forest in the direction of where he saw the boat enter the woods. As he drew nearer, he could hear voices. They were Russian voices and someone was barking out orders. He moved in closer and noticed the boat had been brought into a dock, tied off and a dozen or so men from the shore were helping to unload the crates from the boat.
Andrik was certain of one thing, that it was some sort of a Russian smuggling operation. Did those crates contain munitions? There was only one way to know for sure. He looked toward what appeared to be a cavern opening in a nearly-hidden rock face, itself covered in
vines and ferns growing from the many fissures. He noted bats returning from their nocturnal feeding, darting into the dark maw of the rock face. Andrik transformed into a bat and flapped hard to join the next wave of returning nocturnal creatures.
Andrik tried to stay close to the fluttering bats, but not become swept up with them, and also keep an eye on the crates being carried into the cave. When the group of bats turned into a side passageway, he broke away and continued down in the direction the crates were being taken; shortly, he emerged into a large room where nearly a hundred crates, similar to the ones being unloaded and brought into the cavern now, were stacked.
He flew to a shadowed corner of the room, attached himself to the ceiling and observed the events taking place. Within minutes, one of the crates was mishandled and broke open, and percussion rifles clattered to the stone floor.
Well, there you go, he thought.
“You idiots!” the man who had been barking out orders, bellowed in the regional dialect of the Dobrudzha, of which Andrik could mostly understand.
He waited until those who had dropped the crate were busy re-stacking the weapons, and launched himself into space, swooping down through the long corridor and toward the exit. He was nearly to the entrance when something closed in around him, tangling up in his wings. A net held aloft by a man with a long pole. Andrik fought the strands, but to no avail.
“What have we here?” the man chuckled. “A red fox, then a bat? Unless I’ve missed my guess, you would be a member of the mortal/immortal race, eh?”
Seeing only one chance to escape the net, Andrik transformed back into his MI state and swung with all of his might at the head of the man who held the net. The man leapt away from him with incredible quickness and dexterity; unfortunately, the man leapt to a point that closed off Andrik’s escape route. The vampire attempted to bulrush past him, but the man stood his ground and hurled Andrik backward with incredible force.