by Gordon Ryan
And how did they get in and out of the castle? Not driven, surely. Then loaded in a truck. But a truck couldn’t get in and out of that gatehouse. Which meant there had once been a second entrance.
Did Tess know?
There was a crack as another tree fell in the forest behind him. Two horses dragged yet another tree into camp. The meadow turned to mud under boots and hooves and dragged logs. He needed wood and lots of it. Pine for shelter and cook fires, hardwoods for his war engines and the blacksmith. The sound and movement reminded him of his immediate goal. Attack that gatehouse.
But tonight, under cover of darkness, he’d take a closer look at the exterior walls of the castle. There was a weakness there, he was sure of it.
Find the weak spot in any defense and a single, sharp blow could bring the whole thing crashing down.
Chapter Eighteen:
Transneft employee Yevgeni Arlovski was driving his Land Rover along the Belarus-Ukrainian border when he spotted the oil thieves. They ran a hose from their tap in the pipeline to their tanker. It parked right in the open, surrounded by grazing sheep who brushed away the snow to get the last of the autumn grass. One man worked at the truck, while the other stood watch with a shotgun.
Arlovski had a habit of coming over the top of a ridge at a crawl, then stopping to survey the subsequent valley from a safe distance. Dawn was a favorite time of oil thieves. Still nearly dark, but with no need for lights or other measures that would attract attention. This time, he hit the jackpot.
Instead of calling the local police, or even phoning back to headquarters, Arlovski watched them work through his binoculars. He also had a camera with a telephoto lens. He hadn’t survived thirty years and multiple regimes by being hasty. The loss of a few thousand liters of crude must be balanced against the possibility of tracking down a larger smuggling ring. And with a crew operating so openly, there was a good chance these two represented some corrupt local official.
It was a clever pair. They welded shut their tap when they finished and even spent a moment scraping or painting something onto the pipeline so that it wouldn’t be noticed by repair crews. A few minutes later, and they were off. Arlovski had pictures of the thieves, the truck and its license plate, and now he would go down and inspect their work.
A few thousand liters wouldn’t be noticed. But a hundred, two hundred thieves a day certainly were. And with oil prices sky-high, and the Russian government taking more firm control of the industry, Transneft had stepped up surveillance. Airplanes passed overhead, snapping pictures. Men like Arlovski patrolled the thousands of kilometers of pipeline that stretched across Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Arlovski returned to his truck and drove down to see what they’d done to patch the pipeline. Some sort of weld, it looked like. Transneft could get a team down here, inspect the pipeline in this part of Belarus, see if they could find similar evidence of theft.
This part of the pipeline rested on alternating mounds of earth and columns of cement blocks. The support wasn’t particularly sturdy looking, but it had sufficed for more than forty years, already. It cut through the Belarus countryside, maybe five, six kilometers from the closest village. The Ukrainian border lay to the south.
Arlovski looked at the thieves’ weld. Not hard to spot when you looked at it close, but who would do that? If he’d left it there, he wouldn’t have seen the bomb. But Arlovski was a careful man, a thorough man. He thought the thieves might have returned to this same spot, like fleas on a dog, biting again and again at the same exposed bit of skin.
He was about fifty meters beyond the tap when he saw wires poking from one of the concrete supports. He stepped closer with a frown. His heart lurched suddenly into a frantic sprint. A quick step backward.
The device snugged into the wedge between the support and the pipeline. It was about the size of a pack of cigarettes, but Arlovski didn’t have to know much about explosives to know it would open a huge gash in the pipe, light the oil on fire.
And what a fire. May as well light a huge stack of money ablaze and fly crop dusters across the countryside, spraying the fields, hills, and villages with poison.
He raced back to the truck and drove several hundred meters down the line before he made the call. No way to think standing close to that bomb. Borisenko was out. He got Borisenko’s assistant, Anton Kirkov, instead.
“But where is he? And when will he be back?”
“I’m not sure, exactly,” Kirkov said. “Safari in Africa, or something. He’s offline, could be weeks.”
Arlovski groaned. He had to talk to the oil minister.
“Maybe you could tell me,” Kirkov suggested. “Borisenko said you might call.”
Borisenko hadn’t given Arlovski any such warning, but then again, he hadn’t mentioned anything about a lengthy safari in Africa. And it was true that Kirkov had seemed unsurprised to receive a call from a Transneft nobody.
Arlovski had to tell someone. He’d have to take a chance with Kirkov. “The oil minister told me to watch for anything funny along the line, call him right away if I found something.”
“And did you?”
He told Kirkov about the oil thieves. “But that’s no big deal. I catch someone every month stealing oil. It’s what I found on the pipeline about fifty meters further on.”
“Go on.”
“There’s a bomb tucked under the pipe where it meets a support column. It’ll blow that thing to hell, and the fire. God.” Arlovski swallowed. “Wasn’t the oil thieves, just doesn’t fit. It had to be someone else, don’t you think?”
The other end of the line was silent. Arlovski felt a cold sweat popping out on his forehead.
“Yes, I do think,” Kirkov said at last. “You’ve made one hell of a discovery. Wonder what made Borisenko think something might be happening? Who told him? Are there any other charges?”
“Haven’t checked. Should I?”
“No. We’ll need professionals, with dogs. And it’s doubtful whoever did this would place multiple bombs in close proximity. You’d rather spread it out a bit.”
“Right, that makes sense.” If Chechens, or other saboteurs wanted to disrupt the flow of oil, they’d need more than one hole. A team could patch one hole in a day or two, although the resulting fire and spill would be tougher to manage. But a series of explosions?
“What should I do?” he asked.
“You’ve absolutely got to keep this secret,” Kirkov said after a long time. His voice was calm, reassuring almost, in spite of the seriousness of the situation. “I have to call Moscow. But in the meanwhile, do not tell the local authorities. The Belarus government might play this for political purposes, not to mention our clients in Germany and beyond, who will have a meltdown if they hear about this. Do you understand me?”
The Druzhba Pipeline carried close to a million and a half barrels of Russian and Kazakh oil a day to Eastern Europe and Germany. Oil and the lifeblood of the European economy flowed west, billions of dollars flowed east. Knock out the pipeline and more than one economy would collapse.
“Yes, of course, I understand. Sir.” After nearly twenty years, he still had to stop himself from saying, ‘comrade.’ The entire situation reminded him far too much of the way things worked in the old Soviet Union. He’d become an informer.
Arlovski drove another fifty kilometers along the pipeline, but with little attention. He had a little breakfast place outside Pinsk, and he wanted nothing more than to sit and drink coffee and watch the ancient waterwheel. Maybe today he’d give his coffee a little extra something. He had a flask in the glove compartment. Just a drop would calm his nerves. He tucked it into the pocket on the inside of his coat.
Two men stood outside the café. They leaned against the railing that overlooked the mill stream. The mill wheel turned, while to the other side, water poured over the spillway with a roar. One man smoked, the other gestured at the water wheel. As Arlovski pulled up, the smoker flicked his butt into the water.
> They moved as he got out and click-locked the door. He turned to find the two men blocking his path. They held something in their hands.
A pop. A blow like hammer against his chest, where he’d tucked the flask. Surprised, but not yet injured, Arlovski looked down. Vodka ran down his chest and soaked his shirt. He looked up and met the eyes of the two men, and saw the guns in their hands. And knew.
Pop, pop, pop. He fell to the ground, and this time the pain was blinding.
Kirkov. He’d known. He’d known about the explosives already.
One of the men straddled him now and pointed his gun directly at Arlovski’s head. He fired.
Chapter Nineteen:
Tess held out her candlestick to illuminate the dungeon and shuddered. There were chains on the wall and a table set with all manner of tongs, tearing tools, and vices. Peter had warned them that he’d set up a real dungeon as if it might be holding real prisoners. Peter didn’t go halfway in creating an effect.
Lars and Dmitri came down the ladder behind her. Lars said, “Smells like blood.”
“That’s your imagination.”
“Well, there’s some kind of unpleasant smell down here,” Dmitri said. He held his own candlestick toward the table of torture devices, then took a step back. A frown passed over his features.
The number one thing Tess smelled was damp stone, but there was something else underlying that. “Probably mold,” she said at last.
“Nothing here,” Lars said. “Better keep moving.”
“You losing your nerve?” she asked.
“Just thinking we don’t have much time before someone comes down and wonders what we’re doing.”
Peter knew she was checking out the castle defenses. She wasn’t sure if he was keeping an eye on her or not. But she didn’t think that explained Lars’s hesitation.
“Lars, are you in, or not?”
He didn’t answer her, but turned to Dmitri. “Are you sure those pictures came from here? Could have been the basement of the British Museum or the Smithsonian for all we know.”
“I trust my source,” Dmitri said. He handed Lars his candle and walked around the room, poked at the walls, as if looking for a false wall. “I know you can’t trust everything you hear, but I don’t know why someone would invent it, whole cloth.”
“Because they’re trying to discredit Peter Gagné,” Lars said. “Or make him enemies.”
“If I don’t find this stuff, then what’s the point?” Tess asked. “I’m already Peter’s enemy.”
“No, you’re not,” Lars said. “I saw you with that boy. How can you be his father’s enemy? You need Peter, or you’ll never see Nick again. And I’ve seen the way you look at Peter, you don’t hate him”
Tess fixed Lars with a stare. She was doubly angry because she knew he was telling the truth. “So? Are you trying to say that I don’t care about rescuing those antiquities?”
“Of course you are. But that’s not the only thing you’re doing here, and it’s not just about Nick, either.”
“What are you talking about?” Tess asked.
“You’re just as sucked into this thing as the rest of us.” Lars nodded. “Seriously, if you hated Peter, you wouldn’t keep walking around the castle grounds, endlessly talking strategy. You spent half the night breaking glass off the murder holes in the gatehouse and finding a way to reinforce the gate.”
“I’m trying not to get us killed.”
“Which would totally make sense,” Lars said, “if this were real. It’s a game, remember? Unless you’re taking it seriously, just like the rest of us.”
“I need to keep us alive until we find that vault. After that, who cares?”
“So if we find the stash in the next five minutes you’ll open the gates and let Grunberg march in? You know, get it all over with?”
“Of course not.”
“Right,” Lars said. “You’ve got to beat Borisenko to crush his ego. And beat Niels Grunberg, to boost your own.”
“Fine,” she said. “So I’m human, is that your point?”
Dmitri knelt in the corner and now stood up. “Leave Tess alone. Are you trying to back her into a corner?”
“Thank you, Dmitri,” she said.
“I don’t care about Tess’s motives,” Lars said. “What bothers me is this. What’s in this for Peter? Is this just about his ego, is he just having fun?”
“I don’t know, probably some of both. But we still come back to a bunch of men playing an elaborate game of capture the flag. It’s a bit of a downer from his previous scheme to build the American version of the Pyramid of Cheops.”
“Right,” Dmitri said. “Guys like Peter and Borisenko, they don’t come down, they get more and more grandiose.”
“Maybe it’s not about ego after all,” Lars said. “Maybe the ziggurat in Kentucky wasn’t ego either.”
“Of course it was ego,” Tess said. “He wanted to build a monument to last a thousand years and you can bet he wanted people to know who’d done it.”
“Most guys would be happy to start a charitable foundation,” Lars said. “Or put their name on a building at some university. They don’t try to be remembered for a thousand years. All I’m saying is that there’s some other motive that we haven’t identified, and I think it’s a mistake to underestimate Peter.”
“That’s true,” Tess said. “It’s not just about ego.”
“Whatever, we can’t answer that now,” Dmitri said. “But come on, Lars is right. There’s nothing down here.”
Tess turned to the ladder and took a rung with one hand while holding the candle in the other. She looked up, paying more attention than usual because of the awkward way she’d have to climb.
“That’s strange,” she said as she studied the planks of the ceiling overhead. She looked down at the floor, then at the walls. “This room is bigger than the store room above it.”
“How can you tell?” Lars said. “Looks the same to me.”
“No, no, I’m sure now. Didn’t notice it at first because I was adjusting to the dark and that dank smell.”
“The blood, you mean,” Lars said.
She ignored him. “I noted the size of the room upstairs because I was mentally calculating the thickness of the walls. But I swear that room is only about ten by ten. This one is more rectangular. And has to be, what? Fifteen feet wide? About five meters, I mean.”
“I’m not sure I can tell,” Dmitri said. “But it does seem more rectangular.”
She climbed the ladder and held the candle at arm’s length to her right. “Seems to be on this side. Look, the ladder isn’t centered in the room. The trap door on the storage room, is.”
It took all three candles, but they found it a minute later, a second trap door, cleverly concealed between two beams on the right side of the room.
“One of you guys go up and shut the first trap door and make sure nobody comes looking for us,” Tess said. “Wait upstairs.”
“You go,” Dmitri urged. “I’ll stay with Tess.”
Lars grumbled, but Tess urged him to go, more to speed things up, than anything. He helped them get the ladder all the way into the room, then shut them off from the outside world.
Dmitri held the ladder in the new position while Tess climbed and pushed at the second trap door. It pushed open without complaint. She poked her head up, candle outstretched. It was a bare stone room, no bigger than the walk-in closet in Peter’s old penthouse on the Upper East Side. A six-foot wide door with a smooth metal doorknob took up the entire wall to her right. Modern.
She helped Dmitri push the ladder into the hole and a moment later they were both standing in the room. Tess tried the door and was surprised to find that it wasn’t locked. It swung inward.
Behind, a long, dark tunnel with a bare cement floor. No flagstones here. The air was cool and dry. There was a smell that reminded her of something, but she couldn’t place it at first.
“Why isn’t it locked?” Tess asked.
Tess hadn’t noticed anything odd about the storage room wall, which was the wall opposite the door, but the stones, too, must have been newly set to conceal this room and the door from the castle defenders.
There was a light switch to the right of the door and to her further surprise, it worked. Florescent lights lit the passage way, which was about fifteen feet wide beyond the doorway and sloped sharply downward. It was like a stadium tunnel, or those service tunnels that ran below so many college campuses.
“Must be a generator down there,” Dmitri said.
“He pulled out the wiring from most of the castle, but not here.”
“Why not?”
She suddenly recognized the smell. It was the neutral odor you smelled so often in an art museum. Not too damp, nor too dry. “He’s running a climate control system down here. To protect his artifacts.”
This spurred them into action. They followed the tunnel maybe ninety or a hundred feet at a fairly sharp grade until they reached a second door, just as wide as the first. The passageway was wide enough to drive cars. Peter had put in new doors, but these, too, were kept wide, big enough for forklifts or large crates.
They pushed open the door, found another switch, and found themselves in Peter’s secret warehouse.
#
It was late morning on the second full day on King’s Island that Niels Grunberg made his first attack.
Niels meant to accomplish two things. First, probe Tess’s defenses. See what she’d done to shore up that gate. Second, flush out a traitor.
A dozen men came out of the blacksmith’s tent and pulled pine branches off the tree trunk. They wore no helmets and cloaks to conceal their armor. The blacksmiths had worked late into the night to hammer an iron cap for the ram.
Niels had constructed a small shed next to the blacksmith tent, ostensibly to protect firewood from the elements. But the shed wasn’t mounted in the ground and eight more men now shoved poles through two openings near the roof and carried it toward the ram. Others took dippers of water and poured it over the roof until the wood was dripping.