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“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.
CHAPTER 37
If they stick to their schedule they’re already headed back this way,” Remi said. “Four or five minutes away at most.”
/> The presence of the patrol boat had dramatically changed the linchpin to their exit strategy: the raft. If they left it here it would almost certainly be found and the alarm would be raised, and there was no time to find a place to stash it, which left only one option.
They donned their backpacks and then Sam found a pair of handholds in the rock face and held the raft steady as Remi used his shoulders as a step stool to the first spike. Once she had ascended high enough to make room for him, he flipped open his Swiss Army knife and slit the raft’s side tube from bow to stern, then gripped the spike and pulled himself onto the face as the raft sank below him with a soft hissing sound.
“Time?” Sam asked.
“Three minutes, give or take,” Remi replied, and started climbing.
They were halfway to the top when Sam heard the rumble of the outboard engines to their right. As had the raft’s trolling motor, the tone of the patrol boat’s engines suddenly changed, echoing through the arch.
“Remi, company’s arrived,” Sam muttered.
“I’ve got a tunnel opening here,” she replied. “It goes horizontally into the face, but I can’t see how far—”
“Any port in the storm. Just go.”
“Right.”
The gurgle of the boat’s engine was directly below them now, skimming along the face. Sam looked down. While the boat itself was invisible in the fog, he could see the mist cleaving before it like smoke around an object in a wind tunnel. The spotlight popped and began playing over the cliff, zigzagging upward.
“I’m in,” Remi whispered from above.
Eyes alternating between the spikes above him and the rapidly ascending pool of light below him, Sam climbed the last few feet then suddenly felt Remi’s hand on his own. He coiled his legs beneath him and pushed off while simultaneously pulling with his arms. He rolled into the tunnel and jerked his legs inside as the spotlight hovered over the opening for a moment then continued on.
They lay huddled together in the darkness, Sam trying to calm his breath as they listened to the boat make its way through the arch and the engine noise finally faded.
“Is this the place?” Sam asked, pushing himself up onto his elbows and looking around. The tunnel was roughly oval in shape, roughly five feet tall and six feet wide.
“I’d say so,” Remi said, pointing.
Bolted to the ceiling at the mouth of the tunnel was a crisscross bulwark of thick tar-covered oaken beams supported by vertical timbers bolted to the walls. Dangling from the center of the bulwark was a rusted block-and-tackle pulley system linked by thick hawser rope to a hand-crank winch affixed to the uprights. A pair of narrow-gauge rails sitting atop wooden cross ties and crushed gravel ballast stretched into the darkness.
“Well, the winch isn’t original, that’s for sure,” he said. “Unless, that is, Zaporozhian Cossack technology was way ahead of its time. See here . . . those bolts are precisely machined. This might go back to the Crimean War, but my guess is World War II. Just look at the mitered joints . . . this thing could have lifted thousands of pounds.” He stepped up to the mouth of the tunnel and peered over the edge. “Ingenious. See how they placed this, just above this natural bulge in the face? Even in daylight it would’ve been invisible from the water.”