“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.
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
