A Triple Thriller Fest (110 page)

“If this place has been a private home for the last hundred years, I’m willing to bet there are basements, replica dungeons, cellars, and underground service tunnels. I’ll want to inspect all of them.”

Peter said nothing to this. He would no doubt be thinking of his secret stash of artifacts and wondering how to hide it from her. He turned slightly to look back at the keep. He was a handsome man, and never more so when he had that flushed, manic look.

Tess had always been drawn to confident men. Bright men with goals and yes, wild schemes. But a man like Peter was crap in a relationship. Oh, he was fantastic at first: romantic, witty, attentive. But then the thing with the ziggurat had come along, and it had been a struggle to keep his attention. And then it had ended, abruptly, with no warning whatsoever. It was this castle and this war that swept him away.

Why? What was this about? It couldn’t just be a game for overgrown boys. Sure, he was a thrill seeker, given to Richard Branson-esque excitement—skydiving, race cars, and the like—but that was fun stuff.

“But I’m not willing to give up on the outer defenses yet,” Tess said. “By the time you’re retreating to the keep, you’re in deep trouble. You’d better contest every inch of the castle if you want to win, starting with those gates. Let’s look at the third principle of warfare.”

“I thought you said there were two principles.”

“Two? No, of course not. There are hundreds. Those are just my favorites. You don’t understand them and you won’t even make the battlefield.” She smiled. “Number three is deception.”

“Deception?” Peter asked.

“Right. Conceal your weakness. Or, in this case, your strength. Because here’s what I’m thinking. Niels Grunberg is going to drool when he sees those gates. He’ll see us frantically and ineffectually trying to strengthen them. Maybe he’ll get greedy. Overreach. And we’ll be ready. We’ll be luring him into a trap. A very deadly trap that will end the battle in a single, bloody skirmish.”

“I like that.”

“I thought you would,” Tess said. “But that brings me to the fourth principle of warfare.”

Peter laughed. “Okay. What’s that?”

“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning,” Tess said. “That Niels is going to come up with his own brilliant plan. That skirmish could very well be our own men, lying in puddles of blood—fake blood, if we’re lucky—while they chase us to the top of the keep and massacre us.”

“Nice. Well, that’s not the kind of show I want my son to see.”

Tess stared. “Your son? Nick is here?”

She pictured Niels Grunberg’s army in the field below the castle. A steady rain of missiles pummeling the walls, smashing through roofs inside. She imagined a battle in the courtyard in the shadow of a wall, mined and collapsing. And a little boy, curious, wandering into the middle of a battle.

“Are you serious?” she asked.

“Of course. I couldn’t leave him with a nanny for six weeks.”

“Peter,” she said. “What are you thinking?”

Chapter Seventeen:

Niels Grunberg took five seconds to reject each one of Alexander Borisenko’s suggestions. He knew it was just a brainstorm, but some of these were dumb.

He’d come to Lord Borisenko’s tent, which was only marginally warmer than the outside air, but at least protected from the wind. A flag with a double-headed eagle flapped in front of the tent. Two men in chain mail stood guard outside. Inside, Alexander Borisenko and his wife, Yekatarina. She wore a fur-lined cloak with matching gloves. Borisenko himself sat at a desk, writing with a feathered pen. He handed a sheet of paper to Niels.

“Ladders are problematic,” Niels said. He kept his tone neutral. Hard to say how the Borisenkos would react to criticism. It was understood that Borisenko was the Lord, but Niels was the general.

“How so?” Borisenko asked.

“Unless you catch them asleep, they’ll just push them over the edge. And the way the bedrock juts out from the outer curtain, you’d need about a fifty meter ladder.”

Niels considered the next thing on the list with a wrinkled brow, as if giving it the full weight of thought. “Again, you can’t mine, for the same reason. That’s granite under there. Short of dynamite, I don’t know how you’d tunnel under the walls.”

The rest of the army had arrived by ship that morning. Together with Niels and the three men who’d tried to keep Peter and Tess from docking, they made one-hundred-seven men, plus six women. They made camp a few hundred meters back from the gate towers and immediately set to felling trees by axe. Niels also ordered the ship stripped of anything useful that wouldn’t also make it sink.

They only had two weeks of food, plus what they could forage from the island. Peter said there were deer, and he could probably find rabbits.

“What about this?” Borisenko asked. He pointed to the third item on his list.

Niels squinted. He rubbed a thumb against the paper, trying to clear away the mud, but only succeeded in smearing it. “Lure them out? Why would they fight us in the open? This isn’t a real siege, where they know we might be here for six months or a year until they starve.”

“Of course not,” Yekatarina said. “But that’s not what he means by luring them out. This is a war, right? All Peter’s friends expect some good fighting.”

Niels nodded. He thought he saw where she was going. He dropped his voice. It was noisy outside, and would be difficult to eavesdrop, but he worried that his own camp might have a traitor, just as Tess’s did. “Go on.”

“We put our men on short rations,” she said. “And we sit down here and ignore them. They’ll get bored. They’ll start to complain. They’re not real foot soldiers, remember. A bunch of mercenaries and spoiled rich men. Peter will start to nudge Tess and finally, she might snap.”

“Yeah, well, knowing Tess, she might sweep into our camp one night anyway, hoping to wipe us out with a surprise attack. Tonight would probably be the best night.”

“Tonight?” Borisenko asked. “We’re just getting established.”

“Exactly. Not saying it will happen, but we should be on our guard. As for the last suggestion, it isn’t a bad idea. Problem is, I’m one of those anxious men.”

Not rich, he didn’t need to point out. He might just be the poorest man in the group, as his combined salary and book royalties amounted to about seventy thousand euro a year, the kind of money Borisenko could spend on a small party.

He nodded. “I’m here to match wits against Tess Burgess. If I lose, well, I lose. But I don’t want to fight to a draw. Or worse, sit on my ass to a draw.”

“Right,” Borisenko said. “I’m of the same mind.” His wife, however, said nothing. “But if that’s the way you feel, then I don’t see what else there is to do but mount a frontal assault.”

“Right. There’s that gate. Like a big, open invitation. Only open invitations make me nervous. So I wanted to see if we could come up with anything else.”

“Not yet, but I’ll keep at it,” Borisenko said. “In the meanwhile, I’ve got work to do to get this camp in order. You keep at your engineering. I’ll send for you if I need you.”

Niels’s smile did not make it to his face. He was not a proud man, not in the short term, at least. He was perfectly willing to feign weakness, let others take the credit. Bide his time. If Borisenko wanted to believe he was in charge, let him.

He turned toward the door. “As you wish,” he said with a bit of a flourish that might have been overdone. “I’ll be working on my machines.”

Niels stepped into the open air, pulled his cloak tight. No snow yet, but a few big flakes fell from the sky and it was gray to the east and north. Men dug fire pits or chopped kindling. From behind the meadow, the sound of chopping axes, shouts, and the crash of a tree. They had four draft horses and these were well-worked, pulling stones or dragging logs.

He looked up at the castle wall, spotted a couple of men walking the perimeter, protected behind the battlement. Smoke rose from the gatehouse, and also from the keep. For a moment, he envied Peter and Tess, protected on the inside, warm, with the luxury of a castle to defend, instead of the hopeless task of assaulting all those meters of bare stone.

The castle looked almost right to Niels’s eye. Not the gatehouse, unprotected by a moat and suffering those pathetic doors, but everything else looked like an authentic reconstruction. But there was something else missing. In the middle ages, the same castle would have been painted white, or even red, not left as exposed stone. Once they’d lost their defensive purpose, European castles had been allowed to weather for so many generations that people forgot they’d also been homes of powerful lords at one time, and decorated appropriately.

Although, come to think of it, hadn’t this castle been some rich industrialist’s second home? Peter spent a good chunk of money to strip out modern comforts and remake the castle in the image of its medieval predecessor. But was it possible there were relics of its previous function? Hadn’t Peter removed a helipad from the roof of the keep, for example? And Niels remembered hearing that a previous owner had kept a collection of exotic and antique cars, never to be driven, obviously, or why bring them to the island? But where had he kept them? Surely not parked in the inner bailey, exposed to the elements.

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.