Into the Black

by Sean Ellis

  Kismet leaned forward, placing his palms at the lower corners of the representation. He counted off the squares separating Poti from the site in the mountains. "The roads will get us most of the way, but it looks like we'll have to go about twenty-five miles overland."

  "As the crow flies," Irene countered. "But you've got the change in elevation to contend with. And it's virtually impossible to travel in a straight line up there."

  Kismet nodded. The contour lines illustrating relative elevation showed the site to be more than a thousand meters up—well above the snow line. "Well, I suppose it could be worse."

  Before he could opine further on the trials that lay ahead, a booming sound rolled through the cellar. It was unmistakably the voice of Anatoly Grishakov, calling out to Irene. Kismet hastily gathered up the maps and rolled them into a tight tube, which he folded over and slipped into the side pocket of his jacket.

  Irene frowned. "We need his help, Nick. To get up that mountain, if for no other reason."

  "Are you down there, Irina?"

  "All right," Kismet whispered. "But not a word about the Fleece. I still don't trust him."

  The Russian's voice grew louder as he tramped down the steps. He poked his head out from the stairway, catching sight of them. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

  Irene turned to face him. "Anatoly, old friend, we need your help."

  * * *

  Kismet pulled his heavy leather bomber jacket tight across his chest, trying in vain to shut out the permeating chill. While the landscape around him was blanketed in snow, it was the altitude that made the air so unbearably frigid. He found himself wishing that he had worn an extra shirt, but his duffel was back at Anatoly's house, now several kilometers away. His black waist pack held only his kukri and a few other utilitarian items, nothing that would fend off the cold.

  Anatoly's assistance had proved to be more than worth the risk of trusting him. The big Russian had in fact closed his ears to the details of their quest, staunchly proclaiming that it was better for him not to know. As matters stood, Anatoly knew only that Irene and Kismet needed to trek into the mountains. To that end, he had supplied them first with a hearty meal and a good night's sleep; and secondly, with transportation into the foothills. At dawn, the big man had awakened them, stuffing yet another feast into them before loading them into his truck. Although the vehicle was lacking in creature comforts, the brief ride on the primitive roads that carved up toward the mountains cut their trip in half and Anatoly delivered them to a snow-covered farm at the base of the Caucasus in time for lunch.

  The farmer, one of Anatoly's wife's many relatives, required even less convincing than Anatoly before volunteering his help. After dining, Kismet and Irene were taken to the barn where the farmer stabled his horses.

  Kismet was duly impressed by the draft animals. Although he had done his share of riding as a youth, he had little experience with these enormous equines. Their hindquarters were nearly as tall as he was, supported on thick legs that rippled with muscle. Before he could inquire as to their purpose, the farmer selected two of the horses and led them to another part of the barn. It was there that Kismet finally began to understand.

  Resting on a layer of straw, alongside a wheeled cart and various plowing implements was a sturdy sleigh. The horse drawn sled was almost exactly as Kismet had envisioned every time he heard Christmas carolers sing 'Jingle Bells.' While they watched, the old farmer strapped the horses into a yoke harness and hitched them to the sleigh.

  "Can you drive this, Kristanovich?" Anatoly asked.

  "I'll manage." Kismet climbed up into the bench seat and took the reins from the farmer. Irene hopped in beside him. Her colorful dress had been replaced by less elegant but more practical clothes; heavy trousers, a flannel shirt and a cable knit sweater. The farmer's wife appeared at the door, her arms piled high with hand-woven blankets of wool and even a few crudely sewn animal pelts. Kismet accepted these, grateful for the supplemental warmth.

  Anatoly pulled Kismet aside for a final conference. "Kristanovich, the farmer tells me that three days ago, a group of men went up into the mountains."

  Kismet forgot about the cold. "How many men?"

  Anatoly repeated the question to the farmer in a tongue Kismet did not recognize. The farmer began to babble forth information, which Anatoly passed on to Kismet. "A dozen men. Six of them were soldiers—no, that's not right." His craggy brow furrowed, and then he shrugged. "He said 'sailors.' They wore naval uniforms. The others looked like laborers. He thinks they are prospecting for gold. Foolish of them to venture into the mountains in winter."

  "Did he recognize any of the men?"

  Anatoly gave Kismet an odd look, but passed the question along to the farmer and similarly relayed the answer. "No, but they were wearing heavy coats and mufflers."

  "How were they traveling?"

  "A truck. It is doubtful that they got very far. The snow is deep and hides much. There are many ravines and cliffs concealed by the drifts."

  Kismet nodded. "That's very helpful. Thank you."

  "I thought it might be. The farmer says you should watch out for them. He doesn't trust them. The search for gold makes men do wicked things." He looked Kismet in the eye. "Are you looking for gold also, Nikolai Kristanovich?"

  "No, but if I see any, I'll definitely pick it up."

  Anatoly laughed, stepping back and swatting the lead horse on the rump. The animal whinnied, then leaned into its yoke and strained to draw the sleigh forward. In minutes, the powerful team had pulled the sleigh out of the barn and into the snow. The farmer and his wife made a second trip out with supplies, this time in the form of dried foodstuffs, much more than Kismet anticipated needing. Nevertheless, he nodded his head to the farmer in gratitude.

  They quickly found the tracks left by the vehicle the farmer had seen three days previously. The snow had partially filled in the ruts, but the long, perfectly parallel lines made them easily identifiable.

  "Do you think my father is with them?" asked Irene.

  "I'd say it's a good bet. Harcourt wouldn't attempt trying to find the site based on someone's directions alone. The fact that he took your father out of the United States in the first place suggests that he'll hold on to him until he has what he wants."

  "It's been three days. Do you think they've found it already?"

  Kismet sensed the unasked question in her voice. "I'm sure your father is fine. If the farmer was right, their progress will be slow. The trucks could only take them so far. They might have even had to finish the trek on foot. They may have reached the site, but I doubt they've excavated much. Harcourt is a fool to try doing this in the dead of winter. Either that, or he’s desperate."

  Kismet's words had been meant to reassure her, but he noted right away that they had the opposite effect. "Irene, we'll get him back. Don't worry."

  The horses tirelessly drew the sleigh in the trail left by Harcourt's truck. Over the course of the afternoon, the grade increased from a slight incline to a slope of nearly thirty degrees. The tracks in the snow soon began to tell the story of the difficulties experienced by the group in the truck. Erratic variations led to massive drifts, evidence that the vehicle had on more than one occasion veered off track and become mired in deep snow. The laborers in Harcourt's party had probably been called upon to dig the truch out and carve a path back to the main road. Kismet estimated that there was an accumulation of ankle deep snow atop an icy hard pack of nearly five feet deep. With the use of traction chains, the heavy truck tires had penetrated down to the base, permitting them to make gradual progress up the mountain.

  Soon, Kismet realized that their course was taking them laterally across the face of the mountain. Although there was no road marked on this portion of the survey map, he surmised that the primitive track they were following probably cut back and forth across the range in a series of switchbacks. Their own progress was apparently better than Harcourt's had been. The horses' hooves bit into the
packed snow, but did not sink as deeply as the truck tires had, and the sleigh glided across the powdery surface with negligible resistance. As the incline grew steeper, the horses had to exert themselves more, but they required little more than a verbal command and a shake of the reins for motivation.

  With the increased elevation, the chill factor grew more intolerable. Irene unfolded two of the blankets, wrapping them about both their shoulders, so that their shared body heat kept the cold at bay. Kismet found the arrangement especially pleasing, if a little distracting.

  Night fell gradually as the sun dropped into the distant Black Sea horizon. With Irene pressed tightly against his chest and her arm around his waist, he realized absently that his vigilance was slipping. As they rounded a corner, the horses stopped abruptly, giving him a much needed wake-up call. Lying in the path, directly in front of them, was a body.

  Irene's hold around him went slack, and Kismet immediately sensed her terror. He thrust the reins into her hands and shrugged free of the blanket. "Stay here," he directed, in a tone that brooked no refusal.

  It had snowed at least once since the person had fallen in death. A layer of crystalline precipitation had accumulated on the corpse, partially melted, and then frozen into a translucent crust. Kismet hastened to examine the body and quickly realized that the dark spots on the ground around the motionless form were not shadows but bloodstains. The person had died within a few steps of whatever trauma he had suffered. He knelt beside the corpse and brushed away the shroud of snow.

  A pair of blank eyes stared up at him, causing him to start. He took a deep breath to compensate for the surge of adrenaline that left his lips feeling numb, and then resumed his inspection.

  The body was male, no more than twenty years of age. The young man's hair had been cut in a close, military style, but he was clothed in ill-fitting civilian garments. Kismet noted the eastern European facial characteristics, but there was nothing to indicate what he had been in life. It was far easier to determine how he had died.

  The man's chest was a mess of ravaged flesh. Kismet immediately recognized the ragged tears as exit wounds. The tight grouping was unmistakably a burst from a sub-machine gun at close range. He had been shot in the back.

  "Nick?"

  Kismet looked up, reading Irene's concern. "It isn't your father," he answered, trying to comfort her. "I'm not sure who he was. Only that he was shot trying to run."

  "Should we do something for him? Bury him?"

  Kismet frowned. "Yeah. But we don't have the time." In the end, he settled for dragging the corpse off the track and covering the young man with heaps of snow. His efforts to close the young man's eyes were in vain; the flesh had frozen beyond any postmortem manipulation. Ten minutes after discovering the fallen man, he returned to the sleigh.

  He silently cursed Severin for having confiscated his gun. All that remained in the way of defensive weaponry was his Gurkha knife. Although he was confident of his ability to use the heavy blade for self-defense, he doubted that it would help much if they were pinned down by foes armed with assault rifles.

  Nevertheless, he positioned the haft of the kukri where he could reach it in a hurry. It wasn't his pistol, but it made him feel a little more secure. "The stakes just went up," he declared in a tight voice. "Harcourt and his men have killed. They won't hesitate to do it again."

  * * *

  Kismet checked his watch; it was after midnight. They had journeyed for nearly six hours after sundown to reach their destination. Now, perched behind a snowdrift, they gazed down at a loose collection of tents lit up by a chain of klieg lights and the lazy half moon overhead—Harcourt's mountain camp.

  They had left the sleigh and horses some distance away in the woods to avoid detection. Harcourt's party had been blessed with extraordinary luck, driving their truck—a beat-up deuce-and-a-half—all the way to the site, in spite of the heavy snow. This had in turn worked favorably for Kismet and Irene, enabling them to travel on into the night. The trail was not without perils however. The track often skirted steep drop-offs, with overhanging shelves of ice and snow posing a constant threat of avalanche. Their caution and persistence paid off though, delivering them to their destination in one piece.

  A single sentry patrolled the perimeter of Harcourt's camp, a limit that was delineated by a triple thickness of concertina wire. He had worn a path in the snow, the sharp tips of the crampons strapped to his mountaineering boots biting into the subsurface ice. Kismet could not make out the man's face, but his marching steps were rigid and uniform; he was not taking his duty lightly. His routine of moving from one edge of the camp to another was as regular as clockwork and that, Kismet surmised, was the weakness that would allow them to slip in unobserved.

  Kismet carefully monitored his wristwatch as he watched the guard make three circuits; each round was within twenty seconds of ten minutes. He estimated that it would take four minutes for them to steal down to the edge of the camp, during which time they would be exposed to any watchful eyes. He saw no evidence of other lookouts, and thought it unlikely that Harcourt would be expecting intruders, but Kismet was nonetheless cautious.

  The rolls of razor wire, which were stretched out to form a barrier around the camp, were merely an inconvenience. Because they were staked down to the snowpack, Kismet needed only to burrow out a crawlspace, which he did using his kukri like a shovel, during the moments when the sentry was out of view. With this one difficulty surmounted, he prepared to infiltrate the camp.

  "I'll go first," he whispered. "Keep an eye on me. When I give the signal, you follow. But if I get caught, promise me that you'll go straight back to the sleigh and down the mountain."

  She nodded, but he could tell that she wasn't committed to the idea of leaving him. He saw that it was pointless to argue the issue, and refrained from further exhortation. Instead, he waited until the sentry had turned his back on their position, and then started down the hill.

  The descent went smoothly. In less time than anticipated, he reached the outermost tent and ducked behind it. He could hear the sound of the guard's boots crunching in the snow as the man marched his patrol route. Less distinct was the sound of a generator, humming as it produced the electricity to power the lights.

  Kismet checked his watch again; five minutes until the sentry completed his round. He decided to use the time to reconnoiter the immediate area. He began by looking back for Irene. She was not visible, wrapped in the shadows where she hid, but something he did see started his heart racing.

  Leading from the top of the snowdrift, directly to where he stood, was a succession of enormous black spots—his footprints. Each step he had taken had left a depression in the snow, which in turn cast a shadow in the harsh glow of the artificial lights.

  I couldn't have been more obvious, he thought, if I had come down blowing a trumpet. It would be virtually impossible for the sentry not to see his tracks; the only question was how would he react? If he sent up an alarm, then Kismet was as good as dead.

  Kismet's hand dropped to his belt, gripping the haft of the kukri, ready for the inevitable. The crunch of the watchman's boots grew louder. Kismet heard the drawn out sound of the man turning ninety degrees on his heel, and could almost visualize each step that brought him closer to where Kismet was hiding. He began counting the paces, dreading the instant when the steps would grind to a halt, the sentry suddenly aware of an intruder in the camp. His hand tightened on the wooden grip of the knife.

  The guard marched by without breaking stride.

  Kismet nearly collapsed in relief. The watchman had passed right by the telltale footprints without even stopping to scratch his head. Kismet wondered if the man had been miraculously struck blind. Rather than waste the reprieve, he kept listening until he heard the heel grind of a right turn, and then signaled for Irene to join him.

  As she darted across the snowfield, creating a second set of incriminating prints, Kismet wondered again at the guard's failure to notice. The sh
adows were so glaringly evident from where he waited, standing out in stark contrast to the pale snow. After a moment's contemplation, he figured it out. From his position, staring up the hill with the klieg lights shining from behind him, the shadows were perfectly visible, but from the guard's perspective, walking perpendicular to the light source, the shadows would look irregular, masked by the uneven contours of the snow. The sentry's night vision was also likely diminished by the glare, making it even less probable that their intrusion would be detected. Once Irene reached his side, they remained motionless until the guard completed another pass without noticing their tracks.

  The nearby tent was the largest of the camp. Its olive drab canvas clothed a surface area comparable to a circus big top or a backwoods revival tent. The overwhelming size of it piqued Kismet's curiosity. There was only one reason he could imagine for such an enormous covering. Using his folding Balisong knife, he sliced through the fabric and peeked inside.

  His suspicions were confirmed. Beneath the great tent, Harcourt had begun an epic archaeological excavation. All of the snow had been cleared away and tons of dirt had been loosened and moved into heaps around the tent's perimeter. Near the north edge Harcourt had exposed a cave entrance, possibly where an underground river had issued from the mountainside. Kismet knew intuitively that this was the location marked on Kerns' survey map.

  A handful of incandescent bulbs were strung throughout the tent, providing enough light for Kismet to conclude that no one was in the enclosure. "Let's go in."

  "What about my father?"

  "Once we find him, we're not going to have the luxury of time. I'd like to have some answers before I leave here. And I want to make sure that Harcourt doesn't get his hands on the Golden Fleece."

  "I thought getting my father out was our first priority." The implicit accusation in her caustic tone stung.

  He turned and took her shoulders in his hands. "It has always been my first priority. But the Fleece is something I can't ignore."