“Good God,” Commissioner Warner groaned. “This is a disaster.” He looked at Anthony, as if for reassurance, as Healy barked orders for his men to let the truck pass. Anthony caught a flash of Dolores’ face through the canvas that covered the back of the truck, and then it was gone, speeding away.
“No, not yet it’s not,” Anthony said. But his assertion sounded hollow, even to him. He turned as Gentry rushed through the crowd of police, huffing and wheezing. He had arrived in time to see Koschei and his men depart. “Tom, is the car close by?” Anthony asked without preamble.
Gentry gulped air and nodded. “A block over. I had to run over here.” He looked around angrily. “I guess I was still too late.” He looked at Anthony. “What now, Jimmy?”
Anthony didn’t answer. Instead, leaving the situation on the street to the police, he darted to the elevators that would take him to the penthouse. Gentry hurried after him. As the bell rang and the doors opened, Anthony shot past Dawkins’ waiting form and into his laboratory, leaving Gentry to explain what had happened to the agitated butler.
In his laboratory, Anthony went to a heavy steel cabinet mounted on the wall of the lab, just above one of the workbenches that lined the walls. “Jimmy, I hate to be a nag, but what are we doing? Shouldn’t we be following those crumb-bums?”
“No, they’ll follow us,” Anthony said. As he opened the cabinet and pulled out several cardboard tubes he quickly explained the devil’s bargain he’d made with Koschei. Gentry’s face grew pale as Anthony opened each tube and extracted the contents. Each one contained a map, and he unrolled them on the table, one over the other.
“So, we’ve got to find this gold or Dolores gets the chop? Geez Jimmy, how in the name of the blessed virgin are we going to manage that? Tornovsky was the only one who knew and Mephito sent him straight to the devil, one way, no stops,” Gentry said.
“Simple… Tornovsky mentioned that the gold was buried at a temple turned railway depot,” Anthony said. Gentry looked at him blankly. Anthony gestured to the maps. “Remember that business in Peking a few years ago?”
“That thing with Rado Ruric, right?” Gentry said, comprehension dawning in his eyes.
“Right,” Anthony said, “When Koschei mentioned that, I recalled that I had made a cartographical study of the Chinese-Manchurian railway, when we thought that was how Ruric was shipping the weapons to his warlord pals in preparation for the takeover attempt. There were certain points that I marked out along the various routes as ideal locations for such a transfer to take a place. One of them was a former temple…”
“Jimmy, Mongolia has to be lousy with ruined temples,” Gentry protested.
“It is. But there’s only one along the route to Ulan Bator.” Anthony tapped a spot on the map. “That’s got to be it.”
“And if not?” Gentry asked quietly.
Anthony leaned over the maps, head bowed. He didn’t reply. There was nothing to say. He pushed himself away from the table. He cleared his throat. “We’ll need to be quick. They’ll be following us.”
“How will they even know when we’re going?”
Anthony began rolling up the maps. “I’d be very surprised if Koschei didn’t have someone watching the hotel even now. If we leave without contacting him via that frequency he gave us, he’ll kill Dolores. And I have no doubt he’ll do the same if we try and find him, rather than the gold.”
“Can’t bluff a crazy man, I guess,” Gentry said. “Something doesn’t smell right though.”
“No,” Anthony said.
Gentry frowned. “Think our pal in the fur coat is planning a double cross?”
“When do they not, Tom?” Anthony asked. His eyes became as hard as flints. “But we’ll be ready for him this time.”
11.
Outer Mongolia, near Ulan Bator
Several days later, and halfway around the world, a car shot along a dirt road, heaving on its wheels, casting a plume of dust in its wake. The car was German, and had once upon a time been armored. Now it was a stripped down skeleton, with an open compartment in the back. It was worth less than it had cost to rent it, but Anthony hadn’t been of a mind to haggle with the owner.
“We got company,” Gentry said. He hiked a thumb over his shoulder for emphasis. “I wasn’t sure at first, but out here they don’t have anywhere to hide.”
“They’ve been following us since Hong Kong,” Anthony said as he folded the map. They had flown to Hong Kong from New York, and then begun the tedious, and dangerous, overland trip into Mongolia, mostly by train, but by automobile where possible. China was still ostensibly in the throes of a civil war, despite what the Japanese-backed government in Peking claimed, and more than once, he and Gentry had been forced to defend themselves against bandits, communist guerrillas, and other assorted threats that littered the fractured landscape. “Our enemy doesn’t plan on letting us get out of his sight for even a moment.”
“What about Miss Colquitt?” Gentry asked.
“They’ll kill her, once they have what they want,” Anthony said flatly.
“So why are we just leading them to it?” Gentry said. He slammed his palm against the steering wheel. “Cripes sake, ain’t there anything we can do?”
“I’m afraid not, beyond toughing it out. They’ve got Dolores, and I have no doubt that our friend Koschei will kill her without a second thought, if he decides she’s no longer useful,” Anthony said. His voice was calm, but inside he was seething with a barely governable rage. The volcanic anger that had possessed him the moment that Dolores had been taken had not cooled, but instead grown in its potency with every day that she remained in Koschei’s clutches. His mind, normally an engine of precision, shuddered on its tracks, and he was unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time.
He thought he’d been clever, secreting Tornovsky, but he hadn’t thought about what Koschei might do. He hadn’t considered that the madman might react so quickly and so viciously. He closed his eyes as Magda Sirko’s final scream echoed once again in his head. The old woman hadn’t deserved to die, whatever her husband had done. Koschei’s madness had placed him beyond the bounds of the law. As such, Anthony felt no inclination to hand him over to the authorities. His hands flexed, and his fingers curled into claws. They were close to their goal and part of him was eager for the final confrontation.
“Jim? Jimmy, you still with me?” Gentry asked.
Anthony blinked and relaxed his hands. He took a shaky breath. “Yes,” he said. He leaned forward. “There it is, right on the rail line, just as Tornovsky said.”
The temple wasn’t much. There was nothing grand about it now, if there ever had been. It looked like so many broken stone boxes on the plain ahead, surrounded by several crumbled lengths of wall. It sat within spitting distance of the rail line, however, and Anthony could immediately see why it would have been viewed as a satisfactory rail stop. There was water nearby, and several of the inner buildings still had their roofs, including the largest of them.
Gentry drove through what had once been the front gate and parked out of the way off to the side of what had once been the temple courtyard. A stray breeze carried a coiling cloud of dust and grit across the space. “Well, here we are. What do we do now?” Gentry asked.
“We wait,” Anthony said, climbing out of the car. It was cold here, and both he and Gentry were dressed for cold weather. Anthony blew into his hands to warm them.
“Have I ever mentioned how much I hate waiting,” Gentry said, plucking at his coat.
“Every time we have to do it,” Anthony said, his eyes sweeping the courtyard. He noted the odd humps of soil here and there, and the lengths of chain that ran across the ground, seemingly left behind after whatever purpose they’d had had been fulfilled.
“What do you think those humps of dirt are?” Gentry said. “Over by the wall there—you see them?” He peered at the spots he’d indicated. “Too regular to be natural, ain’t they?”
“Grave
s,” Anthony said, without looking at them. “I doubt either Tornovsky or the Mad Baron were the sort of men to let anyone know where they’d buried their ill gotten gains. They likely executed the men they brought to help them bury it.”
Gentry whistled. “Like modern day pirate treasure, hunh?”
Anthony didn’t reply. He looked toward the train tracks, and calculated the distance from them to the courtyard. Though he often focused more on the physical in his line of work, his mind was as swift and as keen as his body, and his thoughts moved with the precision of an adding machine, marking and measuring the space and volume of his surrounding as instinctually as he tasted the scent of the air. He moved quickly along the bottom of the walls, tracing decades old marks on the stones. The courtyard wasn’t large. There was really only one place the boxcar could be buried, and he found the spot quickly enough.
He sank down and ran his fingers through the dirt, until they touched wood, and he smiled mirthlessly. “There you are.”
“Jimmy! Company!”
He looked up at Gentry’s shout, and rose to his feet as a duo of heavy military surplus trucks slewed through the gateway but stopped short of the courtyard. He realized that they had positioned themselves to block the only visible exit. “At ease, Tom,” he said, waving Gentry back as men piled out of the first truck, weapons at the ready. It wasn’t the first time Anthony had found himself looking down the barrels of leveled rifles, but it never got any more pleasant.
“Well, my detective, is this my Shambhala? Is this the place where my dream ends and begins?” Koschei said, coming around from behind one of the trucks.
“This is where your gold is,” Anthony said.
“Ah, good. But I do not see it? Where is it?”
“Where’s the woman?”
“Jimmy, you hear that? Sounds like a train whistle,” Gentry said.
“It is a train whistle,” Anthony said.
“I made certain arrangements,” Koschei said. His eagles were perched on his shoulders. Their weight gave his gait an odd rhythm. As he drew close to Anthony and Gentry, the birds took wing with loud screeches. Koschei watched them rise into the air and then turned his attention to Anthony. “I know many men, and some of those men work with trains and time schedules and maps. It was a simple enough matter to find an unattached locomotive and procure it for use. The only difficulty was making sure it arrived on time and intact. But as you can see, that was accomplished with little difficulty. Where is my gold, Mr. Anthony?”
“Where is the woman, Koschei? I’ll show you the gold when I see her, not before,” Anthony said, his voice heavy with quiet menace. If Koschei noticed, he gave no sign. He clapped his hands, and two men clambered out of the back of the truck, hauling Dolores behind them.
“Here she is. Safe and sound,” Koschei said, as his men shoved Dolores toward him. He caught her arm and jerked her close. He drew his revolver and cocked it. “For how much longer, however, is up to you. Where is my gold?”
Anthony met Dolores’ eyes. She looked tired, and angry, but unhurt. Koschei lifted his revolver and used the barrel to brush aside a lock of Dolores’ hair. “Where is the gold?” he asked again.
Anthony kicked aside a clump of soil. “Here,” he said. “Soil over a tarp-covered wooden blind.” At Koschei’s impatient gesture, he sank down, drew his knife, and shoved the blade into the dirt, until it struck the wood he’d found earlier. With a grunt, he levered it up a crack, and got his fingers beneath it. “Ingenious, really. The tarp keeps out the weather, and keeps the soil from sliding through the cracks in the wood into the hole.” Anthony’s muscle bulged as he bent his knees and lifted the covering. It came up with a sound like a tree falling, and at another gesture from Koschei, men ran forward to help Anthony shove the blind aside.
The boxcar was revealed a moment later, wedged snugly in its waterlogged hole. “This must have been a well, before Ungern-Sternberg decided to turn it into a hiding spot. The river has been slowly filling it all these years,” Anthony said as he crouched at the edge of the hole. The water was dark and unpleasant looking, and the only bit of the boxcar visible was its roof, where a bolt plate had been attached, and the chains that curled across the ground were attached. “Ingenious,” he murmured.
“What is it?” Koschei said.
“The chains,” Anthony said. He pointed to the two lengths of chain that ran across the flat space of the courtyard. Examining them more closely, he saw now that each chain was looped through a number of bolt plates similar to the one on the roof of the boxcar, each of which was attached to the buildings and walls at various points. “They’re anchored to the capstones of the buildings.” He swept out a hand. “Lunatic the Mad Baron might have been, but he was clever enough when he wanted to be. He turned this whole temple into a crude block and tackle pulley system. Pull the chains, raise the boxcar and swing it to solid ground. From there, it’s a simple matter of hauling it out to the track and attaching it to a locomotive—like, say, the one you procured. That boxcar is waterlogged and rusty, but it will move.”
“Good.” Koschei barked an order in Russian, and men snapped into activity, grabbing the chains. Below, in the pit, the boxcar creaked as for the first time in two decades it began to move. Anthony stepped back. Koschei looked at him and smiled. “You are probably wondering why I am doing this, hey?”
“It seems fairly obvious,” Anthony said.
Koschei laughed. “Does it? Do you know why I waited all this time to hunt down the men who killed me, Mr. Anthony?”
“You had better things to do?”
Koschei laughed again. It was a hollow sound, empty of both humour and life. “Yes, yes I did. I awoke in the cold, empty and dead, but with a clarity. Fear was burned out of me, and pride and all those chains men make for themselves. All that was left was purpose. The purpose that this gold was intended for, all those years ago. Enough gold in which to plant the seeds of empire, Mr. Anthony.” Koschei looked up, at his eagles circling. “I found benefactors—men whose names I had been given, before I was betrayed. Men of cunning, men of far reaching thoughts, men who showed me what must be done to stay above the blood-dimmed tide that even now sweeps over this continent. The old empires are gone, and new ones rise in their places, but for how long, eh?”
Anthony said nothing. He’d heard similar speeches before, notably from Rado Ruric. The world powers were gearing up for war, and the political sea had grown rough and choppy. Stability was fast slipping into entropy.
“My benefactors smell the scent of destiny about me,” Koschei continued. “But they have their own wars to wage, and all they can give me is opportunity.” He spread his hands. “Ah, so, but, that is all a man needs, no?” He gestured with his revolver. “A bit of time, a bit of luck, a bit of fate, a bit of gold—that is all I need. With this treasure, with these red fruits of Shambhala, I shall have my war chest and I shall use it to fund my crusade. While the powers of Europe squabble over the west, I shall sweep the east. While the Communists are distracted, I shall ravage among them, and take what is owed me. And for all that is to come, I must thank you.” He cocked his head. “Though, as you have taken Tornovsky from me, I am still owed a life.” He smiled. “Still, this is easily rectified.” Faster than even Anthony’s eyes could follow, Koschei levelled his revolver and snapped off a shot. Gentry pitched backwards without a sound, seemingly drilled through the heart.
As Dolores screamed, Anthony lunged forward, hands outstretched. Koschei’s men rushed to intercept him. They had learned their lesson, and came at him in a group. Gun butts and clubs crashed down on him. Anthony fought his way through the mob, hurling men aside in a display of prodigious strength. He grabbed a gunman by his coat lapels and brought their skulls together with a resounding crack. Ignoring the pain, he drove his foot into the hip of a second, dislocating the man’s leg even as he backhanded the first man, who was reeling from the head butt, hard enough to crush his jaw. A third tackled him around the waist, while a fou
rth grabbed his legs, anchoring him in place.
A moment later, the stock of a rifle caught Anthony in the back of the head, and the world whirled about him in a nauseating fashion. Fists caught him in the sides, chest, and chin. He lashed out, breaking fingers and gouging eyes. Men screamed and reeled as Anthony rampaged among them, like a mountain lion amongst a shepherd’s dogs. He lashed out with feet, hands, and elbows. But for every man he downed, two more seemed to add their efforts to the pile-on. And finally, inevitably, their greater numbers began to tell.
Anthony sank down beneath a hail of blows. He fell to the ground. His body throbbed with pain. Boots crashed against his head and body, but he could barely feel the blows. Finally, Koschei gave the order to stop, and the blows ceased. He was dimly aware of Dolores yelling, and then… nothing at all.
12.
Anthony drifted in and out of consciousness as he felt himself carried somewhere. When a splash of tepid water in his face snapped him back to full consciousness, he discovered that he’d been brought to the roof of the largest of the temple buildings. And, even more disturbingly, his arms and legs had been straightened and tied at their full extension. He flashed back to Shooter’s Island, and how Tornovsky had been bound to the shack roof, and his heart sank as he realized what fate Koschei intended for him. His eyes rolled heavenwards, and his suspicions were confirmed by the twin black shapes that glided through the air far above him in lazy circles.
Koschei stood above him, looking down at the courtyard of the temple below, where his men were busy hauling the train car out toward the waiting engine. They had extricated it from the hole while Anthony lay in a daze. “I am sorry to wake you, but it is almost time to say goodbye,” Koschei said, turning around. He held a canteen in one hand, and Anthony’s knife in the other.
He tossed the canteen aside and sank down onto his haunches, the knife dangling from his hand. “You are strong, Mr. Anthony. That is good. This land eats the strong. It is built on their bones.” He swung the knife up, so that the blade pointed toward the circling eagles. “Your bones will soon join the rest,” Koschei said.
The New Adventures of Jim Anthony, Super-Detective Page 8
