A Triple Thriller Fest (128 page)

The boat was quite close now. It was a dark shape just off shore. A flashlight blinked on its deck and she could see it now, a sport fishing boat. It pitched in the waves and the light wobbled on its decks. The flashlight caught the shapes moving toward it. Men, maybe a dozen or more.

“I can’t get any closer,” the man called from the boat in an American accent. The engine cut to idle.

“Turn off the light,” one of the men shouted from the shore. Sounded like a Russian accent.

“No way. There’s a rock just off starboard. You’ll have to come get the boxes.”

Half a dozen men waded out to the boat and Tess caught a plain glimpse of Kirkov in the flashlight beam. They took a box and carried it to shore. It was the size of a coffin and all they could do to carry it. Half a dozen more men waded out and took another box of similar proportions.

Kirkov grabbed a pair of men and said something that Tess couldn’t quite decipher. He pointed to the boat, then shouted at the man driving it, “We’re just going to get these two boxes to the top of the hill, then come back for the smaller ones. Stay here.”

There was a clang from the direction of the castle, like a gate closing or men simultaneously banging shields and the man on the boat flinched. “What was that? What’s going on up there anyway?”

“Did I hire you to ask questions?” Kirkov demanded. “No, then shut up and do as you’re told.”

The men labored off with the two boxes.

In the woods, Niels said to Tess, “You climbed that hill. How long have we got?”

“At that pace, ten minutes until they get to the road. Then another two to get back. Tip over the ballista and drag it into the woods first.”

They moved the ballista, then ran onto the beach.

“You, in the boat,” Tess called. “Help us, please.”

“Who are you, what do you want?” the man asked. He kicked the engine out of idle and started to pull back.

“Stop!” she shouted. “Whoever you are, you have to help us. For god’s sake.”

The boat cut back to idle. The flashlight glared in their eyes, then scanned the beach twice before coming to rest a second time on their faces.

“You’ve got to help us,” Tess shouted.

“I don’t know what’s going on here, are you with them?”

Tess kept talking. “They’re trying to murder us all. There’s a whole bunch of them and they’ve got us trapped on the island. You know the castle on the island? People are trapped inside and Kirkov is trying to break in to kill us.”

“I’m don’t know anything about that.” He sounded terrified, but he hadn’t left yet, which was good. “I’m just a guy they hired to bring stuff to King’s Island, I don’t know anything.”

“What’s in the boxes?” Niels asked. “Did you look?”

“Doesn’t make any sense, cement drills and a whole shitload of rechargeable batteries. Please, they’ll be back in a few minutes and you’re putting me in a lot of danger.”

“That’s it? Just drills and batteries?”

“No, there’s other stuff. Explosives or grenades in these smaller boxes. I don’t know, I was afraid to touch it. Just took a look and nailed it up again.”

“Give us one of the boxes,” Tess said. “Take the rest back. You have to call the police and tell them what’s going on here. They have to send someone to help us.”

“I don’t know, I—”

“They’ve killed a bunch of people already,” Niels said. “What do you think is going to happen when the police find out what happened here? They’ll come looking for you anyway, if these guys don’t kill you first. Telling the police is the only thing you can do.”

“Okay, I’ll go,” the man said.

“Give us a box first,” Tess said. “Please. We need to stay alive until help comes.”

The man said nothing at first, then disappeared into the back and a moment later the flashlight flashed on them again. “You can take this one, it’s the smallest. The others are too big for two people.”

They waded in. Felt like ice water. The water was mid-thigh by the time they reached the boat.

The man wore a winter coat and a stocking cap and gloves with the fingers cut off. He pushed the box to the edge with some difficulty, then helped lift it over the edge and onto Niels’s and Tess’s shoulders. She groaned under the weight.

“Now get the hell out of here,” Tess said. “And tell the police or we’re all going to die.”

The man on the boat revved his engine and backed away from the shore. Tess and Niels carried their load to shore, then made their way toward where they’d abandoned the ballista.

They weren’t far, just inside the woods when Kirkov and his men returned to the beach. Niels and Tess froze. The box bit into her shoulder and she desperately wanted to put it down, but she didn’t dare move out of fear of snapping a branch or making some other sound to give away their position.

Kirkov shouted curses and threats at the departing boat. It would already be out of range. “Never mind,” he said after the sound had disappeared. “We’ll deal with that later. We’ve got what we need to break in. The rest will be knife and sword work. Come on.”

After they left, Niels and Tess continued to follow their own path back to the castle, their prize heavy on their shoulders.

Chapter Forty-one:

Jim Grossman turned his friend Dave’s Mainship toward Burlington and pushed the throttle forward. At top speed, the 200 horsepower Perkins engine could do better than 20 knots. Not in this weather.

Heavy swells pushed in the opposite direction. The wind and the waves were so high that it was almost like being on the ocean. He had to pull back on the throttle and ride the swells. Sleet fell from the sky. Even with full lights, visibility was almost zero and he navigated by radar.

Goddamn, what the hell was going on? He’d tried to convince himself that it was all part of a crazy game, a bunch of rich people with more money than common sense, but that woman and her foreign friend had been very serious. The woman especially, looked ready to swing herself onto the deck and lop off his head.

And he believed them. Because Black Horse was nuts.

He was halfway to Burlington before he throttled the boat to idle and stared into the darkness. What happened when Black Horse discovered he was gone? He had a satellite phone, he could call someone in Burlington. And he knew where Jim docked his boat.

Jim flipped open his phone to call his wife. Time to come clean. She’d know what to do. Call the Coast Guard maybe? Or the police to meet him at the docks. How was he going to explain it? The cell phone answered the question for him: no signal.

But who said he had to go back to Burlington? What about Plattsburgh, on the New York side of the lake? Better yet, how about Mallets Bay? He could be there in twenty minutes, just had to round the tip of South Hero island and cut southeast into the bay. He could call his wife and the police from there.

Driving sleet froze against the windshield and deck as thick as icing on a cake. The wipers soon failed. Jim fought the wind and ice to go outside and scrape it clean. He turned the light in all directions but could see nothing. The radar showed South Hero a couple of hundred yards off port.

The water was calmer here between the mainland and the southern tip of South Hero and Jim pushed down on the throttle. He leaned forward and tried to see against the sleet.

Was the rock on the radar? Hard to say. Maybe it was and he was too distracted by the mainland. Maybe it had been covered with a huge swell and then he’d come down in a trough.

The Mainship slammed to a halt with a terrific rending sound that ripped along the hull and vibrated up through the floor. The boat lurched hard to starboard, then bobbed up as it tried to right itself.

The boat came so smartly to a correct position that he thought it had resisted the blow. But then it came down again and water sloshed over the deck and didn’t wash off so quickly this time.

It wasn’t his boat and it took him a second to find the life preserver over his head and unlatch it. He grabbed it with one hand and flipped the distress lights with the other, not that anyone would see them. The boat rolled to port and didn’t right itself. Jim found the radio.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is SuzieQ VTH335, two miles east of Mallets Bay, hit rock, going down fast, one man onboard, going into water with life jacket. SuzieQ is 34 foot Mainship sport fisher, white hull, black trim.”

The radio crackled a response, but Jim lost his footing and fell to the floor. Water was up to the doors and he pushed them open. He pulled on the life preserver and clipped it around his waist and chest. There was an inflatable raft in one of the deck compartments, but he couldn’t reach it. He had to let go of the railing. Get away before the boat rolled on top of him. Jim pushed off the edge during the next swell and went into the water.

The cold water took his breath away. He struggled to swim away from the boat as it rolled onto its side, scrapped against the rock and went down. It was underwater within a few minutes. Utter darkness. A swell rolled over his head and he came up sputtering. His muscles ached and his hands already felt numb. Sleet and wind drove against his face.

If the Coast Guard had sent someone from Burlington within seconds of his distress signal and if they powered in a straight line to his exact spot, he had twenty minutes. At a water temperature of forty degrees, hypothermia would hit in fifteen.

Chapter Forty-two:

The castle came under attack before the men on the north wall finished hauling Tess and Niels and their prize up to the walls. They took the box back to the keep. She barely had time to open the box, stare in delighted amazement at the goodies inside, before the shout came from the gatehouse. Niels loaded a satchel from the box, threw it over his shoulder and followed Tess up the stairs to the outer curtain.

By the time they reached the battlements, Tess’s men launched crossbow bolts tipped with burning rags to illuminate the battlefield. They burned and hissed in the driving sleet. Men hung lamps on poles in front of the gatehouse or along the walls to look for enemies against the walls.

A pair of sheds inched down the hill. One made its way toward the gatehouse, the other toward the broken stretch of wall, weakened by days of bombardment. The wall formed a V, open at the top, but tapering to a weakened, but still intact bulge of stone on ground level, where the wall was thickest.

“Get the north shed,” she said told her men. “The south one, with the ram, is a feint.”

Peter found her a few minutes later. He carried lead to melt in braziers being lit all along the wall. “How can you be sure?”

“About the north shed? Look, you can see it going slow on purpose. It’s got less weight because there’s no ram underneath.”

“How are they going to attack the walls, then?”

“Electric cement drills. That’s what was on the boat, and a bunch of rechargeable batteries.”

“Rechargeable?” Peter asked.

“Think of them as disposable in this case,” Tess said. “They’ll go through them one after another as they drill at that weak spot. Pretty soon they’ll be in the middle of the bailey.”

Tess examined the walls. She was crippled by the gaping wound atop the outer curtain that kept her men from moving freely from the near side to the side closest to the gatehouse. It effectively divided her forces.

“Get the blacksmiths,” she told Peter. “Have them drop everything and get up here. See if they can rivet a couple of boards from one side of that hole to the next. It’ll be dangerous as hell, but it might help in a pinch.”

“Wouldn’t want to be standing on a plank if they break through the wall, it will collapse.”

“You’ll be dead,” Tess agreed.

She looked up and her mood improved to see Niels, Miko, and Lars lugging the stolen box along the outer curtain.

“That everything?” she asked.

“I held back a few things for the warehouse, in case they break through,” Niels said.

“Perfect,” she said. She turned to Peter. “And you shut off the electricity down there?”

“Yes, the generator is off. No way to turn it back on now that we’ve hauled up every liter of diesel fuel.”

“Good.”

The warehouse was below ground. With the climate-control system off, the air would shortly resemble the bottom of a mineshaft, except for that bit near the walled-in door on the north curtain, assuming the enemy broke through.

“Heads down!” someone shouted.

A mass of enemy soldiers broke off from where they’d sheltered behind the north shed, now halfway to the castle. They launched a hail of crossbow bolts from the protection of six-foot wooden shields. Her men exchanged fire, and she peered over the battlement to see one of Kirkov’s crossbowmen go down.

Once she had the enemy crossbows pinned down, she returned her attention to the sheds. The nearest was only fifty yards off and broke from the slower one that moved toward the gates.

The planks came from below and men worked from either side of the gap in the wall to attach them to the hoardings. There was shortly a way to move from one side to the other, but she didn’t trust the plank system, attached as it was to a crippled section of the wall.

Tess grabbed Peter. “Go the gatehouse. Make sure everyone is ready. And watch your footing.”

He made his way gingerly across the planks and disappeared into the gatehouse.

The first shed pulled up to weak spot in the castle walls while the other approached the gates. The first shed bumped around as the men underneath tried to get past the heap of stones that had broken free of the walls.

There was a whine of electric drills, maybe three or four from the sound of it. It vibrated through the stone, all the way to the top of the walls. Her men took buckets of warm diesel fuel from the generator, mixed with melted pitch and poured it over the battlements. The enemy had covered the shed with wet hides and layer-upon-layer of canvas from their tents. That wouldn’t matter, and neither would the sleet help. Not with all the diesel.