Into the Black (23 page)

Irene was giddy with relief, as they reached the sleigh.  "I can't believe we pulled that off."

"Wait until we're back home before you start celebrating," Kismet chided.  "We've got a long trip ahead of us."

"Yeah, but it's all downhill from here.  How long before they know we're gone?"

"It depends.  If our Russian friends don't do anything foolish, we should be well on our way before anyone knows what happened.  Hopefully, the Germans will think that their prisoners escaped on their own.  I don't want Harcourt knowing I'm here if I can help it."

Irene and her father got into the back of the sleigh and bundled up together in the blankets, while Kismet took the driver's seat and coaxed the team into motion.  The horses effortlessly drew the sleigh in a wide circle until the iron rails slipped into the tracks they had earlier cut.  From that point on, the ride was virtually self-guiding.

Kerns gradually revealed the events that had transpired since his separation from his daughter in New York.  Harcourt and two of Grimes' agents had crossed the Atlantic with him, stopping in Germany long enough to assemble a team of
Bundeswehr Kommandos Spezialkrafte
elite soldiers.  Together they infiltrated Russian controlled waters, captured a
Svetlyak
class patrol boat, the
Zmeya,
and used it to make a surreptitious landing at a remote point just south of Poti.  Much of what Kismet had supposed was verified; the death of the fleeing sailor, the airdrops and the arrival of fresh troops parachuting in under cover of darkness.

Kerns had cooperated for fear of his daughter's life, taking Harcourt directly to the site of the ancient mining camp. Kismet did not comment, but continued to listen as Irene spun the tale of their own adventures.  Soon thereafter, both father and daughter were lulled to sleep, while Kismet continued to tend the horses.

Traveling on the decline was more difficult than Kismet had anticipated.  The sleigh naturally wanted to race downhill.  The horses were no longer serving as a means of locomotion, but rather as a brake to prevent the sleigh from running away out of control.  Since this was not the task for which nature had so perfectly endowed them, they were having difficulty in maintaining surefootedness on the icy slopes.  Kismet's attention was totally focused on controlling the team.

The lights of dawn were beginning to shine over the crest of the Caucasus six hours after they left the mountain camp when Irene stirred from her sleep and crawled forward to sit beside Kismet.  "What time is it?"

"After seven.  It should be light soon."

"How much farther?"

"I'd say we're about halfway."  Kismet relaxed his tense grip on the reins as the track leveled out briefly.  The horses, sensing that their yoke was no longer pushing them from behind, also relaxed and began trotting forward as if grateful for the exercise.  The track led into a narrow pass, with snowdrifts piled high on either side for several hundred yards.  Kismet remembered that the defile curved around to the left, and began to gradually decline again before leading into the switchbacks.  Nevertheless, he was happy for the brief respite.

"But they're probably awake up in the camp.  They know my father is gone."

Kismet shrugged.  "They've probably known that for hours.  But even with the truck they can't make it down this path any faster than we can.  We've got a good lead on them."

Irene cocked her head to one side.  "What's that sound?"

Her hearing was sharper than his, but before he could enquire, he heard it too; the unmistakable sound of an engine.  He turned his head sideways, trying to isolate the source.  It wasn't coming from behind them, but rather from further down the trail.  Suddenly, a massive vehicle rounded the corner, its headlamps blazing.

Reflexively, Kismet reined back the horses, halting them fifty yards from the turn.  An enormous tracked snow-cat, the kind used to groom ski slopes at mountain resorts, rumbled toward them.  Two more just like it followed close behind, their tracks digging deep parallel grooves in the snow pack.  Painted white to blend in with the wintry background, each vehicle carried a complement of barely distinguishable figures, likewise camouflaged.

"Troop carriers," Kismet realized aloud.

As the driver of the lead vehicle caught sight of them, Kismet could hear gears whining as they were shifted down.  The troop carrier ground to a halt less than twenty paces from the sleigh.  Kismet's heart skipped a beat—not because of the standoff, but because of what he saw in the cab of the snow-cat.

He did not recognize the two men sitting in the front of the vehicle, but the identity of the third man, leaning over the back of the driver's seat, was beyond question.  In a frozen moment, they recognized each other.

Through the frosty pane, he saw Halverson Grimes' lips slowly form a single word: "Kismet!"

Grimes' incredulous expression mirrored Kismet's own.  Both sets of eyes narrowed into defensive slits as each man recognized the other's presence on this remote mountainside.  Grimes broke the visual deadlock, turning to the driver beside him to bark an order.

Kismet also looked away, refocusing on the snow-cats and the terrain they dominated.  The vehicles had turned the corner sharply, staying close to the right hand side of the track—Kismet's left.  On the other side however, to his right, the gap between the snow bank and the sides of the vehicles was considerable, possibly even wide enough to....

Kismet did not hesitate.  Grimes and his troops were already starting to move, beginning the process that would result in their capture or death.  "Hold on!"

With a shout to the horses and a shake of the reins he urged the team into motion.  Immediately as they began to move, he pulled them right, angling toward the gap between the drift and the leading snow-cat.  The horses could not comprehend his urgency, but the ferocity of his manner sufficed to motivate them to a trot.

He heard Irene shouting in his ear, demanding an explanation but there was no time for him to give one.  The side of the sleigh banged into the front corner of the first vehicle, sending a shock wave through the sled and jostling its passengers.  The iron rails bounced out of the grooves in the snow, skipping sideways as the horses' forward motion pulled it into line.  The hop carried the sleigh into a snowdrift and dislodged a torrent of the frozen powder into the interior before it straightened out. 

Kismet kept at the horses, shouting for them to go faster as they threaded the narrow gap.  They shot past the first snow-cat and into the open space between it and the next vehicle in the convoy.  The commandos clinging to the open platform on the rear of the transport stared in disbelief.  Each one fingered his weapon nervously, but without orders from their commanding officer, chose to fire nothing except for harsh curses.

Abruptly, Kismet realized the fallacy of his thinking.  The snow-cats were not in a perfect line.  In fact, the second one was nearly two feet closer to the bank on Kismet's right side.  He swore under his breath, unable to judge the distance between them and the gap or to tell if the space was wide enough to allow them to pass.

The problem solved itself.  Ignoring the possibility of failure, Kismet adjusted the course of the horses so that the edge of the snowdrift was virtually brushing against the right horse's flank.  The rest he left up to luck.

The horses balked, but Kismet shook the reins vigorously, snapping them like whips against the animals' hindquarters.  Grudgingly, they responded and burst forward into the narrow pass.

Each horse tried to turn inward to avoid striking whatever lay alongside.  The harness allowed for very little of this sort of movement, but somehow, the two mighty horses squeezed between the icy wall and the metal behemoth.  The sleigh however was another matter.

The front end was too wide by a fraction of an inch, but that was enough for it to come to a dead stop, wedged between the unyielding fender of the second troop mover and the snowbank.  The sudden halt confused the horses, causing them to slide and stumble in their rig.

"We're stuck!" Irene shrieked, once more stating the obvious to Kismet's continued chagrin.  He ignored her. The horses were strong enough to get them through, even if it meant shaving off the side of the snowdrift with the sleigh.  All that was required was the proper motivation.  Shouting meaningless vocalizations at the pair, he repeatedly shook the reins, trying if nothing else to aggravate the horses into reacting.  Eight hooves bit deep into the snow; massive legs that were nothing less than great pillars of muscle strained against the grip that held the sleigh in place.

"It's working," Kerns shouted, now completely awake.  Kismet did not relent in his efforts, nor did he look to see if the assessment was correct.  There was still a long way to go.

A towheaded man, about Kismet's age, looked down from the window of the vehicle directly above them.  He shouted in German for them to surrender, and brandished a sidearm to enforce his command.  In the reflection of the windscreen, Kismet saw the troops from the lead cat disgorging onto the snow and advancing on them with rifles at the ready.

The sleigh lurched forward nearly a few feet before binding up again.  A second violent movement took it further, and this time it was not halted, but merely slowed as it scraped through.  A burst of noise rattled the mountain pass as one of the Kalashnikovs discharged, and Kismet ducked reflexively.  An instant later, the sleigh burst into the clear between the second and the last snow-cat in the convoy.

Troops from both vehicles were spilling out onto the snow, bent on impeding their escape.  It seemed obvious that commandos were linked by radio and getting updates from the front.  The men in the last vehicle had probably known about them almost from the start, and had formed a human wall in the narrow gap beside their cat.

The troops behind them had also closed the gap, the foremost attempting to manually seize control of the sleigh.  Kerns roused himself to fight them off with his fists, and unprepared for foot pursuit in the icy conditions, the men slipped and fell against each other like dominos.  Soon white clad commandos were piled up behind them in the narrow space.

Kismet leapt forward, onto the back of the left-hand steed, and used the reins like a whip against the soldiers directly in their path.  The leather straps proved more intimidating to these well-trained warriors than a blazing muzzle flash from a machine gun.  The thought of the rawhide burning into their exposed faces, tearing out their eyes or disfiguring them with long, painful cuts, caused even the toughest of them to recoil, and the human barrier crumbled.

The draft horses plowed forward.  The troops ran from before them, knowing that a slip might find them crushed beneath the massive hooves or sliced apart by the iron rails of the sleigh.  With Irene and her father successfully repelling the advances from their rear and sides, the sleigh passed the final snow-cat and burst into the open.

Right away Kismet found himself imperiled by a new threat.  Beyond the mountain pass the trail began declining again.  Moreover, a broad corner loomed ahead, with a precipice on one side.  He immediately let the horses' pace slacken as to approach the curve at a less hectic clip.

As he clambered back to the bench seat of the sleigh, he risked a rearward look, confirming his belief that the pass was too narrow to allow the snow-cats to turn and pursue.  Like the barbs on a fishhook, the vehicles were firmly inserted into the narrow passage.  They might, with great difficulty, be able to back up, but the only viable way of using the caterpillar driven transports to pursue the sleigh would necessitate driving them forward until a space wide enough to come about could be found.

However, Kismet quickly realized the commandos would not need their vehicles to mount an effective pursuit.  Dozens of the soldiers were breaking out long containers, from which they took narrow strips of carbon fiber, each as tall as a man, which curved like scimitars at one end.

"Skis," rasped Kismet, as if the word were an oath.  The elite soldiers had brought along cross-country skis.  In a matter of seconds, the first of the troops had secured his boots in the toe bindings and pushed off with his ski poles.

Kismet brought his focus back to the trail ahead.  The snow-cats had stamped a broad path of packed snow leading back down the mountain.  That was the good news.  Their speed was gradually increasing as the slope began to drop away beneath the rails.  Kismet felt the shift in their momentum as first, the horses altered direction, and then the sleigh, like a pendulum, swung into line.

Beyond the corner, the track led into a rapid descent across the face of the mountain.  Sheer ice rose above on one side, while a drop-off opened up on the other.  The side nearest to the edge of the precipice put them dangerously close to going over, but there was no way to effect a change.  The only option was to once more put their fate in the slippery hands of luck.

Three fearless ski-troopers screamed toward them, leaning forward as the slope increased their own speed.  The first tucked his poles under one arm and brought his rifle around.  Using the web sling like a bracing arm, he fired the weapon one-handed into the air.  They were only warnings shot, but nonetheless close enough to let the fugitives know where the next discharge would be aimed.

Kismet found the threat bitterly amusing.  They were committed to a descent of the mountain; they could not stop now, even if they wanted to.  Any attempt to slow the draft horses would end disastrously, with the sleigh jack-knifing and causing a lethal tumble down the trail, or shooting out over the edge. The commando dropped the smoking weapon, allowing it to dangle impotently from the strap and tucked in to increase his speed. As he maneuvered closer to the speeding sleigh, Kismet saw what he was up to.

Despite the urgency of the moment, gears were turning in Kismet's head.  In the back of his mind, he was putting seemingly unrelated facts and observations together.  It was glaringly apparent that Grimes and Harcourt still had a use for Peter Kerns.  Perhaps Harcourt had begun to suspect what Kismet now knew; namely, that Peter Kerns had deliberately misdirected the British archaeologist, that he had not discovered the artifacts in the mountain camp, and that in all likelihood, the Russian engineer had already laid eyes on the Golden Fleece and probably concealed it somewhere far from the Caucasus.  Irene was merely a pawn, useful alive, but no loss if killed.  What was not so obvious was the value of his own life to Grimes.  The pursuit in New York had seemed openly hostile, yet throughout Grimes had made a pretense of wanting Kismet's assistance.  What was his value to the traitor now?  Had Grimes ordered the soldiers to kill him, or to simply commandeer the sleigh and return all three to the mountain camp?