Clive Cussler - The Tombs

Remi grabbed Sam’s hand. “The stable is over there,” she said as she veered toward a long, low building. Sam ran harder.

Behind them there were injured men being dragged out of the smoke-filled building into the air, many of them coughing and many battered and cut by flying doors and windows.

Remi and Sam slipped into the stable, where they could see a row of ten stalls with horses in them. The big noise had startled the animals, so they tossed their heads and looked at the two intruders with big rolling, frightened eyes. Far down the row, there was a horse kicking the gate of his stall, making a sound like gunshots.

Remi walked along the stalls, talking to the horses. “Hello, boy. What a big, smart boy you are. And handsome too.” She reached up and patted each horse, murmuring sweet words to all of them. In a short time they seemed to be calmer, but outside the disturbing human noises continued—shouts, running feet, smoke alarms.

Sam held the Škorpion in his hand as he watched through the partially open door. “They’re not turning on the power.”

“Would you?”

“Probably not. The dark should help us get out the back of this building and into the fields.”

“What would help more is if you’ll saddle your own horse.”

“Horse?”

“We can’t outrun them, we don’t have a car, and can’t get to one without getting shot. A horse can run across country where there are no roads. Sasha says the railroad tracks are that way and they lead to a station.” She swung an English saddle over the horse and cinched the strap. “Be good, big guy. Be calm.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Sam.

“I wasn’t talking to you, but be calm anyway.”

Sam went to the wall of the stable where the tack hung, selected a saddle, blanket, bit, and bridle. He approached a horse and it reared and kicked the wall.

“Over here,” Remi said. “I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”

Sam went to the other stall and said, “All right, you big, beautiful monster. You and I are going to be best buddies.” He saddled the horse and put on the bridle. “Now we’re going to run away from about a thousand Russian guys before they kill your nice new friends.”

Sam and Remi led the two horses to the far end of the stable, away from the house, the fire, and the commotion. Remi led her horse outside, mounted him, and waited. Sam, a far less experienced rider, hoisted himself up into the saddle, and his horse spun around. He needed to hold the reins with both hands to control the horse, so he tossed the gun aside. “Hold on, buddy. I’m your friend, remember?” The horse seemed to decide then he would be willing to go away from the house and set off at a canter.

They were in a large pasture where the horses no doubt were allowed to run during the day, so the horse’s newfound calm was probably familiarity. Sam patted the horse and talked to him. In the next paddock, Sam could see barriers for steeplechase jumping and he felt a twinge of anticipation that things were not about to get better for him. Apparently these were jumping horses, and as a child Remi had been an avid rider. The only one in the paddock who had no idea what he was doing was Sam.

Sam again heard voices shouting, but this time it sounded as though they were near the riding area. Several times Sam heard the crack as a bullet passed nearby and then the rattle of machine-gun fire. He saw Remi’s horse speed up, galloping toward the fence at the end of the field.

Remi’s horse soared over the white rails. Sam spent a second noticing that the whiteness of the fence, reflecting some of the light from the fire, made everything beyond it look black. He couldn’t make out Remi and her horse very well. Sam’s horse followed with him astride it, willing the horse to believe, against all reason, that Sam was confident and experienced. To his amazement, the horse ran up to the fence and leapt into the air. As Sam became airborne, he heard Remi yell, “Lean forward!” so he did, and then the horse landed, front hooves first and then the back, and Sam managed to hold on.

The horses ran on, not as fast as they had at first but still about as fast as Sam could tolerate. The field looked to him like an endless sea of blackness. The horses ran for two miles or so without meeting an obstacle. In the distance, far to their right, Sam and Remi could see lights on a roadway. It was hard to tell whether the occasional headlights had anything to do with them, but the road never got any closer and the lights never turned toward them or stopped. Remi and Sam slowed down, and then they dismounted and walked the horses in the darkness for a while to let them rest and cool down. When Remi felt the horses were ready, she mounted her horse and began to ride forward, slowly picking up speed again. Sam mounted and followed.

* * *

SERGEI POLIAKOFF walked outside the burning manor house, keeping a distance of thirty feet from the flames that were licking up its sides and flickering along the peak of its roof. The back of the house seemed to have been kicked outward by the explosion. What there had been to explode, he had no idea. Since the fire had begun, it had set off a couple of caches of ammunition, but they had been quick, rapid-fire volleys, like strings of firecrackers, not big explosions. Maybe the gas had not been turned off completely. He would probably never know.

The explosion was an outrage, an insult so egregious that he hadn’t quite found a way to react to it. His handpicked, highly trained, well-paid squad of bodyguards and operators had failed utterly against one man on foreign soil, arriving on foot, to take back his wife.

The word wife set off a new set of concerns. His wife, Irena, and his children had been in Moscow, visiting her parents, and he felt relieved knowing that. But in a few days she would be coming home. And this—this ugly, horribly damaged building—was home.

His stupid men had formed into squads now and had begun fighting the fire with garden hoses. He watched them imitating well-trained troops, and felt affronted by their tardy and useless discipline and their lack of professionalism.

Next, faintly at first, and then louder and louder, he heard the wails of sirens. His men looked at one another, grinning at the realization that help was coming, and kept spraying water. Poliakoff ran across the yard and clutched the arm of Kotzov, the head of his bodyguards. “Hear those sirens?”

“Yes. They’ll have these fires out in a few minutes.”

“No, you donkey. Don’t you remember what’s stored in the basement? Get your men to stop spraying water. Get them to soak what’s left of the ground floor with gasoline. Block the road from the highway to delay the fire trucks. We’ve got to give the house time to burn before the firemen and police get a look at those drugs.”

Poliakoff stood in isolation as his men stopped fighting the fire and ran to siphon gasoline from the cars and trucks to add to it. This too was part of the outrage. These Fargo people had forced him to burn down his own house. What an indignity. He should have killed the wife as soon as he’d seen her.

* * *

MILES AWAY on the steppe, Sam and Remi saw train tracks across the road from them, the rails gleaming in the moonlight. “Sasha was right,” Remi said. “Here are the tracks.”

“Yes,” said Sam. “But which way is the station?”

“Both ways, silly. That’s how railways work.”

“I meant the nearest station. But I guess it doesn’t matter. Nizhny Novgorod is that way, so we’ve got to go the other way.”

As they started to lead the horses across the road, they saw the first headlights they’d seen in hours. The car originally appeared far away and then came closer and closer. They could tell immediately it was like no car they’d ever seen. It had three headlights—the usual pair, and then another one right between the two on the nose of the car. As the car came around the bend and pulled to the side to pass, the center headlight moved, pointing in the direction it was going.