One of the little men stood up for a better look, and Jake made his move. With one fluid motion, he rushed the man, grasped him by the collar and pants, and threw him overboard. The other men, dumbfounded, suddenly realized what had happened and pointed their guns at Jake.
“No,” Petrova yelled.
The boat slowed and turned to the left.
Jake looked back and saw the man bobbing up and down behind them, his tiny arms waving and his voice barely audible in the wind.
“What was the point of that?” Petrova asked Jake.
Moving back to the bench, Jake took a seat again. “It just looked like fun.” Really, he had gotten rid of one MP5 automatic submachine gun. He was sure the guy would have dropped the rifle to the bottom of the lake as soon as he hit the water.
“That was just cruel.”
“That means a lot coming from you, Victor.”
They picked up the wet little guard, without a rifle, and continued down the lake toward Hamar.
32
Toni Contardo had heard over the radio that Jake was probably with Victor Petrova and his men in the boat, somewhere in the fog ahead of them. But by then Petrova had gotten a good lead on them. They could have been miles ahead by now. Toni had made sure to tell Anna to redirect some assets along the road between Lillehammer and Hamar. That had angered the Interpol agent. She had already done that.
Now, with the fog lifting somewhat, the police officer driving the boat was able to pick up the pace. Yet they still had not even caught a glimpse of Petrova’s boat. Sitting solemnly next to Toni, Colonel Reed shifted his head away from the wind and caught Toni staring at him.
“Jake will be fine,” the colonel said, barely above the sound of the motor and the swift breeze.
“Why did you get him involved in the first place?” Toni asked him. She thought she had already asked him this before, but her thoughts were clouded now by the task at hand — finding the little madman.
The colonel lowered his jaw and said, “Petrova suggested it. When he mentioned that our mutual friend Captain Olson had died there, I should have been suspicious. After all, how would he know that?”
That was easy to know. “The KGB had a file on all of our military attaches at each of our embassies — just like we have on them. When Captain Olson and CIA officer John Korkala suddenly no longer worked there, no cover story would have slipped past Victor Petrova. He knew our men had something to do with his own men not coming back from the Arctic.”
“Makes sense. Now that you spell it out for me. How we going to find Petrova now?”
They both heard the helicopter approaching from the north at a high rate of speed, and looked up as it buzzed past them fifty feet above the lake.
“That’ll help,” Toni said.
They were cruising at maximum speed for the Bell 407 at that elevation, over a hundred forty miles per hour. Kjersti looked determined behind the stick. Anna, in the second front seat, turned to the cargo area and saw the two MI6 officers, Jimmy McLean and Velda Crane, strapped into benches, the tall Scotsman calm and cool and the little English woman, white knuckles, holding on for her life.
They had hurried back down the road to Lillehammer, the area still foggy, but Kjersti saying she could take off, clear the low ceiling, and pull back down once they got down the lake a ways. After all, the weather report had Hamar nearly clear and the fog thinning out the farther they got from Lillehammer. They could have taken more people on the flight, but Kjersti wanted her chopper as light as possible for maximum speed and maneuverability.
Anna had asked for the main highway between Hamar and Lillehammer to be closed, but the local police said that would take a while. It was almost forty miles between the two cities by road — longer by the lake — so it would take some time to clear the cars from that highway. She had also asked the police to set up on the main bridge crossing the lake, but the police had not been able to reach the bridge in time.
Through the headset, Anna said, “Would it be better to vector over the mountains and come at them from the other side?”
Kjersti thought for a moment, no certainty in her expression. “I don’t know.”
“Victor Petrova could feel cornered, nothing to lose, and decide to kill Jake.”
“I don’t think so. He wants those gems more than he wants Jake dead.”
Anna hoped so, but she still thought she was right. Why not come around and catch them off-guard? “Move to the east,” Anna ordered.
Instantly after Anna spoke, Kjersti banked hard left, the helicopter responding to her actions. As they approached the hills around the lake, she pulled back on the stick and they rose over the trees and hills. Once over the top, she banked to the right and continued south. From that position they could only catch periodic glimpses of the lake as they passed river valleys or lower humps in the hills.
The quick maneuvers put a lump in Anna’s throat and she thought she might lose her lunch. But she was convinced they had done the right thing.
Jake checked his watch. They had traveled by boat for an hour now. Perhaps thirty miles at their rate. Moments ago, the driver slowed and pulled over to the east bank of the lake. A couple miles back they had passed under the main highway that ran from Hamar to Lillehammer, with Jake guessing they would have had at least a modest police presence on the bridge. But he had only seen a couple cars cruising along the highway as they passed under the bridge, none of them police types.
The boat slowed now and pulled into a small sheltered inlet. Ahead on the shore, Jake saw movement. Victor Petrova had men waiting there. They nudged the shore and two Swedish men, the remaining two that Jake had followed from Falun, including the man he had encountered on the train, held the boat as all but the driver and one of Petrova’s men remained on the boat. The man Jake had thrown overboard. Seconds later, the boat was shoved off and it quickly made its way back out to the center of the lake at their original speed.
All of them trudged through the thick woods — no trail at all — until they came to a small dirt road where two identical Volvo sedans sat. They piled in, Jake ending up with the driver who would no longer drink Coke, he and Petrova in the back, and another little man with an MP5 in the front. The one with the blond spiked flat-top.
As they pulled away, Jake said to the driver, “I’m getting kind of thirsty. You wouldn’t happen to have a Coke hanging around up there would you?”
The driver scowled at Jake in the rearview mirror. They all ignored Jake. Fine. They can’t take a joke. But Jake guessed the Swede hadn’t mentioned the incident on the train to anyone.
“You all seem to know where you’re going,” Jake said. “Glad someone knows. I get all turned around on these back roads in foreign countries.”
The front passenger leaned over, digging into Jake’s backpack, and came out with his hand-held GPS, showing it to them in the back seat. Good thing Jake had wiped out his waypoints and not written down the location where he had placed the box of gems.
“Yeah, that’s mine,” Jake admitted.
Jake could see Victor Petrova’s smirk from the corner of his eye.
“I think you know precisely where we’re going,” Petrova said.
“I barely use the thing,” Jake said. “A GPS is great for wilderness hikers. When they get lost, those finding their bones years later will know exactly where that person died.”
“But I’m guessing you wouldn’t hide millions of dollars of Alexandrites without taking an exact GPS reading.”
Jake shrugged. “Check it out.”
“We have,” Petrova said, the snide smile still smack on his face. “You cleared all of your waypoints and locations. But if I had to bet that entire box of Alexandrites, I would guess you placed the location in memory.”