The Mystery of the Russian Ransom (10 page)

Everyone looked at the mysterious man in the photograph. His face wasn’t very clear, but they could see he was tall. His fur hat was very distinctive.

“I know that hat,” said Mr. D.

“So do I,” said Muck.

Muck looked at the picture one more time, then started nodding.

“It’s Mr. Petrov.”

“W
e have a game to play,” Muck announced after the police had been called and Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbertson had raced over from their hotel to see for themselves that Sarah was all right.

“We have a game to play … and we have our first-line center back.”

There was no time for pausing. That evening, at the Ufa Arena, the Owls were up against Yekaterinburg, the top-rated Russian peewee team in the tournament.

There wasn’t really a championship trophy – the gathering was supposed to be just a series of exhibition matches – but it was a tournament in the eyes and minds of the Owls. Winner would have “bragging rights,” just like back in 1972, which seemed a million years ago to the young Owls.

The Owls scrambled to get their gear from their rooms and load it onto the shuttle bus that would take them to the rink. Sarah’s equipment was ready for her, as carefully packed as she had left it. It smelled like roses compared to Nish’s stinking equipment bag, which all the other Owls carefully avoided.

Nish was still boasting about his vital role in Sarah’s rescue – “And then I remembered how the Zamboni had to dump its snow …” – as the bus turned in to the parking lot of the Ufa Arena. By then, every Owl on the bus was sick of listening to him. They’d tuned him out before the bus turned the first corner.

Travis felt happy. Happier than he could ever remember being. He was on his way to play a game
of hockey against a strong team. He had his line back – Sarah in the middle, Dmitri on the right wing, Travis on left.

He thought about Pavel and why the young coach had decided to help them rather than turn them over to the bad guys. Pavel had been a bad guy himself, but then he turned out to be a good guy. Why? Was it just because he’d come to realize what an awful thing it was they were doing to her? Or had he been struggling with it all along?

It was going to be a good game. Travis had kissed the inside of his jersey as he hauled it over his head. He had been the first player on the ice, his skates the first to draw a line on the new, freshly flooded surface. He had twirled his stick perfectly as he pulled away. He had been first around the net, digging in extra hard as he exploded down the far side of the rink, his skates singing and sizzling. His first
shot had pinged off the crossbar and high into the netting at the back of the Owls’ net.

He was set.

“They’re
good
!”

Sarah was gasping for breath. Her line had been trapped in its own end for the entire shift by the determined forechecking of the Yekaterinburg Dynamo. Travis had twice tried to clear the zone by firing the puck off the glass, only to have the tall defenseman for Dynamo leap into the air like a baseball outfielder and knock the puck down with his glove. But for the incredible goaltending of Jeremy – flopping this way and that, stacking his pads, moving quickly from post to post – Dynamo would have scored two or three times on that shift alone.

“Dmitri!” Travis yelled across Sarah’s back. Dmitri leaned back and looked Travis’s way.

“Use that speed of yours,” Travis said. “We’ll flip you the puck.”

Dmitri nodded. The Screech Owl who had done all the talking when they rescued Sarah was
again the silent Dmitri. Travis smiled, happy to be together with his line once again.

Travis saw Muck reach and gently tap Sarah’s shoulder. The sign that her line was up next. Muck was going to double-shift them.

Andy’s line came off after a puck went out of play, and Sarah jumped straight over the boards, not even bothering with the gate. She was ready.

Sarah easily won the face-off, blocking the other center with her butt while sliding the puck back to Lars. Lars hurried behind Jeremy’s net, turned, and watched as everyone took up positions. The Dynamo forwards came over the blue line but swooped away like swallows, not challenging Lars.

Lars hit Nish on the far side with a pass, and the closest Dynamo player charged at him, hoping to cause a turnover. But Nish deftly sidestepped the check and tricked the player by doing absolutely nothing with the puck. He simply lifted his stick, leaving the puck where it was, and the checker roared by, stopping suddenly in a high spray of snow when he realized he’d just skated past a free puck.

Nish tapped a short pass to Sarah, who immediately wheeled and sent a hard backhand cross-ice to Travis. Travis had the open lane and moved fast over the Owls’ blue line.

Dmitri was already away. Travis feared they’d be offside if he didn’t get the Hail Mary pass away fast, so he flipped the puck immediately and it sailed high over his checker’s head, over the reach of the tall defenseman, and landed smack on the blue line just as Dmitri crossed.

Dmitri was in alone. Travis felt he hardly needed to watch to know what would happen next: forehand fake, backhand, and high into the roof, the water bottle flying.

Muck never said a word. Just a light pinch of three players’ shoulders when the line came off. For Travis, Sarah, and Dmitri, that was enough.

The highest praise possible from their coach.

They were tied 2–2 going into the third – Nish scoring on a power play blast from the point – and still tied with less than a minute to go in the game. A small touch to Sarah’s shoulder from Muck sent
her line over the boards again for the final shift of the game.

Travis was pumped. This wasn’t a real tournament with a real championship to be won. It had been arranged by Ivan Petrov as an exhibition to show how good a peewee team could be with boys and girls playing together. It was to be an inspiration to girls playing the game in Russia, a country where girls were not allowed to play on teams with boys, and where many people still felt that girls were too delicate to play with stronger, larger boys. How silly, Travis thought. Find me a stronger Owl than Sam. Or a faster Owl than Sarah. Well, maybe Dmitri, but that would be all.

It had turned out that Ivan Petrov had more in mind than an exhibition. But that was all settled now and the games were still on.

The Owls wanted to win, badly.

Sarah took the face-off but lost it. The Dynamo center sent the puck back, and the tall Russian defenseman blew a hard slap shot that would have gone in the Owls’ net had it not hit Jeremy’s stick handle.

Was that luck? Travis wondered. Or was Jeremy that sharp tonight?

Didn’t matter – the puck hadn’t gone in. It slammed into the glass, where it lay in the corner.

Sarah was first there. She leaned down, placed the back of her stick blade on the puck, and scooped it up, causing a roar from the crowd.

She flipped the puck over the two checkers moving in on her, then quickly darted to pick up her own pass.

The crowd cheered.

Cheered?
Travis wondered why. They were all Russians, apart from a handful of Screech Owl parents. He had no time to look up.

Sarah saw Travis cutting hard across center and threw a pass slightly behind him. Travis caught it in his skates and angled the puck up onto his stick. He slipped the puck between the skates of the closest checker and hit Dmitri with a perfect pass as Dmitri broke hard down the right side.

Dmitri was past the final defenseman so fast it looked as if he had gone through him like a ghost.
The defenseman, startled by Dmitri’s speed, turned so abruptly in pursuit that he fell over.

Dmitri was in alone again. Travis could see it play out the way it always did: forehand fake, backhand, water bottle flying.

Only this time it didn’t happen.

Dmitri drew out the goalie, who was anticipating this exact move, and the goaltender kept sliding while Dmitri kept skating, holding the puck instead of going to his backhand, and flying around the back of the net.

He could easily have scored on the wraparound, but Dmitri wasn’t even looking at the net. He was searching for Sarah.

Sarah saw the play unfolding and charged to the net.

Dmitri threw a light saucer pass over the stick of the fallen defenseman. Sarah picked up the puck, stepped around the skates of the downed defender, slipped past the goaltender, still slightly out of his crease, and dropped the puck into the back of the net as if it were a little hamster she was patting back into its cage.

The crowd roared.

Travis was sure he could hear “
Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!
” being chanted as he and Dmitri, Nish, and Lars, and then Jeremy, piled onto Sarah in the corner.

He thought at first it must be the Owls still on the bench, but it sounded different, and it seemed to come from somewhere in the crowd.

He broke away and looked for the sound.

There, in the middle of the stands, was the entire Russian peewee girls’ team, all decked out in their red tracksuits, all on their feet, yelling and screaming.

They were cheering for Sarah.

“W
hat a devious plan.”

Mr. Cuthbertson shook his head. Mrs. Cuthbertson was holding Sarah’s hand and dabbing at her eyes, unable to hold back the tears.

All the Owls and the parents who had traveled to Russia had been called to a meeting in the Astoria to discuss the details of what had happened to Sarah.

Ivan Petrov’s ambitions had taken control of his senses. He was fabulously wealthy thanks to his
investments in oil – a billionaire several times over, as Mr. Yakushev said – but it was hockey that had made him famous in Russia. The money he had spent in support of Russian hockey had made him a much-loved public figure. And his stated intention to help develop women’s hockey until it was on par with Canada and the United States had been very popular with the people. His picture was regularly in the papers, and he was often quoted. His fame in Russian hockey circles gave him a power that money could never buy.

But it wasn’t enough just to help. He had to control the situation. He announced in the papers that, with his support and guidance, the Russian women’s hockey team would dethrone the United States and Canada in the next Winter Olympics. He would pour as much money into the team as it took to get it to that level. He would use the best coaches, the best science – and this is where it began to spin out of control for him.

His plans were so complicated they fit together like a
matryoshka
doll – each one opening up to reveal another. The capturing of Sarah was just the
first of many layers of his plan. He knew about Sarah’s skill at hockey because he and another Russian had watched the Owls play in a tournament at Lake Placid. He had decided Sarah’s ability to skate and pass made her the perfect model for Russian girls playing the game. He would have Sarah studied to a point where scientists could apply the best training and nutrition, and the coaches could give the best coaching to the top ten- to twelve-year-old girl players in the country. None of the girls themselves, or anyone connected with their team, needed to know that Sarah had been kidnapped.

That was his plan for women’s hockey. Illegal – kidnapping a twelve-year-old girl – and a bit mad, but there was never any intention to harm Sarah in any way.

And this was where his plan for himself came in. He had her kidnapped. He then had the kidnappers (really himself) demand an outrageous ransom of ten million rubles – and he would come out of it a hero by paying off the ransom and getting Sarah back. It wouldn’t cost him a cent.

But it all had blown up in his face after the Screech Owls stumbled upon his hockey rink laboratory and Pavel decided that he couldn’t be part of it any longer and helped the Owls spring Sarah free. Petrov still might have succeeded in his plan had Sarah not been able to take that sneak photograph that allowed police and others to positively identify him.

It was such an incredible story that people all over Russia were shocked and horrified that one man’s ambitions could take such a turn.

He was front-page news. Travis had grabbed a newspaper from the front desk of the Hotel Astoria, and he planned to keep it as a souvenir. It had a huge photograph of Ivan Petrov being hauled away by the police.

“What’s the headline say?” he asked Dmitri, shoving the newspaper across a coffee table.

Dmitri looked down and smiled.

“It says, ‘The New Ivan the Terrible.’ ”