The Hunters

by Chris Kuzneski

  ‘Malta,’ Jasmine said. ‘British warship - remember?’

  ‘No,’ he said as he wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin.

  Changing the subject, Cobb drew his thumb across his throat, signaling that everyone should deactivate his or her microphone. He wanted a private conversation.

  Everyone nodded in understanding. Around the room, team members whispered their personal codewords, the ones they had personally chosen to mute their individual microphones. One after another, their vocal feeds shut down. Cobb scanned the room, watching his team as they gave him the sign they were all clear.

  He finished with Garcia, who gave him a thumbs-up.

  ‘We’re good, Hector?’ Cobb asked.

  ‘Good as gold,’ Garcia replied.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Of course, I’m sure. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  Cobb held up his hand, signaling Garcia to be quiet.

  ‘Panther,’ Cobb stated. It was the code word for his microphone, which was now reactivated. ‘Jasmine, do me a favor.’

  Garcia scanned the room nervously, suddenly realizing that not everyone was present and accounted for in the command center.

  Cobb continued. ‘Please confirm that Garcia’s microphone is still active. Did you hear his chatter from a moment ago?’

  ‘I sure did,’ Jasmine said. ‘He said we’re as good as gold, then you challenged it.’

  Cobb grimaced. ‘That’s what I figured.’

  McNutt instantly raised his MP7 and aimed it at Garcia’s chest. Garcia looked down and saw the bright red dot that was projected by the laser sight attached to the rifle’s barrel.

  One false move, and he was dead.

  44

  As part of his operational checklist, Cobb had insisted that Garcia divulge the location of every camera on the train. That way, Cobb knew every angle he could call upon if there was an emergency.

  Shortly after the train had left the station, Cobb asked McNutt to check the control center for renegade cameras. The weapons man had found one, and only one. It was set in a screw at the base of a window. It was also a camera that Garcia had not mentioned in his discussion with Cobb. At the time, they weren’t sure who had planted it: the Black Robes, the Russian government, or someone on their team.

  So Cobb and McNutt had run an internal op to find out.

  While glancing at Garcia’s wall of monitors, Cobb had found the diagnostic screen that tracked the status of every video and audio signal being fed into the system. To the untrained eye, the feeds appeared as little more than solid green lines that continually scrolled across the screen. Only the time stamps that periodically marked their progress gave any indication as to what these lines represented. Fortunately, Cobb was familiar with the software. A green line meant that the feed was streaming normally. If the line turned red, it meant that an error had occurred. Clicking on any point in the timeline would open the data stream and allow the user to view or listen to anything recorded by the device.

  In his gut, Cobb sensed that Garcia was involved.

  To test his theory, Cobb monitored the communication feeds on Garcia’s computer screen while McNutt placed a mug of coffee in front of the camera. A few minutes later, the coffee had spilled, as planned, when the train took an especially hard turn. The liquid caused a short circuit in the camera. Cobb knew if Garcia had been aware of the hidden camera, its feed would be among those listed on his screen. As Cobb watched, the corrupted feed had changed from green to red on Garcia’s system. Just like that, they knew that Garcia had planted the rogue camera in the control center. They weren’t sure why, but they knew he had done it.

  Of course, they didn’t challenge him right away.

  That would have been a wasted opportunity.

  Instead, Cobb called the team together, minus Garcia, for a private meeting. He warned them to watch what they did and said in front of Garcia until they could use the hidden camera to their advantage. Cobb guessed it would take twenty-four hours - tops - for the circuits to dry, and that time was almost up.

  That meant it was time to confront Garcia.

  * * *

  Garcia went from relatively calm to totally panicked in a flash. His face, which was normally a medium brown, turned shockingly pale - as if he was about to pass out.

  ‘I had to!’ Garcia pleaded. ‘Papi’s got enough on my hacking to put me in jail for years!’

  Cobb dismissed that with a grimace. ‘I’m sure he’s got something on all of us, Hector. That’s irrelevant.’

  ‘To you, maybe. But not to me! I’d never survive in pris—’

  Cobb cut him off. ‘Not interested. Just shut up and listen.’

  Garcia forced himself to sit still. At least as still as a terrified man with sudden facial tics could manage.

  ‘I figured you were Papi’s inside man from the start. I knew he had one, and I assumed it was you.’ Cobb shook his head with disappointment. ‘That’s fine. Part of your job description, I guess. But it has to end now. You can’t - I repeat, can’t - feed him our plans or let him deprive us of information. That could have tragic consequences.’

  ‘You - you know everything,’ Garcia protested.

  McNutt stormed toward Garcia but was stopped by Cobb’s extended arm. One word from Cobb, and McNutt would finally get to kill somebody.

  ‘Couldn’t find dirt on Papi or the Black Robes?’ McNutt shouted as spray flew from his mouth like a junkyard dog. ‘Give me a fucking break!’

  Garcia’s eyes went from one member of the team to the next, but he found no sanctuary. ‘No, really. There wasn’t anything of significance. I swear, I would have told you! My life is on the line, too!’

  ‘More than you realize,’ Cobb said menacingly. He lowered his arm a few inches. McNutt leaned forward as though he were on an invisible leash. ‘So how about this, then? We need you, and you need me. As far as I’m concerned, the past is the past. No hard feelings. But here’s the deal: get me that information. Now.’

  Garcia opened his mouth again to plead, then he saw the look of disappointment on Jasmine’s face. He lowered his head in shame. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Good,’ Cobb said, speaking for the group. ‘You get our trust back when you get us that information. Do we have a deal?’

  ‘Of course,’ Garcia said, sniffing. ‘I’m—’

  McNutt cut him off. ‘Don’t say you’re sorry! The only reason you’re apologizing is because you’re afraid I’m going to throw your ass off a moving train.’

  ‘No,’ he protested. ‘The guilt’s been killing me.’

  ‘Cry me a river! I knew you were a weasel from the start. Your kind always is!’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Cobb ordered.

  ‘My kind?’ Garcia blurted. Despite his guilt, he knew he needed to stand up for his family and its proud Mexican heritage. ‘Take that back!’

  ‘No way!’ McNutt shouted. Suddenly, he felt the harsh glare of his teammates focused on him. He glanced around the train car, trying to figure out why. ‘What’d I say?’

  Jasmine spoke up. ‘There’s no place for racism on this team.’

  ‘Racism?’ McNutt shrieked, even more confused than normal. ‘I wasn’t talking about Puerto Ricans. I was talking about nerds. I can’t stand you fuckers - always reading books and shit. How can you trust someone like that? Turn on a TV like a normal person.’

  ‘First of all,’ Garcia argued, ‘I’m not Puerto Rican. Secondly—’

  ‘Enough!’ Cobb shouted, growing more impatient by the second. ‘We need to move on starting now. Garcia, get that information you promised me.’

  Garcia nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Cobb turned toward Jasmine. ‘What’s the latest from Dobrev?’

  She answered, ‘He said we’ll never get anywhere if we stick to the main lines.’

  ‘These are main lines?’ McNutt exclaimed, happy for the change of subject. ‘Those dirt roads, old villages, and mountain passes would put a Dracula movie to shame.’


  Jasmine smiled. ‘Actually, we’re pretty close to Transylvania.’

  ‘Did Dobrev have any suggestions?’ Cobb asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Jasmine said. ‘He wanted me to tell you there’s an unused track that will bring us into the plateau region. He said—’

  ‘If someone were going to split a shipment, this is where,’ Sarah interrupted.

  Cobb nodded. This was one of those fortuitous moments on any mission when theory and reality reached the same conclusion.

  ‘Where is this track?’ Garcia inquired, preparing to program it into Goldfinder.

  His eagerness to get back in the mission caused both McNutt and Sarah to turn away in disgust.

  Jasmine smiled thinly at him. ‘You won’t find it,’ she said. ‘Andrei says it’s not on any map or chart.’

  ‘I’ll find it,’ he insisted.

  ‘Shouldn’t you concentrate on getting the information Jack asked for?’ she said.

  ‘I’m already running that search,’ he said. ‘Just tell me what you know.’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ Jasmine said. ‘Apparently not even who to trust.’

  ‘All right, that’s enough, kids,’ Cobb stated.

  ‘He wants to see you, boss,’ Jasmine said to Cobb.

  ‘All right. McNutt, Sarah - play nice here. Let Garcia do his job.’

  ‘For once,’ McNutt said bitterly, walking away.

  ‘Garcia, I’ll expect some good news when I get back.’

  ‘You’ll have it,’ Garcia promised. ‘I swear.’

  Cobb glanced at Sarah, who held up her hands in mock surrender and went back to her sofa and the maps. McNutt collapsed onto the chair where he’d eaten his sandwich.

  Cobb nodded at them, then joined Jasmine. ‘Let’s go.’

  The two walked through the command center toward the engine. As he took a step across the linkage, Cobb got his first real-world glimpse of the surroundings.

  Views from train windows must be similar throughout the world, he thought. Rail-side cities whose population is rattled and shaken yet largely oblivious to the noise from passing trains, giving way to hillsides, grassland, and waterways.

  He tried to see it through the prince’s eyes, but the world of the Romanovs was not the world of today. He knew that Felix, in order to safeguard the Romanian treasure, would have wanted to get as far from civilization as possible.

  Cobb’s thoughts on the outside world were cut off by the reality of the locomotive. The brief exposure to the wind and nature between the cars was slammed out of his mind by the dragon-roar of the engine. He and Jasmine had to twist and duck to avoid the head-end power unit on the floor and the cooling fans on the ceiling.

  ‘Do you think Mr Papineau is really plotting against us?’ Jasmine shouted back as they navigated the machinery. Her tone, even muffled by the noise, was fretful.

  Cobb shook his head. ‘No, but there’s definitely something he’s not telling us, and that makes me uneasy.’

  They marched by air compressors and filters, then turned sideways to shuffle along the big main generator, while crouching slightly to avoid the dynamic brake grid and the dynamic brake fan that hung from the ceiling.

  ‘Why?’ Jasmine wanted to know.

  ‘Exactly,’ Cobb said. ‘Why would he? I can think of a few reasons, and none of them fill me with confidence.’

  ‘Anything we should be looking out for?’ she asked.

  ‘Everything.’

  They stopped talking when they had to turn the other way to slide by the main generator and engine turbocharger to finally reach the cab. Thankfully, the fuel tanks, batteries, and compressed air tank were beneath their feet, attached to the underside.

  Andrei Dobrev turned his head when the rear door of the cab opened, letting in the roar until Cobb closed it behind him. He smiled, happy to see the leader again. The man who had given him the opportunity to leave his detested semi-retirement. The man who had put this aged but still regal queen back into operation. Dobrev was proud and eager to show off what he called his ‘old dancing partner’.

  That is exactly what they were, Cobb thought as they entered the cab. The machine did not, could not, fail to impress. He understood how a boy could fall in love with it and never love anything else equally, ever.

  Jasmine took her place on the second of two seats in the small, half-octagonal space that she and Dobrev occupied. It was adjoined by the slightly larger half-rectangular part Cobb stood in. Looking dead ahead out the smallish windshield, he saw more track, more grass, more trees, more hills, and more horizon. From the window to the side, he saw it all speed by.

  Dobrev sat in a tall seat with its own suspension system to Cobb’s right: the engineer’s station. Spread before him were the brake, throttle, speedometers, and more than two dozen buttons dealing with systems spread throughout the train.

  Jasmine sat in the same sort of seat to Cobb’s left: the fireman’s station. Here there were more controls and indicators, as well as the radio to make sure they didn’t collide with anything and nothing collided with them. There was also a narrow door behind her that led to a toilet.

  A minute later, Cobb noticed the terrain outside start to slow noticeably. He glanced at the controls. ‘The throttle is at notch two. That’s pretty slow.’

  ‘Almost the slowest,’ she replied. ‘The cut-off that we’re looking for is somewhere up ahead. We’ll actually have to leave the train in order to find the switch. You might want to let everyone know that we’ll be stopping frequently. Everyone except Garcia.’

  45

  The train squealed loudly - she had a right to, at her age - then hissed steam as she came to a slow stop. Cobb hopped from the engine, then helped Dobrev and Jasmine out.

  As she translated, Dobrev said they were at a spot that he had known about for several decades: ‘the dead end’, he had called it.

  ‘The junction switch was disabled long ago by whoever was leaving,’ Jasmine said.

  ‘Not the track?’ Cobb asked.

  Jasmine asked Dobrev. ‘Not the track, he says.’

  Dobrev continued as Jasmine translated.

  ‘According to lore, the Russian White Army stranded a large faction of the Russian Red Army on the other side, then laid siege. No one has gone back there since. There are rumors of dead lying in the open, deadly munitions hidden by grass.’

  Cobb smiled. ‘In other words, disinformation to keep people out. Stronger motive than just having to repair a junction switch.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said before she took a moment to explain the theory to Dobrev. ‘He says he likes our explanation better than the traditional one.’

  The engine was sitting on the somewhat steep side track that had taken them away from the main line about twenty kilometers back. It was, as Dobrev had promised, a less traveled route. Gone were the villages, waterways, and protective walls. They had left the cow pastures and hay meadows far behind. Now it was just dirt, grass, forests, and hills. At times they couldn’t even see the sky through all the oak and beech trees.

  It had taken an engineer of Dobrev’s skill just to get them this far. There were times when even Cobb doubted the wisdom of the move, as Dobrev navigated sharp turns on steep inclines and seemingly impossible declines. Cobb found it only mildly amusing as he heard the others react in his ear as if they were on a roller coaster climbing for a drop - or just coming out of one.

  Nearly the entire time Cobb was in the cabin, Dobrev was talking to himself. Even now, outside the train, the old man continued.

  ‘Anything we need to know?’ Cobb asked.

  ‘No,’ Jasmine told him quietly, so as not to disturb or embarrass the engineer. ‘Most of it is about trains, about the old days. Some is about his son and the life they all thought they’d have. And some of it is about the coin and the lost glory that was old Romania. He sounds sorry that his father’s bloodline was mingled with his mother’s Russian blood.’

  ‘Ethnic conflict in your own head,’ Cobb sa
id. ‘Not pretty.’

  ‘I’ve got that with North and South Korea. I’m a second-generation schizophrenic.’

  Cobb smiled. ‘Let me know which side wins.’

  She grinned. ‘You know, I get the impression that Andrei is doing more than babbling. He is taking stock of his life at what he knows is a significant juncture.’

  ‘His life and our train, both diverging. It’s fitting, somehow.’

  Back in the command center, Garcia sat amongst his video screens, checking the surrounding woods by satellite. He also used his ‘roof-cam’ to look for any sign of life that wasn’t bird, animal, or insect. Meanwhile, McNutt was crouched on the rear lip of the engine roof, covering Cobb, Dobrev, and Jasmine with a Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun, complete with sound suppressor and reflex sight.

  ‘Is there a reason for the firepower?’ Cobb asked him.

  McNutt nodded. ‘I’m still worried about Cossacks. Hordes of ‘em.’

  Cobb grinned. It wasn’t a big leap of the imagination. This kind of rocky, scrubby terrain - miles from any signs of the modern world - did things to a person’s mind.

  Feeling well protected, Cobb turned back to the matter at hand.

  Finding the junction switch.

  At all the previous junctions, either Dobrev or Jasmine had used the radio to call ahead with instructions for the station controller to throw an electronic switch that would move them onto the various tracks they required. Most of those transfers had been on the main line, to let faster trains pass. Two had been on a parallel track they had used to avoid a bridge. Cobb did not want them on a sixty-meter-high trestle or inside a mountain tunnel if they could avoid it.

  Those positions would have been tough to defend.

  Since leaving the main line, Dobrev had jumped to the track to pull the old, heavy metal switches himself. As they got deeper into the wild, Dobrev thought it would be best if he had reinforcements, just in case.

  Cobb was actually pleased to leave the hot engine for the cool, dry, Romanian autumn weather. They were lucky to be here during the moderate season between the sweltering summer of August and the numbing snows of November. He was also happy to be on solid ground. It was subtle, but the vibration of the train made him feel he was being shaken like a cocktail.