The Hunters

by Chris Kuzneski

  ‘Someone didn’t want us to get into that box,’ McNutt said.

  ‘Garcia? You got anything?’ Cobb quietly asked.

  ‘Searching, boss, but I’m not optimistic,’ he said.

  It didn’t matter. Borovsky was about to show them what was inside.

  Borovsky removed a chain from around his neck and used the attached key to unlock the ancient locks. Picking up a small pry bar from a nearby crate, he thrust the sharpened end under the lid. Struggling to simply remove one of the sixteen nails, he motioned for Cobb to pick up the second pry bar and start on the opposite side. Working together, it still took them nearly five minutes to move their way around the coffin. As Borovsky pried loose the final anchor, Cobb and McNutt gently pulled back the wooden curtain while bracing themselves for the expected and inevitable stench of death.

  There was none. Much to everyone’s surprise, there were also no spiders, cockroaches, ants, maggots, flies, mice, or rats. There was only a slight aroma.

  ‘What is that smell?’ McNutt said. ‘It’s like … fruit.’

  ‘Shellac,’ Jasmine said, transfixed by the object within. ‘Used as a preservative - made from lac, a deposit found on trees across this continent.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be prune.’

  McNutt was only partly kidding because the object inside the coffin looked like a human-sized, human-shaped prune.

  Time seemed to have sealed its limbs against, and slightly into, its desiccated yet lumpy body, which consisted of what seemed to be eroding clothing combined with mummified flesh.

  Whatever hair was left on its wrinkle-skinned skull now looked like stringy mold. There were only vague suggestions of ears, eyes, nose, or mouth. Over the years, its shape had shifted severely. Now it looked like a Halloween mask.

  The only thing seemingly untouched by time was a ring that clung to what used to be its finger. The wide, gold band of the ring was encrusted with sparkling diamonds. The girdle held a magnificent, blood-red ruby. The face of the ring was oblong, with bands of onyx standing out against the polished jewel.

  The emblem was clear.

  It was the three-barred cross of the Russian Orthodox Church.

  The ring was sanctimonious, yet righteous; decadent, yet humble. It somehow reflected lust and virtue at the same time. As if the designer recognized the sin of creating such a lavish bauble before asking for God’s forgiveness by adorning the piece with the holy sign of his faith.

  ‘We’ve found the ultimate treasure,’ Jasmine said.

  ‘We have?’ Cobb asked. ‘I mean - is this what I think it is?’

  She looked back at the others with a palpable sense of dread.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s Rasputin.’

  56

  The reactions to the announcement were muted. The shock of the find was tempered by Borovsky’s explanation that this body was what had drawn the attention of the Black Robes and why they were so fanatically determined to remain.

  Cobb was not startled or unnerved by Rasputin’s corpse. It was just one more dead body on a day full of them. Instead, he focused on the rest of the train car, searching for more surprises.

  Sarah walked over casually to the coffin. She froze when she saw the ring on his finger.

  ‘Get me a good image,’ Garcia said.

  McNutt brought the flashlight closer.

  ‘How do you know it’s him?’ McNutt asked Jasmine.

  Jasmine pointed to the ring. ‘That’s a gift from the tsarina.’

  ‘Couldn’t it have been looted from one of the palaces and left here with the rest of the treasure?’ he asked.

  ‘Hidden on a dead body?’ Sarah said.

  ‘In a coffin,’ McNutt replied. ‘Who’d look there with all the rest of this lying around?’

  ‘Me,’ Sarah said, looking over the perimeter of the pine box. ‘The way that thing was sealed tight, they might as well have built a neon sign that said “Important!”’

  Jasmine corrected her. ‘Actually, the spikes and padlock weren’t to keep people out.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Sarah asked.

  Jasmine didn’t answer. It took a moment for her meaning to penetrate.

  ‘Oh,’ McNutt gasped. ‘It was to keep Dracula in.’

  ‘It’s Rasputin all right,’ Garcia said. ‘Facial recognition is a match. So much for the rumor that his body was immolated.’

  There was no response.

  For a moment, the train car was, fittingly, as quiet as a tomb.

  McNutt broke the silence. He pointed at the ring and glanced at Sarah. ‘Gonna go for that?’

  Sarah looked down at the jewelry. The corpse still had a disquieting power about it. ‘Too tough to fence.’ She cocked her head slightly to one side, then knelt on one knee beside the coffin to get a better look at the infamous mystic.

  ‘Praying to your master?’ McNutt asked.

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Please tell me you aren’t a Black Robe. I’d hate to shoot you before I get to bang you.’

  Cobb glanced at Sarah and quickly studied her face. McNutt’s idea wasn’t likely, but it wasn’t impossible. Papineau had strong-armed Garcia into spying for him; maybe he’d hired a second mole. Or maybe the Black Robes had bribed her. He took a second - literally, no more - to study her posture, her eyes, her hands. Her head was tilted to one side, not bowed. Her eyes were moving; they were not down, not shut. Her fingers were relaxed and nowhere near a weapon. She did not have what the guys at Guantanamo Bay called ‘snapback’ - the look of a captive, or infiltrator, or sleeper, who was shedding a guise and reverting to their true self.

  ‘Sarah,’ Cobb said, ‘you with us?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she assured him. ‘Just looking.’

  Cobb nodded. ‘All right then. Let’s go.’

  No one asked where. The others in the group were still in the thrall of a man who had been dead nearly a century - a man whose mesmeric powers, at least, transcended death.

  Cobb led his team members back toward the entrance of the cave when the hair on his arms began to prickle. The others would soon feel the same sensation, but Cobb’s sharply-honed senses alerted him first. He froze, his head slowly panning from side to side.

  ‘I feel it, too,’ McNutt agreed.

  ‘Feel what?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘The air’s moving in here,’ McNutt explained.

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Jasmine argued. ‘That would mean—’

  ‘There’s a second opening somewhere,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s right.’

  They looked back toward the front of the train. No one could honestly say that they knew that’s where the cave opened, but it was the logical choice.

  Sarah grinned and looked meaningfully at Cobb.

  ‘You up for it?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s what I do, Jack.’

  ‘Go to it then,’ he ordered.

  ‘I don’t get it!’ Garcia cried. ‘What’s going on now?’

  ‘Garcia, I’m with you,’ McNutt said. ‘Except I’m here, and I’m lost.’

  But Sarah was already sneaking past the front of the first car, going deeper into the cave. Cobb turned in the other direction and headed back toward Decebal, with a distracted McNutt and a confused Jasmine close behind.

  ‘Did you know about this too, Papi?’ Cobb asked as they walked.

  ‘I’m not even sure what you’re talking about,’ the Frenchman said in his ear.

  He sounded genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Jack,’ Jasmine said, frustration in her voice, ‘what are we doing?’

  ‘You saw the track we were on earlier, outside,’ Cobb explained. ‘It ended. Decisively. No hidden rails that would’ve let us push farther. Isn’t that right, Garcia?’

  ‘There was no iron anywhere up ahead,’ he agreed.

  ‘But this train got in here,’ Sarah stressed in their ears, ‘so there had to be more track at some point.’

  ‘And after they drove t
his train inside, that track was pulled up and removed, probably melted,’ Cobb said. ‘Getting the treasure out again would take a small, properly equipped army to replace a missing kilometer of rail - all the while being picked off by the members of the honor guard.’

  ‘Wait,’ Jasmine said. ‘Are you saying there’s another way out? That the Romanovs never had any intention of going back, but they gave themselves the option of going forward?’

  ‘I’ll let you know soon enough,’ Sarah offered.

  Cobb checked his watch. ‘Garcia, is that Papi-cam dried out yet?’

  A moment later Garcia replied. ‘Nope. Still not online.’

  Cobb heard a snort from Papineau. Cobb felt a pinch of anger - not at the Frenchman’s reaction but about his secrecy. If he had told Cobb that there was a camera in the command centre, Cobb wouldn’t have short-circuited it and they could be getting valuable intelligence on the Black Robes right now. That was Papineau’s error, not his.

  Cobb motioned for Jasmine to follow as he went to confer with Borovsky.

  * * *

  Grigori Sidorov, the leader of the Black Robes, was not happy.

  ‘I told you not to shoot at them!’ he shouted, banging the flat of his hand on the table in the command center of the train.

  Vladimir Losovich held the Heckler & Koch 91 sniper rifle he had taken from the freight car. He cradled it as if it were his child. ‘We weren’t shooting at them,’ he grunted. ‘We were shooting at the horsemen.’

  The Black Robes were crawling all over the train, looking for whatever they could use, examine, or loot. After they had piled up their dead and removed the net to make sure it wouldn’t get underfoot, a group of six went into the woods and tried to follow the trail. There was distant gunfire in the woods, but no indication of whose it was or what the result might have been. The majority of the Black Robes went back to the train.

  Sidorov twisted his head toward the big, metal bracket holding the array of computer screens, where three Black Robes toiled. ‘Any progress breaking their security?’

  The one on the right, watching the actions of the one hunched in the middle as if he were playing a video game, shrugged noncommittally.

  Sidorov sat down heavily where Papineau and Cobb once sat. He dismissed Losovich with a wave of a hand. He let the hackers continue to click away as he surveyed the situation.

  They were close. The body he had sought all his life was out there, just beyond his reach. But not for long. The biggest danger, if not the biggest impediment, was his own desperation.

  He finally admitted it to himself. He wanted it so badly that he had been reckless in his attack. Over-eager. Part of that, too, was that he felt alone. He drew strength from the knowledge that Rasputin must have felt the same way. But I am just an aspirant, a pilgrim, a strannik.

  Sidorov missed Kazan: not just the city but the people. He missed his palace. He had been feeling the withdrawal from sin more and more, the same way an addict felt the absence of drugs. He needed a fix soon, and the shooting of a few villagers and horses had not sufficed.

  A slaughter, he thought distractedly. That would do. Finding these horsemen, their women, their children. Where were the six men he had sent out? Why had they not called, or sent a messenger, or returned? Could this golden opportunity be slipping away?

  Sidorov pulled his phone from his coat pocket and pressed the button that immediately linked him with his offices. ‘Where are my reinforcements?’

  ‘They’ll be there soon, starets. We’ll double your numbers before dawn.’

  Sidorov smiled. Although they were based in Kazan, the Black Robes were a powerful organization with recruiting posts in Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania. As luck should have it, one of their largest armories was located less than two hundred miles away.

  ‘And the vehicles I requested?’

  ‘We got you everything you asked for - and more.’

  57

  Cobb and Jasmine approached the Russian colonel, the woman police officer, the village elder, and the train engineer - who had joined them at the entrance of the cave.

  Cobb said in Russian. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Jasmine was openly surprised at the preciseness of his accent. She would not have been surprised to learn that wherever Cobb went he filled his head with the basic vocabulary of the place, but speaking with the effortless tongue of a native was a different matter.

  Borovsky sighed, his chin sinking to his chest. Decebal turned away and stared through the close-knit branches of the protecting trees, as if seeing the past, present, and future of his village. Only Dobrev and Anna didn’t understand the full import of what Cobb was saying.

  ‘Why?’ Anna asked through Jasmine. ‘What’s the matter? What have you done?’

  ‘I’ve brought an end to their obligations,’ he answered as Jasmine translated. He nodded toward the old men. ‘They feared it when they decided to talk with us rather than fight us. They knew it when the Black Robes appeared.’

  ‘It’s the war we’ve always prepared for, but one we’ve feared,’ Decebal said.

  ‘But can’t you just go?’ Anna pleaded with Cobb. ‘You are honorable people, are you not? Can’t you just lure the Black Robes away and let these people be?’

  Borovsky shook his head. ‘He could lure them to the other end of the earth, but it would not be enough.’ He turned to Decebal and put a heavy hand on his shoulder. ‘It is time, my friend.’

  Decebal hesitated.

  Borovsky continued. ‘The treasure is no longer safe here.’

  Decebal looked away from all of them, his face in his hand.

  Borovsky turned to Cobb. ‘We will deal with the treasure later. But first we must protect these people, yes?’

  Cobb nodded. ‘Yes. But first, a few questions. The train and the locomotive are still here. How did the prince and his entourage get out of here? Out of this region?’

  Jasmine translated as Borovsky revealed, ‘The loyalists took the prince and four personal bodyguards by horse cart to a waiting boat, where they went to Bacau, Odessa, and finally Yalta.’

  ‘Why Odessa?’ Jasmine asked. ‘That was one of the hearts of the Revolution, the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin—’

  ‘It was chaotic, occupied by no fewer than five competing armies,’ Borovsky agreed. ‘They were too busy fighting each other to worry about another small, nondescript group of refugees making their way through the city.’

  Jasmine paused, no longer translating. Her eyes were wide with wonder. ‘This is amazing, truly amazing historical information.’

  ‘Second question, Jasmine,’ Cobb said firmly. She closed her open mouth and nodded. ‘Those cauldrons back in the village, the ones they used to make our dinner. Pretty big. Where did the metal come from?’

  Borovsky grinned. ‘The melted iron of train tracks. You have a good eye. Would you care to work for the Moscow police department?’

  ‘Maybe someday,’ Cobb said, smiling. ‘I’m guessing the village was here before the prince arrived. They weren’t agrarian, since the ground is pretty dead, and they weren’t fishermen, since the catch isn’t significant. Here, in the mountains, I’m guessing a mine or quarry. The track used to go through this cave. I’m guessing it also knocked on the back door of the village. Is it still there, by chance?’

  Borovsky’s grin broadened. ‘There is a trunk line about half a kilometer behind where your train stopped. It takes you right into the village.’

  ‘But you buried it,’ Cobb said, ‘so that anyone who came this far wouldn’t try to develop the village and its resources.’

  Borovsky nodded. ‘That culvert we crossed was dug by the villagers. They used that earth to build the berm that runs from the main line to the village.’

  ‘We crossed that ridge,’ Cobb said. ‘Didn’t suspect a thing.’

  ‘Years of compacting, growth,’ Borovsky said.

  ‘Which brings me to question number four,’ Cobb said. ‘Money. The honor guard is well
equipped, the village well fed. There’s not a gaunt face among them. My guess is that the prince set up a trust fund to support their mission, and that he did it in the name of the Borovsky family, his devoted servants.’

  ‘Impressive … and correct,’ Borovsky said. ‘All of the town’s basic needs are financed by a portion of the wealth the Romanovs distributed among institutions throughout Europe.’

  Jasmine’s mouth and eyes were again open wide.

  Suddenly, Sarah’s voice whispered into Cobb’s ear. ‘I’ve got it, Jack.’

  ‘Good,’ he answered. ‘Be right there.’

  Cobb told Jasmine to tell the others that he would not permit the villagers to be harmed and assured them that he would be back momentarily. Instructing Jasmine and Dobrev to stay put, Cobb motioned for McNutt to join him. Then the duo headed deeper into the cave at a slow jog.

  They followed the barely discernible path beyond the railroad cars to where Sarah’s powerful penlight was flickering. She was crouched by what looked like a few mounds of loosely packed dirt, but as the men got closer they could see slat-like wooden cases.

  ‘I’m surprised they didn’t take it with them,’ Sarah said.

  McNutt peered as close as he could, whistled as he saw the outlines of howitzer shells, large cigar-shaped cylinders of black powder, and several big corkscrew-shaped implements used for boring holes. ‘Looks like Prince Felix absconded with more than treasure.’

  ‘He needed enough munitions to turn any tunnel, natural or unnatural, into a cave,’ Cobb said. He turned his flashlight on the walls. ‘You can see the darker blast markings, the parts where harder rocks scooped out chunks of softer ones.’

  McNutt followed the light. Parts of the wall looked like the surface of the moon. ‘So this section of the cave was an add-on?’

  ‘No,’ Cobb said. ‘It wasn’t a cave. It was a tunnel. They sealed it.’

  McNutt’s face uncreased in a big ‘ohhhh’ of understanding. ‘He closed the door. But it was still letting a little bit of a draft through.’

  ‘There are tracks buried under here,’ Sarah confirmed.