The Hunters

by Chris Kuzneski

  Jasmine gasped as she saw his body hurdle above the windshield and land on the top of the prince’s first car. He dropped, rolled, and came up on his feet in a well-balanced crouch. Barely stopping, he sprinted and leaped from one car to the next until he made it to the last car in the prince’s train. He made sure there were no Black Robes coming, then he grabbed the lip of the door, and swung inside.

  ‘Jack, what are you doing?’ Jasmine demanded.

  ‘I’m borrowing something from Rasputin,’ he replied in her ear. ‘Just keep the train as steady as possible, and be aware of the attackers’ positions. If any happen to get by McNutt—’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  Jasmine kept low. She was cognizant of her peripheral vision, but her main focus of concentration was keeping the train moving steadily and safe. She watched Cobb as he climbed back onto the roof of the prince’s last car and started sprinting across the roofs toward her.

  ‘Watch it, Jack! We’re coming into low branches,’ Jasmine warned. She saw him hold onto the lip of the car roof and hazard a glance forward. Then he looked between the car and the engine snout.

  ‘Black Robe trying to climb the engine,’ he said, calm and to the point.

  ‘Sorry,’ McNutt said. ‘They’re starting to swarm.’

  ‘Apology unnecessary,’ Cobb remarked.

  Jasmine’s head snapped left. A stranger’s face was rising in the window.

  The .38 Special was in her hand with her arm outstretched before she was completely aware of it. She squeezed the trigger just as McNutt had shown her. The weapon discharged, and the rubber grip bucked in her hand. The face disappeared from the window.

  The window frame was speckled in red.

  Cobb saw the resulting mess. The Black Robe’s head jerked back, and then his body followed. His ruined face swung down, the top of his skull banging against the train’s wheel truck, and his legs slammed across his motorcycle sidecar.

  The Black Robe smashed to the ground, and the cycle veered off into a tree, sending the driver ten feet through the air. In that amount of time, the train had already gone too far for Cobb to see him land.

  ‘Good shot,’ he said, then stood up again on the roof of the prince’s car.

  By the time Jasmine realized she had killed a man, Cobb had jumped back onto the top of Ludmilla’s engine car and raced to the gap between it and the command car. He dropped down into the doorway with ease. The command center had seen better days. Bullets had broken glass, torn up the furniture, and shattered computer screens.

  ‘McNutt, status,’ Cobb said.

  ‘The Val is out of ammo,’ he grunted. ‘Down to my last clip on the Steyr Aug, and making every round count.’ That meant he only had about thirty bullets left. ‘Could sure use the Sig that Sarah took.’

  At that moment holes started ripping into the wall at about waist level along the entire length of the command center. Cobb kept low, judging that a Black Robe was racing alongside, having fun with the Mac 11 he had stolen from them. The nine-millimeter rounds wreaked havoc on Cobb’s eardrums as the Black Robe emptied all thirty-two slugs into the command center - as if mocking McNutt’s dwindling ammo supply. The echo of the shots combined with the wreckage it caused nearly drowned out the voice he had been waiting to hear.

  Sarah shouted, ‘Can anyone hear me? I repeat, can anyone hear me?’

  ‘Finally,’ Cobb replied. ‘What’s your status?’

  ‘I’m alive and moving into position for phase two.’

  Cobb nodded. ‘Good. I’ll try to distract them the best I can.’

  Garcia, who was hunched over his tablet in the freight car amidst several frightened villagers, butted into their conversation. ‘What’s phase two?’

  ‘None of your business,’ Cobb said curtly. There were some things he refused to discuss over the air. ‘Worry about your job. Not Sarah’s.’

  ‘Sorry, chief,’ Garcia said. ‘Won’t happen again.’

  Jasmine heard none of this in the cab. The rumbling and screeching were too pervasive. All of her senses were focused on keeping the unwieldy train on the tracks. Dobrev had rhapsodized about balance, and now she fully appreciated that they were guiding a snake with two heads. She had to be hyper-aware of both the weight they were pulling and the weight they were pushing, or everything would tear off the tracks.

  Meanwhile, Cobb kept hustling through the train.

  Garcia thought he had heard Cobb in his earpiece, but soon realized that he heard him in his other ear as well. He craned his neck to see Cobb rushing by. ‘Jack?’

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ Cobb said as he grabbed a fifteen-foot by three-foot container and dragged all two hundred pounds of it back toward the flatbed car.

  ‘Let me help,’ McNutt said, turning from the slat in the wall.

  ‘No. You’re needed here,’ Cobb said without stopping.

  ‘Bullshit,’ McNutt retorted, suddenly pushing the container from the other side. ‘I can pick off these bastards just as well from the flatbed. Better, in fact.’

  ‘Giving them a better target at the same time,’ Cobb reminded him.

  ‘Like you have to tell me that?’ McNutt blurted. ‘Shut up and pull, chief!’ He added the title to give his remark a veneer of respect rather than defiance.

  They emerged onto the flatbed car, crouched to stay beneath the five-foot fence lip that encircled the space. Tree branches cracked and snapped overhead as the train muscled through, while the crack and snap of the Black Robes’ bullets blended with the sneering roar of their cycles.

  Garcia appeared in the doorway of the freight car just as Cobb swung open the container lid.

  ‘Ohmigod,’ Garcia exclaimed. ‘Is that a GEN H-4?’

  But Garcia knew it was. Designed by miniaturization mastermind Gennai Yanagisawa in the 1980s, it was upgraded, improved upon, and enhanced until it was the most portable, most versatile, cockpit-less, one-man helicopter in the world.

  Cobb didn’t have to answer. He just started to haul the two thirteen-foot rotors out of the carrying case.

  Garcia raced over to where Cobb knelt in the center of the flatbed and helped remove the aluminum pipe framework, the bicycle-handlebar-style controls, the magnesium crankcase, and, most lovingly, the big bowl that contained the four miniature, two-stroke, two-cylinder, air-cooled engines.

  ‘Ohmigod, ohmigod.’ Garcia nearly hyperventilated. ‘Why’d you hide this in the control center?’

  ‘For safekeeping,’ Cobb replied.

  ‘What are you going to do with it?’

  ‘I’m going to lure those bastards away from the train,’ Cobb grunted as he started to assemble the framework.

  ‘No, no,’ Garcia snapped back, reaching toward him. ‘You’re doing it wrong.’

  Cobb locked on the techie’s eyes. ‘How fast can you do it?’

  ‘Faster than you!’ Garcia insisted.

  ‘Prove it,’ said Cobb, his Colt .45 already in his hand as he moved to join McNutt at the rail.

  The view from there was both dream-like and nightmarish. It was as if they had traveled back in time to both 1945 and 1845 in a parallel universe that was both the end of World War II and the Wild West. They were on an Iron Horse wagon train surrounded by galloping, bloodthirsty tribes. Only now, the flesh-and-blood horses were being chased by motorcycles, and the vintage rifles were being overpowered by automatic weapons.

  The horsemen were incredible, but the Black Robes had superior numbers and firepower. What was worse was that the horses, although obviously well trained, were frightened by the Cossack cycles and unwillingly threw off their riders’ aim. In some extreme cases, they threw the riders themselves.

  McNutt, meanwhile, would pop up like a whack-a-mole, target a Black Robe, and snap off a shot before ducking from an angry swarm of bullets slapping the metal wall of the flatbed fence in return. McNutt had to keep sliding from place to place along the wall so they couldn’t get a bead on him.

  Cobb ran to get the Uzi. After ch
ecking for the horsemen’s positions, he simply pushed the gun up over the flatbed lip from a crouch, and sprayed bullets at anything in range.

  ‘Give me that,’ McNutt hissed, sliding his empty Steyr across the metal floor. He sounded like a father who was disappointed that his toddler had gotten his hands on some matches. He grabbed the Uzi from Cobb, who gave it up willingly. ‘Let me show you how it’s done.’

  Cobb grinned despite the situation and said quietly, ‘You picked a good team, Papi. A very good team.’ His head snapped back around when he heard Garcia howl.

  He saw the techie on his knees, holding the big engine bowl like Oliver Twist asking for more food. On either side of him were the ‘X’ shaped rotors and what looked like the skeleton of a barber’s chair. It was a simple slat of a seat, with a fuel tank as a backrest, positioned upon three wide-set, metal legs ending in tiny chair wheels. Attached to the front leg was a horizontal footrest bar.

  ‘I’m trying to get the motors and rotors attached,’ Garcia whined, ‘but every time I stand up, they shoot at me!’

  Cobb looked back at the flatbed fence to see McNutt looking at him from a crouch. ‘The Uzi’s running out of ammo, too,’ he reported. ‘And the horsemen are getting routed. A couple more minutes and we’ll be the only ones left.’

  Cobb’s mind raced. Every scenario he played out in his brain ended badly. He and Garcia could try to finish erecting the H-4, but the odds they would complete it in one piece were negligible. Cobb could try his plan without the H-4, but that would only have the Black Robes swamping the train with reinvigorated mania.

  And just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse …

  ‘Jack!’ Jasmine cried. ‘The uncoupled compartment car is up ahead!’

  Cobb didn’t have to look, and Jasmine didn’t have to explain the danger. If they hit the stationary car at this speed, the crash would likely derail them. But if they slowed now, they’d be easy pickings for the Black Robes.

  Cobb could see no alternative. White flags meant nothing to these lunatics. The explorers and villagers would have to fight to their last man, and their last breaths. Cobb shook his head.

  ‘Jasmine, we’re going to need to—’ he started to say, but McNutt interrupted.

  ‘Cobb—’

  ‘I wasn’t talking to you, McNutt—’

  ‘No, Jack, look!’

  McNutt stood at the rail, pointing northeast. Cobb blinked in bewilderment. McNutt was standing up straight, and no one was shooting at him. Cobb sprang to his feet and stared off to where his sniper was pointing. And then he saw it.

  Roaring out of the tree line on a sidecar motorcycle were Sergeant Anna Rusinko and Colonel Viktor Borovsky.

  And both were armed with assault rifles.

  65

  McNutt cheered as he watched Anna steer the bike while Borovsky held the AK-47 against his shoulder in the sidecar, targeting and hitting Black Robe drivers as though they were wolves.

  The two had dragged the abandoned bike from a ditch near the village after hauling Black Robe corpses from it. Now they had the remaining Black Robes scattering for cover. Not a one of them charged the new arrivals.

  ‘White, Red, and now Yellow Russians!’ McNutt taunted.

  The others weren’t paying him - or the new arrivals - much attention. Cobb told Jasmine to slow to a crawl to buy time between themselves and the rogue car. He was busy on the flatbed, helping Garcia with the last steps of building the H-4. The only assembly still required for the seven-foot-tall vehicle was the rotor and engine attachments. The footrest had been attached to the two forward legs, the seat at their top, and the spine above, where the rotors were going to be attached. There was no cabin, no tail section. The controls sat on the bicycle-like handlebars that were suspended from the rotor base at the bottom of a periscope-like extension. The whole contraption looked like a skeleton - if a skeleton consisted of a skull, backbone, sternum, two hipbones, a pelvis, and a really long coccyx.

  Cobb left the techie standing on the bucket seat to secure the engine atop the structure while he and McNutt stood on the packing case, lifted the rotors, and settled them into the aluminum tube on top. Jasmine had slowed the train and the side-to-side sway was minimal. With the phut-phut-phut of Borovsky’s weapon echoing along the western side of the train, McNutt lent both hands as Cobb fitted the blades into place.

  ‘So, is this a true helicopter?’ McNutt asked. ‘Not one of those - what do you call them?’

  ‘Gyrocopters,’ Garcia said as he tightened the screws.

  ‘Right,’ McNutt said. ‘Saw a guy fly by in one during survival training in Death Valley. We survived. He didn’t.’

  ‘Nice,’ Garcia said.

  It was the casual chatter of weekend hobbyists, not men fighting for their lives. Cobb jumped from the wooden box and put a quick end to it.

  ‘Finish, Garcia!’ he barked as he ran over.

  ‘Done, done,’ Garcia told him, as he made sure the rotors were secure. That consisted of pushing them one way, then another, and watching for any vertical wiggle around the central axis. The blades themselves were designed to have significant up-and-down flexibility.

  While he did that, Cobb straddled the seat of the H-4. It was plastic to keep the weight down, without padding of any kind.

  ‘Chief, uh … what’s the plan?’ McNutt asked.

  Cobb didn’t answer. His silence was intended as a conversation-ender. A seatbelt was attached to the metal spine of the mini-helicopter. Cobb strapped himself in. ‘Jasmine, after I leave, keep the train slow and kiss that compartment car.’

  ‘Can you spare any eyes on the back of the train?’ she said.

  ‘Garcia?’

  ‘We have an undercarriage cam,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk you through it.’

  ‘Okay, back away, you two,’ Cobb advised Garcia and McNutt.

  Crouching low, the IT man hurried to a corner of the flatbed where he was exposed to gunfire but wouldn’t be beheaded by the spinning blades.

  ‘Which way you going?’ McNutt asked, walking backwards more slowly.

  ‘Where the action is,’ Cobb replied, pointing west.

  McNutt turned in that direction and knelt down on one knee, his arms firmly planted on the lip of the car, his hands steady, his fingers wrapped tightly around his last remaining weapon, which was his own sidearm - a Glock 17 Gen4 nine-millimeter automatic.

  Cobb held a license for single-engine rotorcraft, training he had found useful on a number of missions - not so much for getting into places but for getting out of them. Though he had never flown this particular aircraft, he had selected it because, at least on paper, it didn’t present any unusual challenges. There were only four controls: a starter switch, a switch to engage the rotors, a throttle, and a yaw switch; and one instrument, a tachometer. There were also more redundancies built into this baby than in any grownup aircraft: she had four 10 hp, 125 cc, two-stroke engines. They were connected to the transmission via a single clutch; if one shut down, the others automatically shared the burden to keep the rotors spinning. In theory, the H-4 could fly on a single engine - long enough to set down, anyway.

  The engines revved, sounding like four lawnmowers. The two blades spun in opposite directions to provide counterbalance, rotating for all they were worth.

  McNutt watched as the horsemen rallied to protect the villagers and the train. Borovsky’s fire had given them that opportunity by driving the Cossack cycles back up the rise to where the hill met the grove. Anna and Borovsky’s bike was racing down between the combatants, taking out Black Robes whenever they could.

  As the rotors raced to full power, Cobb’s survey of the battlefield was suddenly rendered meaningless when he saw a new monster cresting the hill in the middle of the remaining motorcycles. It was a stripped-down Boyevaya Razvedyvatelnaya Dozomaya Mashina combat reconnaissance patrol vehicle, otherwise known as the BRDM. Russia, the Ukraine, and Poland had been crawling with them since the 1960s, and there were rumors that m
any of them had been confiscated by local authorities and sold to militias to fight the Soviets.

  Of the four-hundred-odd units that had left Russia, fewer than half had been found.

  Like this one, for instance.

  Obviously, the Black Robes had been building their own mechanized brigade in this province, knowing that Rasputin’s body had to be somewhere in the area.

  As Cobb watched the armored, four-wheel toad of a vehicle, the roof hatch opened and Grigori Sidorov emerged. He was holding their Accuracy International AX-50 sniper rifle. Cobb and McNutt both watched helplessly as the man aimed the gun at Anna and Borovsky’s motorcycle. With the H-4 buzzing like a million bees, there was no way to warn them.

  In Cobb’s mind, that left only one option.

  It was up to him to distract Sidorov.

  In a flash, the H-4 rose into the air as if pulled by a string. Cobb gritted his teeth until he got the hang of the controls. Then he turned and faced the armored vehicle.

  Unfortunately, it was not an ideal day for a flight. The wind howled, and strong gusts kept Cobb from getting the height he wanted. He only got up about thirty feet, but it would do. His sudden appearance above the flat car distracted Sidorov enough that the bullet meant for Borovsky’s skull smashed into the front of the motorcycle instead.

  McNutt groaned when the cycle’s front tire exploded. Anna flew over the handlebars and rolled across the hillside, while the sidecar toppled over sideways - smashing, twisting, and bouncing. At some point, Borovsky was viciously tossed aside like a broken marionette.

  Cobb saw it all from his elevated position, and with just a push on the handlebars, he sent the H-4 swooping toward the BRDM.

  At first, the combatants were too shocked by the appearance of the strange, skeletal helicopter to shoot it down, and Cobb took full advantage of the surprise. He sped in and hovered over the Black Robes, directly in front of the BRDM. Cobb remained stationary for only a moment - just long enough to threaten the destruction of Rasputin’s grave - before he accelerated over them and headed toward an imaginary spot in the forest.