The Prisoner's Gold (The Hunters 3)

by Chris Kuzneski

  ‘Chief,’ McNutt said, ‘this party’s about to get crowded. I have a car approaching from the north. He’ll be on you in twenty … nineteen … eighteen.’

  Cobb could see the headlights of the new arrival in the distance.

  The patrolmen saw it, too. The first turned to the second and quickly argued his point.

  Maggie translated. ‘‘‘Shit! They’re already here. Let’s just kill him and get this over with. We’ll get all the credit.’’’

  Cobb pulled his weapon before Maggie had even finished.

  It was kill or be killed.

  Cobb squeezed his trigger twice, burying a hollow-point round into each of the men’s foreheads. The backs of their skulls burst open like overripe cantaloupe. As their bodies hit the ground, their weapons clattered harmlessly to the pavement.

  McNutt saw everything through his scope. ‘Nice shootin’, chief. By the way, those are Czech machine pistols. Definitely not military or police issue. Not around here.’

  ‘They weren’t cops,’ Cobb agreed as he took out his phone and snapped their pictures for possible identification. Then he turned his gaze toward the car that was bearing down on him. ‘And neither are they. A little help here, Josh?’

  ‘Already on it,’ McNutt replied as he steadied his aim. ‘Three … two … one …’

  A second later the .50 caliber slug from McNutt’s rifle tore through the engine of the approaching sedan as if the car was made of Jell-O. Smoke and steam billowed from under the hood as the driver jerked the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes. The car came to a stop a mere twenty feet from where Cobb stood, but none of the goons inside leaped out to confront him.

  ‘Wrong move, fellas,’ McNutt said with a grin. Moving objects at least made things interesting – though not much of a challenge to a marksman with McNutt’s skill – but a stationary target was child’s play. The next time he fired, the gas tank ruptured and the sedan exploded in a magnificent shower of flames.

  ‘Sorry, chief, didn’t mean to singe your whiskers.’

  Cobb had bigger concerns than a few burned hairs.

  ‘More from the west,’ Cobb shouted as he spotted two more cars barreling in his direction. ‘Sarah, get Maggie out of there. Evac plan beta. Josh, light ’em up!’

  ‘With pleasure,’ McNutt announced.

  Cobb broke for the Mercedes as McNutt opened fire. The modification the sniper had purchased for his rifle allowed for semi-automatic fire; he didn’t need to chamber each round; all he needed to do was tap the trigger.

  It didn’t just make things easier, it made things fun.

  Cobb started the engine with his spare key and threw the gear into DRIVE as thunder boomed from the hillside. McNutt squeezed off round after round, each roar from his rifle leaving his enemy more damaged than the last. But it wasn’t enough. He had already destroyed the first car and disabled the next two, but three more vehicles suddenly appeared.

  ‘More party-crashers headed your way,’ McNutt informed the others. ‘And I’ve only got two shots left. I was never strong in math, but—’

  ‘I can handle the last one,’ Cobb assured him. ‘Just make your shots count.’

  ‘Copy that.’

  Cobb floored the accelerator and sped toward the rear of the warehouse.

  * * *

  Maggie glanced in all directions, but the only exits she saw were the oversized garage doors of the loading bays. She was sure that Sarah couldn’t pick her way through it because there were no locks to be picked. Nor were there mechanical overrides. The doors were opened electronically or not at all.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Maggie asked.

  Sarah ran toward the garage doors. ‘Through there.’

  Maggie didn’t understand. ‘How do we raise it?’

  ‘Who said anything about raising it?’ Sarah replied. As she spoke, she reached into her suit and produced a small aerosol bottle that had been labeled as designer perfume.

  It wasn’t.

  ‘Stand back,’ Sarah warned. ‘You really don’t want to inhale this stuff.’

  She drew a three-foot arch near the door’s base.

  Maggie watched with fascination as the colorless liquid that Sarah sprayed on the metal panel began to bubble. By the time Sarah stood back to admire her artwork, the fluid had transformed into a thick arc of foam.

  Sarah pressed a breath-mint-sized receiver into the goo and stood back.

  ‘Open sesame,’ she said as she pressed the detonator.

  Maggie instinctively covered her ears, but there was no explosion. Instead, the receiver ignited like a white-hot ember. In a flash of sparks and smoke the foam incinerated, cutting cleanly through the metal door as it burned. When the fire was out, all that remained was a hole.

  ‘Careful,’ Sarah said. ‘The edges are still hot. Like, really hot.’

  Given what she had just seen, Maggie had no trouble believing that the rim of their escape tunnel was still too hot to touch.

  * * *

  Cobb arrived at the delivery zone just as Sarah crawled through the improvised exit. Maggie stood beside her, clutching her own pack as if it held the meaning of life.

  ‘We good?’ Cobb asked.

  ‘We’re great,’ Sarah answered as she and Maggie jumped into the car.

  ‘Josh?’ Cobb said.

  ‘The highway,’ McNutt replied in his ear.

  Given the location of the warehouse, the team had multiple escape routes. They could work their way through the residential neighborhoods to the east to the subway line that serviced this section of Panyu. Or they could head south to the crisscrossing waterways of the delta. But their best option – the one that McNutt was recommending – was north on the adjacent highway. If they could get to the thoroughfare, they would have a straight shot toward the relative safety of Guangzhou.

  ‘Can we make it?’ Cobb asked.

  ‘Yes,’ McNutt answered. ‘Go to Plan D.’

  Cobb turned to Maggie as he gunned the engine. ‘You better buckle up.’

  As the Mercedes bounced up the road toward the highway, Maggie hunkered low in her seat. When Cobb cranked the wheel, the centrifugal force pinned her against the side of the car. Tires squealed and a horn blared from behind as the last remaining sedan gave chase.

  ‘What’s Plan D?’ Maggie asked. ‘I only heard about A and B.’

  ‘D stands for “demolition”,’ Sarah explained. ‘That means Josh gets to blow some shit up.’

  Cobb pushed the pedal to the floor, trying to put some distance between his team and their pursuers. Why aren’t they shooting at us? Why do they need us alive?

  Then the real reason came to him.

  They can’t risk damaging what we took.

  ‘Hey, chief,’ McNutt said, ‘see the construction barrels?’

  Cobb saw a row of bright yellow barrels just ahead of him, lining each side of the road. ‘Affirmative. I see them.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever you do, don’t run into them. Seriously, that would be … not good.’

  Cobb understood the message. ‘Everyone, hang on.’

  As he drove past the barrels, Cobb braced for the fireworks.

  McNutt laughed in his ear. ‘Boom.’

  No sooner had the word left his mouth than a huge fireball erupted behind the Mercedes. The charges he had concealed in the plastic drums not only flipped the approaching sedan, they destroyed the road entirely. The asphalt that the team had driven on only moments before was now a smoldering crater in the earth.

  The shockwave shattered the rear window of the Mercedes as it sped off into the distance. Through Maggie’s screams of confusion and Sarah’s shouts of excitement, Cobb could still make out the chuckling of his sniper over the comms.

  ‘Is everyone okay?’ Garcia shouted.

  He knew better than to press for updates throughout the chaos, but the explosion had sounded like an atomic blast. For all he knew, he was listening to the death knell of his dying teammates.

  ‘You�
��re clear,’ McNutt said to Cobb. ‘No one on your six. Actually, nothing on your six. See you at the rendezvous.’

  ‘Thanks, Josh. See you soon.’ Cobb turned his attention to Garcia. ‘Yes, Hector, we’re fine. Tell Papi we’re coming home.’

  Cobb pulled onto the highway as real police cars, legitimate cruisers this time, raced past them in the opposite direction, sirens blaring and lights flashing.

  ‘And the package?’ Papi asked impatiently. ‘Do you have it?’

  Cobb glanced at the backpack on Sarah’s lap. ‘Yeah, we’ve got it.’

  Maggie held her satchel with both hands. ‘I hope Polo ends up being worth it. We might have just started World War III.’

  37

  The team abandoned their beat-up Mercedes at the edge of downtown Guangzhou and walked a few blocks through the alleys before Papineau pulled up alongside them in a limo. They all piled in, and he took them back to the Westin hotel in silence. Cobb had instructed each of them to remain quiet until they reached their suite, which had been swept for listening devices.

  Once safely inside the room, all hell broke loose.

  ‘Well, that was a clusterfuck of epic proportions,’ McNutt said. ‘Someone please tell me there’s treasure in those bags. Not descriptions of treasure, but actual treasure.’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘It will take some time to—’

  ‘The treasure can wait,’ Cobb growled, anger flushing his cheeks. ‘I want to know who the hell that was back there. That wasn’t a fluke, people. That was an ambush. Those men came prepared for us. They knew we would be there.’

  In the limo, Cobb had considered the possibility that the attack at the warehouse was related to the security men from Loulan who had tenaciously followed him and McNutt on the rekky, but he had quickly rejected the notion. Besides the prize that Cobb’s team was after, the dead zone in Xinjiang had no connections with the warehouse in Guangzhou.

  Garcia was sitting at a desk, typing away. ‘I’m already looking into it, but I haven’t found much yet. The men who attacked you were clearly not cops, but the real police are investigating the incident now. The bombs threw the whole thing into chaos.’

  ‘Didn’t have a choice,’ McNutt said with a shrug. ‘No way they escape without it.’

  Cobb glared at Papineau. ‘What about you, Jean-Marc? Is there any chance these guys found us through you? Maybe they were upset about a business deal of yours gone bad?’

  Papineau gave the question some thought. ‘I haven’t done any deals in China in over a year. It has to be something else.’

  ‘Even if this did trace back to Jean-Marc,’ Maggie added, ‘how could they have even known we would be arriving in Guangzhou? We’d only gotten into town a few hours earlier.’

  ‘That’s what I was wondering,’ Sarah said. ‘No way anyone gets an ambush together that quickly. They weren’t following us. They were ahead of us.’

  ‘Which means somebody tipped them off,’ Cobb stated.

  Sarah shook her head. ‘I didn’t talk to any contacts about extraction from Guangzhou – there were just too many conventional ways out of the city with trains, boats, and cars. Plus we weren’t looking to move a haul this time; just the books. So the leak didn’t come from my end.’

  McNutt chimed in. ‘I met a contact in Hong Kong to collect weapons, but there’s no way those guys were involved. I’ve known a few of them for years. They’re unsavory types, I’ll grant you that, but there’s no reason they’d want to ambush us. They get a lot of business from referrals. Something like this would be bad for business. So it wasn’t me.’

  Cobb turned to Garcia. ‘Hector?’

  ‘I don’t have any contacts in this part of the world. And there wasn’t even a computer network for me to hack at the site. Everything was pre-Y2K. Paper records and filing cabinets. I listened in on the police band, but that was it. The rest of the time I was waiting for something to do.’

  Cobb glanced at Maggie but said nothing.

  ‘I contacted no one,’ she assured him, ‘and Professor Chu didn’t know where we were headed after our meeting. Obviously I know many people in the area – both in Hong Kong and Guangzhou – but I saw no one I recognized. I just assumed this was something from one of the team’s previous missions. Revenge, perhaps? These men were quite determined.’

  McNutt nodded. ‘You can say that again. They sent in a lot of support to take us out. Did you get a visual on your guys, Jack?’

  ‘Both Chinese. I had no reason to suspect them until the second car arrived, and the two men started arguing. Maggie’s translation saved my life. No doubt about it.’

  Maggie smiled with pride.

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ Papineau asked.

  ‘With an unknown enemy hunting us,’ Cobb said. ‘But at least we know they’re out there now. We need to be extra careful wherever we go. We have to assume they know our faces. We need to get out of the area, and we need to do so very carefully.’

  Sarah stared at him. ‘Do you think they’re after the treasure – or just us?’

  ‘That’s the million-dollar question,’ Cobb admitted.

  ‘Five-million, actually,’ McNutt added.

  Cobb nodded his acknowledgment. ‘For the time being, I’m only sure about two things. If they’re not after the Polo treasure, they will be once they find out about it.’

  ‘What’s the other thing?’ Papineau asked.

  ‘They won’t be getting it.’

  * * *

  The team started to pack their gear immediately and were out of the hotel before dawn. They boarded a battered commercial fishing boat and headed down the river to Hong Kong.

  When the boat pulled into the familiar docks in Victoria Harbor, the team didn’t head toward a limo or a fancy hotel. They walked off in different directions, per Cobb’s instructions, before making their way to their accommodations.

  They separately checked into budget guesthouse rooms at the infamous Chunking Mansions, a block of small, gray apartments renowned as a hotbed of backpacker activity. None of the team contacted any of the others, and they all had removed their communications gear and dropped it in the river on the way into Hong Kong.

  They had ditched every weapon as well, retaining only their first aid and survival kits, which could easily be explained as backpacker gear. As an extra precaution, the documents from the warehouse were divvied up between team members.

  At a predetermined time, they each wandered out of their rooms. Some of them had checked in for just a single night, while McNutt had requested three. None of them intended to spend an evening in Hong Kong, though. They returned separately to the docks and boarded the hydrofoil to the gambling city of Macau. They ignored each other on the boat and continued to do so once they had arrived.

  They headed separately to the airport via taxis, but they all wound up on the same Japan Airlines flight to Tokyo. Although they each had connecting flights to different destinations, they reconvened in the terminal and exited the airport together, heading to the Imperial Hotel.

  Only after showering and changing their clothes did they meet up in Papineau’s suite.

  It was time to plan their next move.

  38

  Lim Bao had been at the warehouse for several hours, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. What should have been an ambush had turned into a bloodbath.

  And his team was on the losing side.

  Despite the presence of his men, the foreigners had infiltrated the warehouse, pulled down two boxes from the storage shelves, emptied the contents, then put the two boxes back on the shelves. If not for footprints on the dusty floor, Lim wouldn’t have known even that much. According to the ledger, the boxes contained records of the Great Wall of China during the Mongol era.

  Lim had no idea why the Westerners wanted the ancient records, and neither had the old professor from Peking University. The man had been quite forthcoming when questioned – especially when his grandchildren had been threatened. The
Fists had informed Lim that the Westerners would be searching for records from the Mongol era pertaining to the Wall, but the old man had been unable to shed any light on what specific questions the group hoped to answer.

  Given the Fists’ connections in China, it hadn’t taken long to figure out which warehouse the foreigners would be visiting. Unfortunately, business in Hong Kong had kept Lim from personally supervising the ambush.

  Now he had no choice but to visit Panyu himself.

  He needed to know why his men had failed.

  Local law enforcement was not a problem for Lim. No one questioned him or even asked to see his identification. They’d simply given him a cup of coffee and asked if he needed anything, then they had left him alone at the scene. They knew who he represented, and that was enough.

  They dared not interfere with the Fists’ investigation.

  McNutt had destroyed all of their vehicles, but he hadn’t killed every man. Those who had survived the assault had removed the bodies of their deceased brothers before the police had arrived. Having cleaned the scene of evidence, they had provided Lim with a detailed account of the incident. Feng was dealing with them and their failures while Lim examined the site.

  He knew what had happened.

  It was his job to figure out why.

  When he was certain nothing else had been disturbed besides the boxes, he left the warehouse and asked a uniformed officer to take him to the hillside where the sniper had been perched. He didn’t expect to learn much over there, but if Feng questioned him he wanted to be able to respond that he’d been thorough.

  An hour later he phoned Feng, who was out of breath when he answered the call. In the background, Lim could hear a noise that sounded like a whimper.

  ‘Yes?’ Feng said.

  ‘Sir, I’ve examined the site. They were after something specific, and it appears they found it. Two boxes of records were removed. And as the professor told us, those records concerned the Wall.’

  ‘Anything special about them?’

  ‘They are normal governmental records from the Mongol period. Information about the Wall’s restoration efforts, information about payments and taxes. Ordinary things. Unfortunately the records had yet to be scanned, so we don’t know the exact details of what they contained.’