The Prisoner's Gold (The Hunters 3)

by Chris Kuzneski

  Cobb climbed the ladder to the AFV’s roof where Sarah was manning the machine gun, just in case they were attacked by unseen forces.

  ‘So?’ she asked. ‘What are we facing?’

  Cobb pointed to the sky behind her. ‘A tricky landing.’

  Low in the sky, the white Gulfstream G650 came in steadily, its landing gear already deployed. The small plane was one of the finest business aircraft in the world, designed for long flights of over 6,000 miles and able to top out at speeds just shy of Mach 1.

  They watched as the plane swooped in lower and lower until the rear wheels gently tapped the road a moment before the nose gear settled. If everything went according to plan, the sleek jet would race on its wheels along the road and stop right next to them.

  ‘Shit,’ Cobb said as he stared to the south. Off in the distance, he could see the army convoy coming around a bend in the road behind the plane. The soldiers were less than a mile from the rendezvous point, and they were closing fast. Cobb immediately stuck his head in the hatch and shouted for his team. ‘The troops are coming. Time to go!’

  Sarah slid gracefully off the side of the AFV. ‘Hector, keep those engines running. This is going to be close.’

  ‘No shit!’ Garcia replied. ‘We just flew over them.’

  To their left, snow-capped mountains rose up high. To their right, the muddy brown water of the surging river roared through a series of rapids, carrying tons of soil and debris along the way. Cobb knew they would be pinned by the geography if it came to a gunfight, but this was the only straightaway where the plane could safely land. Unfortunately, the road wasn’t quite the recommended 6,000 feet they would need for takeoff, so getting airborne again would be dicey.

  Still, it was the best chance they had.

  With a rush of wind and the roar of the turbines, the plane rolled up next to the AFV. Papineau was at the door of the jet with the stairs already lowered; they cleared the ground by barely a foot. Sarah helped Maggie aboard first and nimbly hopped up the steps behind her.

  McNutt was next, as Cobb ran alongside the still-moving aircraft to keep pace with it. He was about to catch up to the stairs when he heard the distinctive sound of one of the oncoming AFVs firing its 30 mm cannon in the distance. He dove forward and grabbed the handrail, holding on for his life as the round exploded on the other side of the jet.

  ‘Go!’ he shouted even though he wasn’t inside the plane yet.

  Immediately the engines revved louder as the plane picked up speed on the straight road. As it did, Cobb dragged on the asphalt next to the jet. Without his heavy-duty boots and reinforced cargo pants, he would have lost most of the skin on the lower half of his body, but they protected him until he was able to pull himself onto the stairs and into the plane itself.

  Thankful to be inside, he pressed the control that should have retracted the stairs and closed the doorway on the Gulfstream, but nothing happened.

  ‘You’ve got to be shitting me!’ he blurted.

  Cobb grabbed the handrail and tugged as hard as he could as the scenery whizzed by at an alarming rate, but he simply wasn’t strong enough to pull the stairs inside while fighting the surging air. As Cobb pondered his options – and he didn’t see many – Papineau joined him at the door. The Frenchman clamped onto the other rail and heaved with all his might until the steps flattened and the door swung shut. They collapsed to the floor completely out of breath as the pressure seals hissed their approval.

  A moment later, the nose of the aircraft lifted up, tilting the cabin back as another round from the AFV’s cannon hit the road nearby with a shuddering boom. Everyone held their breath as the plane lurched upward and then ripped into the sky at a steep angle. Cobb and Papineau rolled down the aisle in a tangle of limbs until McNutt reached out from his seat and grabbed them.

  ‘I’ll be damned: Papi saved the day,’ McNutt said.

  ‘In more ways than one,’ Cobb admitted. He patted Papineau on the shoulder while untangling himself from the Frenchman. ‘Thanks for coming back for us.’

  ‘Happy to help,’ Papineau said as he lay back on the floor. ‘If it’s okay with you, I’m just going to lie here a bit until I catch my breath.’

  Cobb smiled. ‘Take as long as you’d like.’

  ‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ Garcia said, securely strapped into his seat while staring at his laptop. ‘The jets are a lot closer than expected. I had guesstimated an hour. Turns out I was wrong.’

  ‘How wrong?’ Cobb asked as he helped Papineau to his feet. The Frenchman scrambled to the nearest seat and buckled himself in.

  ‘Tough to say,’ Garcia announced. ‘We’re sixty miles to the border of Bhutan. That’s approximately six minutes at our top speed. But we’re not there yet, so let’s say seven.’

  The pilot, who was fully aware of the incoming jets, abandoned his pursuit of altitude and punched the throttles. They needed speed, not height. The whine of the engines nearly doubled as Cobb buckled himself into the seat next to Sarah.

  ‘What about the MiGs? Can they catch up to us?’ McNutt asked.

  Garcia answered. ‘They’re actually not MiGs. They’re Chinese Chengdu J-10s, which is why my initial calculations were off. They can reach speeds of Mach 1.2.’

  Cobb nodded. ‘In other words, yes.’

  ‘Definitely,’ Garcia said. ‘Here’s the thing, though. They won’t catch up to us until we’re near the border. They might not fire on us that close to a sovereign nation. That is, if they’re even coming after us. For all we know, they might be air support for the troops on the ground.’

  ‘Give me some odds,’ Cobb demanded.

  ‘Fifty-fifty,’ Garcia guessed.

  Papineau pulled out his cell phone and made a frantic call, but the others couldn’t hear what he was saying. Maggie was holding the armrests of her chair, her face drained of color. Garcia was tapping at the keys of his laptop and mumbling to himself. McNutt rested in his chair with his eyes closed. If he was worried, he didn’t show it.

  Their plane continued to gain speed.

  Cobb glanced at Sarah, and she looked back at him. Their eyes locked for a few seconds, but there was nothing that needed to be said. The look alone expressed a range of emotions involving friendship, loyalty, concern, and lost possibilities.

  Suddenly, a loud beeping noise emanated from Garcia’s laptop like an alarm.

  ‘What is it?’ Cobb asked.

  ‘The jets have altered course to chase us down. Two minutes out.’

  From this point on, it was a race to the border.

  Cobb felt each beat of his heart in his throat as the seconds ticked by slowly and painfully. When he closed his eyes he felt Sarah’s hand slip into his, and he squeezed it tight.

  Forty seconds later, Garcia spoke again. ‘They’ve hit top speed.’

  The Gulfstream’s engines were already whining so loudly that Cobb didn’t need to ask whether they had hit their maximum velocity. He knew the answer.

  Almost a minute to go.

  Cobb opened his eyes to look at Sarah, but she was in a trance of her own, her eyes closed in silent prayer. Papineau was off his phone, his eyes likewise shut.

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ Garcia called out.

  Cobb closed his eyes again and started counting down.

  At ten seconds, Garcia mumbled to himself. ‘I think we’re gonna make it.’

  A moment later, another alarm shrieked – this time from the cockpit.

  It was high-pitched and constant.

  Cobb and McNutt knew the sound well.

  One of the Chinese jets had missile lock.

  ‘Shit!’ Garcia shouted. ‘They fired!’

  55

  The next few seconds in the Gulfstream were completely silent.

  The pilot shut off the missile alarm, and team members each retreated into their own morbid thoughts as they waited to explode in a ball of fire. A split-second over the border, something whizzed past them on the left, fast enough to rock the plane. It
was followed immediately by an explosion that lurched the Gulfstream forward.

  Inexplicably, a third jet passed directly overhead, aiming back toward the Chinese border. Its wash forced them to dip suddenly, but then the Gulfstream corrected its course and continued deeper into Bhutan airspace unharmed.

  ‘What was that?’ Cobb shouted.

  ‘Holy shit!’ Garcia blurted as he stared at his screen. ‘There’s another jet up here. It took out the missiles with countermeasures. I don’t know where it came from, but it certainly did the trick. The Chinese jets just turned back for home.’

  The team let out a collective cheer, shocked by their good fortune.

  ‘Where the hell did the reinforcements come from?’ McNutt asked.

  Papineau smiled. ‘Some friends of mine from l’Armée de l’Air. They were in Sikkim on joint task-force training exercises with the Indian Air Force. I gave them a call.’

  McNutt stared, open-mouthed.

  ‘I wasn’t always a businessman,’ Papineau said.

  Cobb realized he was talking about French mandatory military conscription, which would still have been in place when Papineau was graduating from high school. He probably would have served in North Africa or Lebanon. It wasn’t something Cobb had ever thought to investigate, despite having Garcia look into Papineau’s business dealings over the last decade.

  The plane banked in an easy turn to the right, and Cobb could see the white Himalayas below the dipped wing through the small Plexiglas window. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Somewhere we can all decompress,’ Papineau said as he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. ‘Then we need to examine what the monk gave to you.’

  * * *

  The Hyatt Regency in Katmandu, Nepal, was a luxury hotel that catered to the business set. With excellent restaurants, expensive decor, expansive meeting rooms, and a well-trained staff eager to please, it was a great place for the team to catch their second wind.

  They had retired to their respective suites to rest for a few hours before regrouping and discussing their next move. Cobb had tried to sleep but failed miserably. He was too wound up. He knew Garcia would be, too, and that he would already be trying to decipher the contents of the USB drive the old monk had slipped to Cobb in the Potala.

  Concerned for the monk and his brethren, Cobb had accessed the hotel’s Wi-Fi to check the news about the palace, but the media hadn’t gotten wind of the turmoil.

  Or more likely, the Chinese had clamped down on all news coming out of Tibet.

  Fed up with waiting, Cobb left his suite and headed down the hallway for Garcia’s room. Just before he got to the door, he heard someone approaching from behind.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep?’ McNutt called out to him.

  Cobb shook his head. ‘I thought I’d see if Hector is restless too.’

  Cobb and McNutt knocked on the door in unison. Sarah opened it a moment later. She had changed her clothes, but she looked as tired as Cobb felt.

  ‘Sorry, wrong room,’ Cobb said. ‘We were looking for—’

  Sarah opened the door wide, and they could see Garcia at his desk, pounding away on his keyboard. Maggie was seated on the cream-colored sofa, looking at a tablet and swiping rapidly through images that Garcia streamed to her.

  ‘Welcome to the party,’ Sarah said, ushering them into the room.

  Cobb and McNutt stepped inside and crossed the dark wooden floors. Exhausted from the day’s events but too tired to sleep, they quickly grabbed chairs in the sitting area.

  ‘No one else could sleep, either,’ Garcia said, not looking up from his laptop. He had changed into cargo shorts and a T-shirt that read: I’M NOT ANTI-SOCIAL; I’M JUST NOT USER-FRIENDLY.

  Cobb looked around the room. ‘Papi must have been able to get some sleep, at least.’

  ‘Actually,’ Sarah said, ‘he just went to get ice. He’ll be right back.’

  ‘How is it going with the USB?’ Cobb asked.

  Garcia kept typing. ‘It wasn’t encrypted. We’re going through it now with the translation software. Maggie has a lot of stuff already.’

  Maggie looked up from her tablet. ‘Shall we wait for Jean-Marc?’

  Just then they heard a knock at the door.

  This time, Sarah made no move to get up. Instead, McNutt stood and quickly paced down the hallway to the door. Cobb noticed he did not look through the peephole in the thick wood, but rather stopped at the doorway to the bathroom and edged into it before calling out, ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘It is I,’ Papineau said.

  As McNutt moved to open the door, Cobb was once again impressed with the sniper’s ingrained security-consciousness. He would never use a peephole, alerting anyone on the other side of the door to his location via the shadow cast through to the front of the glass, and he knew well enough to stand aside from the door should shooters be waiting on the opposite side.

  Papineau entered the suite carrying a silver tray with several cups of steaming coffee. ‘I was going to have a Scotch,’ he admitted sheepishly, ‘but I thought perhaps coffee would be better for all concerned.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ McNutt said as he took the tray and set it on the coffee table in the center of the sitting area.

  Papineau wasn’t sure what stunned him more: the sniper’s good manners, or the fact that McNutt called him ‘sir’ instead of ‘Papi’.

  Cobb noticed the change in McNutt as well, but the truth was Papineau had earned it with that miracle at the border. Cobb wondered idly whether the favor from the French Air Force was provided courtesy of loyalty or massive stacks of euros. He would have Garcia dig into Papineau’s military days later. Not that he suspected he would find anything damning; he simply wanted all the pertinent information on the background of his people. If he had known about Papineau’s military connections, he might have used them earlier instead of relying on Papineau to think of doing so at the last minute.

  McNutt passed coffee around to everyone, and they all took sips of the imported brew before Papineau looked around expectantly. Cobb noticed he did not attempt to retake command of the room by asking everyone to begin. Cobb appreciated the gesture.

  ‘Okay,’ Cobb said. ‘What do we have?’

  Garcia answered first. ‘We have a shit-ton of photos of two separate books. We’re running the translation program on the pages right now. It should be done any minute.’

  Maggie took over from there. ‘The first book is an official account from a clerical monk named Thokmay. He was basically the right-hand man to the Sakya lama, who was the head of the religious administration unit in Tibet during the thirteenth century. Thokmay’s account will hopefully mention Marco Polo’s visit to Lhasa. Unfortunately, I haven’t found such a section yet. The book is a massive volume consisting of over three thousand pages. It will take some time to dig through everything.’

  ‘Okay, not a problem,’ Cobb said. ‘And the other book?’

  Maggie pointed at Garcia. ‘Still waiting on that one.’

  Cobb rubbed his tired eyes and thought back to the events at the Potala. Based on the urgency in the old monk’s voice and the death grip that he’d had on his arm, Cobb had assumed that the contents of the USB drive would be staggering. Then again, maybe he had misread the situation. The palace was under attack and the monk was obviously scared. Maybe his superhuman kung fu grip had more to do with the adrenaline surging through his veins than anything else.

  A ding on Garcia’s computer pulled Cobb out of his thoughts.

  It was soon followed by a shriek of feminine joy.

  Strangely, the sound had come from Garcia.

  ‘No way!’ he shouted, his voice cracking in midsentence. ‘Maggie! Take a look at this!’

  She rushed to his side. ‘At what?’

  He pointed at the translation on his screen. ‘Can this be right?’

  She looked at the computer, then at Garcia, then back at the computer.

  Sarah stood as well. ‘What is it? Is it im
portant?’

  ‘Very important!’ Garcia shouted.

  Maggie’s face broke into a huge grin as she turned to explain their discovery. ‘Obviously I haven’t had a chance to go through the data yet but, if this translation is correct, the second book on the drive is much more significant than the first.’

  ‘Why? What is it?’ Cobb demanded.

  She smiled at him. ‘It’s the personal diary of Marco Polo.’

  56

  Papineau was the first to speak. ‘Well done, everyone!’

  The team celebrated with high fives and hugs, a moment of pure joy that temporarily made up for all they had been through in China.

  Their efforts had paid off. They finally had a solid lead.

  Despite her happiness, Maggie held up her hand and asked them to stop. She needed them to understand that their search was far from over.

  ‘People,’ she said, ‘listen to me. There’s still a lot of work to be done.’

  Cobb agreed. ‘Okay, guys. That’s enough fun for today. There’ll be plenty of time to celebrate after we find the treasure.’

  ‘There’ll be plenty to drink, too,’ McNutt added.

  Maggie shook her head. ‘Joshua, don’t plan your party quite yet. Just because we have his diary doesn’t mean we’ll find his treasure.’

  ‘Why not?’ McNutt asked. ‘Seems pretty simple to me. “Dear Diary, Today I buried my treasure in the yard behind my house. I hope no one looks there. Signed, Marco.”’

  Maggie smiled at the comment. ‘Obviously, I wish it were that easy, but the truth is I haven’t had time to read the document yet. Assuming there are no maps or step-by-step directions to the prize, I will still have to search for details about the treasure. Also keep something in mind: this book was most likely left in Tibet before the Polos set out on their return journey. For all we know, it could have been toward the beginning of his trip – before he even had a treasure.’

  ‘Understood,’ Cobb said before McNutt could crack another joke. ‘But it will certainly give us a better picture of the man himself, even if it contains no direct clues.’

  ‘True,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m smiling.’