The Hunters (39 page)

As they spoke, the train reversed out of the tunnel.

‘Sarah,’ Cobb said. ‘Elvis is leaving the building. Care to join us?’

Still no answer.

‘Damn it,’ Cobb spat.

Suddenly light flooded into the cab as they emerged from the tunnel. Cobb could see Jasmine hovering protectively over Dobrev, who was leaning forward with one hand on the control, one palm pressed against the front of the cabin. He was breathing heavily, his clothes soaked with perspiration.

But the train was moving and picking up speed.

As it did, the Black Robes were beginning to regroup.

‘Garcia, make sure everyone stays down,’ Cobb said.

As if on cue, bullets began to splatter on the outside engine walls.

‘Down!’ Cobb ordered, as he and Jasmine went to one knee. Both looked as Dobrev remained rigidly standing.

‘Andrei!’ yelled Jasmine in Russian. ‘Get down!’

But he didn’t respond.

The train began to pick up even more speed. Now clouds were being reflected in the windshield glass, and tree branches were whizzing by the windows, flipping off their newly acquired dust as the train passed, still going backwards.

Jasmine saw none of it. She was watching Dobrev.

Cobb shouted at her, his hand out, knowing that Jasmine was going to do what she did anyway. She jumped up and grabbed Dobrev under his arms as he was about to drop.

‘Andrei …’ she shrieked.

Before she could say another word, Dobrev fell back like a stone slab. She went with him and just managed to keep his head from smashing into the cab’s steel floor. His teeth were clattering, his eyes unfocused, and his right hand was spasmodically gripping his left arm. Jasmine looked over at Cobb in alarm.

‘It’s a heart attack,’ she said. ‘What can we do?’

‘Here’s what you’re going to do,’ Cobb said. ‘You’re going to drive this train.’

She hesitated as Dobrev’s right hand clawed at her arm.

‘You do it,’ Cobb said sternly, ‘or he will have suffered this for nothing. He and everyone else who died here.’

She tried to move - and then Dobrev yanked her head close to his, her eyes facing his mouth. Dobrev whispered something to her while placing his most treasured heirloom - the gold, twenty lei coin - in her grasp before he squeezed her hand closed.

Jasmine didn’t translate right away.

She needed a moment to fight her emotions.

Eventually, she looked up at Cobb with tragic resolve in her eyes. She wiped away a tear while revealing Dobrev’s final words.

‘Andrei said, “Drive the train, and kill those sons of bitches.”’

Despite what had just happened and all that was happening around them, Jasmine was surprised by what Cobb did next. He reached through the cab window, grabbed onto a rung there, and started pulling himself onto the roof of the engine.

Jasmine’s mouth opened as her brain filled with questions, but the train lurched before she could ask anything. She instinctively leaped up, grabbed the controls of the train, and started to drive the eleven cars with all the skill she had picked up from Dobrev.

Cobb stood on top of the train, quickly surveying the scene. There was a mass of gathering Cossack cycles on the left, a few stragglers on the back right, and horsemen pounding through the woods after them. The tree cover was still pretty extensive, with branches all around him. The downward incline was slight at the moment, but as soon as they broke into the open, it would dip sharply.

He wasn’t going to ask anyone to cover him. Whoever he’d ask would have his hands full as it was, and hopefully he could accomplish what he needed to do without undue attention. Thankfully, no one had yet noticed that he had climbed up there.

Cobb took a quick look down and said a fast prayer for Andrei Dobrev. He had connected Ludmilla to the prince’s cars perfectly. Although the securing spike was not pushed through the corresponding holes in each coupler, the trains were ‘holding hands’, the fingers and thumb-like joints intertwined. This had allowed Ludmilla to pull the treasure train free.

Cobb looked up to gauge the distance from the engine tip to the back of the prince’s cars. He silently thanked the gods of Russian train construction that Ludmilla’s roofing was relatively flat and free of projections. He turned and took a quick look along the track to make sure there were no sudden turns coming up for the backwards-running train. Then he ran and jumped.

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 checking 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.