The Hunters

by Chris Kuzneski

  ‘A body? As in, someone died?’

  The news excited Callahan. A dead body, no matter who it was, would give them cause to knock down the door. Not only that, it would tie Kozlov to a murder.

  His mind raced at the possibilities.

  ‘No, not dead,’ Koontz informed him. ‘Just really messed up. There’s a lot of commotion, but I think someone said he broke his hip.’

  ‘Shit!’ Callahan blurted. His vision of storming the mansion was replaced by thoughts of an old man slipping on an ice cube.

  Koontz continued to listen. ‘Now they’re talking about killing someone.’

  ‘Killing who?’ Callahan demanded.

  He paused for a moment. ‘You.’

  ‘Me? They’re talking about killing me?’

  Koontz laughed. ‘Nah, I’m just messing with you. They’re looking for some intruder. They think he’s in the vault, and they’re gathering the troops to find him.’

  ‘What intruder? What vault?’

  ‘How the hell should I know? I can only translate so many things at once - especially since I’m flying solo. It might be nice if I had some help.’

  * * *

  Compared to traditional elevators, the dumb waiter shaft was dark and cramped, but it felt downright spacious compared to the chimneys, crawlspaces, and ventilation ducts Sarah had shimmied through over the years. And since the dumb waiter car had been removed long ago, she had plenty of room to maneuver.

  Splaying her legs to the sides, she climbed the chute with relative ease. All she had to do was maintain enough side-to-side pressure with her arms and legs to support her bodyweight while she crawled vertically toward the roof. She wasn’t sure if the top of the shaft would offer an exit or if she would have to create one herself. For the time being, her only goal was to avoid a messy confrontation in the basement.

  When she reached the pulleys that had once held the support ropes in place, Sarah realized she had come to the end of the line. The exit door to the third floor had long since been covered by plasterboard, but it wasn’t all bad news in her mind since they hadn’t reset the studs in the wall. She knew she could punch through drywall, but two-inch-thick boards would have been a different matter.

  Before she did anything drastic, Sarah pressed her ear against the shaft and listened for any signs of life on the other side of the wall. Guards scurried on the floors below, desperately searching for the evil ninja who had defeated the giant ogre they kept locked in the basement, but she heard nothing but silence outside the chute.

  It was now or never.

  She walked her feet around the perimeter of the shaft and planted her shoes firmly against the frame of the opening. Holding onto the pulley above, she curled her legs against her chest and swung out from the wall with all her might. As gravity reversed her course, she combined her momentum with a violent thrust of her legs.

  The wall splintered on contact as she drove her feet through the drywall. Chunks of plaster flew into the hallway and clanked down the shaft to the basement below, but she knew the noise was worth the risk. She repeated the process again and again, widening the hole until she could slip through the narrow gap.

  She looked like a gopher searching for hawks when she peeked her head through the hole. She turned left, then right, then left again, making sure the coast was clear before she fully emerged from the wall. Satisfied with her surroundings, she dove through the small fissure, launching all but her lower legs into the hallway beyond. She quickly pulled her calves, ankles, and feet through the wall and rose to one knee.

  She listened, wondering if her breach had been detected.

  ‘You’re good,’ Garcia said in her ear. ‘The mass of guards hasn’t moved from the lower floors. I think you’re clear unless …’

  ‘Unless what?’ she whispered.

  ‘Hold on! We have movement. One person, heading your—’

  ‘Shit,’ she blurted.

  Not thirty feet in front of her, Kozlov himself emerged from a room at the end of the hallway. He stared at her, consumed with rage. Although he was unarmed, she half expected fireballs to burst forth from his eyes - that’s how angry he was.

  ‘Here!’ he screamed in Russian. ‘The intruder is standing right in front of me! Someone, grab him!’

  Even with the language barrier, Sarah understood that she wouldn’t be getting a holiday card from Kozlov anytime soon. Preparing for the worst, she slipped her brass knuckles on and took a step toward the crime boss.

  ‘Shit!’ Garcia yelled in her ear. ‘Here comes another!’

  Almost instantly, a single figure appeared on the stairwell nearest Kozlov’s room. Dressed in a dark suit, he dashed up the steps two at a time while pulling a pistol from the holster inside his coat. His eyes locked on Sarah as he charged at her with his gun raised. Kozlov sneered and pointed at Sarah as she turned and sprinted down a hallway toward the back half of the house.

  Thinking quickly, the gunman leaped over a railing in the open mezzanine and tried to catch her before she reached the back deck. He fired once, barely missing her right shoulder but hitting the French doors in front of her. The glass shattered on contact, which surprised everyone in the hallway because it was supposed to be bulletproof.

  * * *

  Despite the chaos, Kozlov made a mental note to kill the contractor who had installed the window. Then he returned his focus to the gunman.

  He fired again. And again. And again.

  Every time his bullet just missed.

  Kozlov watched in amazement as the intruder reached the end of the hallway but didn’t stop running until ‘he’ leaped off the third-story patio with reckless abandon. His national pride soared when he watched the gunman do the same. Kozlov thought it was suicide to go after the thief in that way, but he appreciated the dedication. As soon as he learned the new guard’s name, he would reward him for his bravery.

  Just to be safe, Kozlov waited for several guards to join him before he led them down the hallway to where the intruder had made ‘his’ escape. In Kozlov’s mind, the intruder had to be a man because women were incapable of such feats of strength. Of course, it was assumptions like that that helped her get away.

  Hoping to find the intruder’s blood on his carpet, Kozlov saw nothing but broken glass. Disappointed, he raced to the balcony where he expected to see two crumpled bodies on the pool deck below. Instead, he saw something that sickened him to his very core: the gunman was helping the intruder out of the pool.

  It took a moment for it to all sink in.

  The two of them were working together.

  Kozlov’s face turned red as he roared, ‘Kill them both!’

  7

  It took Callahan nearly ten minutes to reach the surveillance van through the mob of gunmen that filled the street outside of Kozlov’s house. Not because the guards were hassling him - just about everyone in the neighborhood knew what the Feds looked like - but because Callahan was hassling them.

  When it came to gun laws, New York City had some of the strictest in the nation. Callahan knew he could bust all of them on felony charges if he had wanted to. Instead, he tried to use the threat of arrest to obtain more information about that night’s events while Koontz filmed the scene from afar.

  Callahan realized the odds of getting information from one of Kozlov’s men was pretty unlikely, especially with so many of them packed together. But he hoped this approach would spook someone into revealing something of value in the crowd.

  As luck should have it, one of the lead guards spotted Callahan and spread the word through the ranks: if anyone told the Feds about the upcoming art auction or about the intruder who had tried to rob the basement vault, the offending party would be shot in the face and fed to the sharks. That message was repeated again and again in Russian and Ukrainian until everyone on the street had gotten the word.

  Unfortunately for them, Koontz got it, too.

  Inside the van, he laughed at the irony of the warning. By telling his unde
rlings what they shouldn’t say, the lead guard had actually revealed everything.

  That was taking stupid to a whole new level.

  Koontz was still laughing when his partner reached the van. He looked forward to briefing Callahan on everything he had heard - and how he had obtained it - but before they had a chance to speak, gunfire rang out from across the street.

  Koontz threw open the van door and pulled Callahan inside.

  ‘Who the hell is shooting?’ Callahan demanded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Koontz said as he turned his attention to the van’s computer system. He punched a few keys and tried to locate the source of the sound, using the parabolic microphones that a tech team had covertly planted around the neighborhood.

  Callahan checked his weapon. Unlike the thugs outside, he was legally allowed to shoot people in Brighton Beach. ‘Please be Kozlov. I want to be the one to arrest him.’

  Koontz shook his head. ‘Sorry. He’s shouting, not shooting.’

  ‘Figures. What’s he shouting about?’

  ‘He just yelled, kill them both.’

  ‘There are two of them?’

  Koontz nodded. ‘That’s what “both” means.’

  Callahan sneered. ‘And both of them are in the house?’

  He shook his head. ‘Were. They were in the house. They just jumped off a balcony into Kozlov’s pool.’

  Callahan waited for more. ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. The guards are looking for them.’

  ‘Then so are we,’ Callahan said as he opened the van door. ‘If they’ve been inside Kozlov’s house, we need to find them before the guards do.’

  * * *

  Jack Cobb was soaking wet, but at least he was alive.

  And, thankfully, so was Sarah.

  Water poured from his suit as he yanked her from the pool. He had millions of questions for his partner-in-crime, but they would have to wait for now. There was little time for chitchat with Kozlov’s guards giving chase.

  Despite the danger, Sarah scolded him as they hustled toward the fence in the back of the grounds. ‘I could have done it myself, you know. I didn’t need your help.’

  ‘I could see that,’ Cobb replied sarcastically. ‘You had them right where you wanted.’

  ‘It wasn’t them,’ she countered. ‘It was one man. No, scratch that. It was the man. I could have ended everything right there.’

  ‘Ended what, exactly? Our mission wasn’t to kill him. It was to rob him. You need to put your Agency training behind you. The only way you’ll survive as a criminal is to think like a criminal.’

  ‘But I’m not a criminal!’ she insisted.

  ‘Not yet, you aren’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you!’

  Sarah realized there was no point in arguing. They could pick up this discussion later, once they had evaded the Russians and made it safely to their rendezvous.

  That is, if they made it to their rendezvous.

  ‘Okay, Mr Helper,’ she said as they scaled the fence together. ‘Now that you’ve decided to get involved, what exactly do you have in mind?’

  Cobb scurried to his right and scanned the terrain. ‘I say we run down the beach as fast as we can and hope the Russians don’t catch us.’

  ‘That’s it? That’s your big plan? I swoop down like a bat in the middle of the night and break into the most heavily guarded compound this side of the White House, and your big plan is to run as fast as we can?’

  Cobb shrugged. ‘Part of it.’

  ‘Wonderful. What’s the other part?’

  He fought the urge to smile. ‘Hey McNutt, can you hear me?’

  A new voice entered the conversation. ‘I can hear you, I can hear her, and I can hear gunfire. The only thing I can’t hear is the nerd. Is he still on the line?’

  ‘Still here,’ Garcia assured them.

  ‘Oh goody,’ McNutt teased, ‘if we have any questions about Star Wars or time travel, we’ll be sure to let you know.’

  Cobb cut them off. It was bad enough that Sarah was giving him lip. He couldn’t afford antics from the other guys on the team, too. Not with hostiles in hot pursuit.

  ‘Josh, what’s your position?’ Cobb asked.

  ‘Two hundred yards west,’ McNutt answered.

  ‘Sarah and I are headed your way. We’re going to need cover.’

  ‘It’s about time. Shoot to kill?’

  Cobb shook his head. ‘That’s a negative.’

  McNutt grumbled but followed his orders.

  8

  The man with the dirty beard and unkempt hair had been patrolling the sand with his metal detector for several hours. His ratty clothes and strange demeanor kept passersby at a safe distance, not that there were many at this time of night. Every so often he would dig in the sand and search for buried treasure, but he never came up with anything more substantial than an aluminum can or a foil wrapper.

  To most observers, he fit in with half the scavengers who roamed the beaches at night. Over the years, Kozlov’s guards had dealt with so many of these people that they had learned the best way to handle them was to simply ignore them. That might have been a wonderful policy for tourists, but it wasn’t the best strategy when it came to guard duty. If Kozlov’s men had been paying closer attention, they would have realized the crazy man in the Hawaiian shirt wasn’t searching for treasure, he was actually planting devices in the sand. And the ‘metal detector’ that he had been using for half the night couldn’t actually detect metal - but it sure as hell could deliver it.

  As Josh McNutt climbed the steps of the lifeguard shack, he detached the circular ‘sensor’ from the end of the bar and examined its contents. He had loaded fifty high-powered rounds into the custom drum magazine. He checked the barrel and the stock that been disguised as the unit’s shaft and stabilizer, then pulled himself on the roof of the stand. By the time he reached the edge, he had reassembled the metal detector into its preferred configuration: an Armalite AR-30 .308 Winchester sniper rifle.

  ‘I’m in position,’ McNutt informed the team.

  ‘Beta plan is a go,’ Cobb confirmed in his ear.

  ‘Beta - as in Beach Bum.’

  ‘No more jokes,’ Cobb snapped. ‘Watch our six.’

  ‘Can’t I do both?’ McNutt asked rhetorically.

  The alpha plan was simple, as most plans were on paper. Sarah would infiltrate the mansion from the sky, find the package, secure it, and make her way back to the rooftop. From there, she would travel across the tops of several neighboring buildings until she could safely descend to street level.

  As for Cobb, he would blend in with the guards outside the house, ready to provide on-site support at a moment’s notice. McNutt and his sniper rifle would remain at a distance, in position to cover their escape. Meanwhile, Garcia would monitor all electronic aspects of the operation and update them on the status of everyone involved: the guards, the Feds, and innocent bystanders.

  Unfortunately, plans change.

  Now that the Russians had been alerted to their activities, the team had to adapt to the situation. Using real-time satellite images, Garcia was able to direct Cobb and Sarah into the shadows of the nearby houses and through the first wave of guards. The duo were more than a block from Kozlov’s mansion, but they were far from safe. They knew his henchmen were somewhere in the dark behind them, and stopping only closed the distance.

  ‘They’re hunting in packs like wild dogs,’ Garcia informed them. ‘The good news is they don’t have your scent. The bad news is they’re getting close.’

  Cobb slipped off his soggy jacket. ‘Civilians?’

  ‘Plenty,’ Garcia said. ‘But it will be tough to blend in. Everyone knows everyone in this part of town. The only visitors are here for the beach.’

  Cobb smiled. ‘That’s exactly what I had in mind.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Sarah asked, confused.

  He inspected her from head to toe. ‘Take off your pants.’

  ‘Excuse me?’
she barked. ‘What the hell do you mean, “take your pants off”? What exactly do you think—’

  Cobb brought a finger to his lips, asking her to stop.

  Normally, he would have reached out and clamped his hand over someone’s mouth, ensuring his or her silence. But he had the feeling that with Sarah, such action might have resulted in the loss of a finger … or a testicle.

  ‘Look at yourself,’ he explained. ‘You’re not going to blend in like that. Right now you don’t even have a face.’

  ‘How does taking off my pants make things better?’

  McNutt chimed in. ‘In my experience, it never makes things worse!’

  Cobb removed his shirt, exposing washboard abs. He wasn’t as fit as he had been in his twenties, but he was still in better shape than most. ‘Kozlov saw you in the catsuit. We have to assume he spread the word to all his guards. They’ll be looking for someone dressed in black.’

  ‘Fine!’ Sarah conceded. She quickly unlaced her booties, kicked them off, and peeled off the lower half of her suit. Standing there in a black thong, she mockingly posed for Cobb. ‘Happy?’

  He turned his head from the athletic blonde, focusing his attention on his shoes and socks. She was stunning, he had to admit, but there was a time and place to acknowledge it. That sure as hell wasn’t now. ‘What about your bra?’

  ‘Screw you!’ she snapped. ‘I’m not showing you my boobs!’

  ‘Now we’re talking!’ McNutt said, trying to find her in his sniper’s scope. ‘Should I get undressed, too?’

  Cobb tried to explain as he took off his own pants. Underneath, he was wearing a pair of boxer briefs that looked like swimming trunks. ‘That’s not what I meant. Does your bra look like a bikini, or does it actually look like underwear?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, finally understanding his meaning. ‘It’s a sports bra.’

  ‘Great. Hurry and take off your top.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘My prom date said the exact same thing.’