The Hunters h-1

by Chris Kuzneski

  ‘Racism?’ McNutt shrieked, even more confused than normal. ‘I wasn’t talking about Puerto Ricans. I was talking about nerds. I can’t stand you fuckers — always reading books and shit. How can you trust someone like that? Turn on a TV like a normal person.’

  ‘First of all,’ Garcia argued, ‘I’m not Puerto Rican. Secondly-’

  ‘Enough!’ Cobb shouted, growing more impatient by the second. ‘We need to move on starting now. Garcia, get that information you promised me.’

  Garcia nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Cobb turned toward Jasmine. ‘What’s the latest from Dobrev?’

  She answered, ‘He said we’ll never get anywhere if we stick to the main lines.’

  ‘These are main lines?’ McNutt exclaimed, happy for the change of subject. ‘Those dirt roads, old villages, and mountain passes would put a Dracula movie to shame.’

  Jasmine smiled. ‘Actually, we’re pretty close to Transylvania.’

  ‘Did Dobrev have any suggestions?’ Cobb asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Jasmine said. ‘He wanted me to tell you there’s an unused track that will bring us into the plateau region. He said-’

  ‘If someone were going to split a shipment, this is where,’ Sarah interrupted.

  Cobb nodded. This was one of those fortuitous moments on any mission when theory and reality reached the same conclusion.

  ‘Where is this track?’ Garcia inquired, preparing to program it into Goldfinder.

  His eagerness to get back in the mission caused both McNutt and Sarah to turn away in disgust.

  Jasmine smiled thinly at him. ‘You won’t find it,’ she said. ‘Andrei says it’s not on any map or chart.’

  ‘I’ll find it,’ he insisted.

  ‘Shouldn’t you concentrate on getting the information Jack asked for?’ she said.

  ‘I’m already running that search,’ he said. ‘Just tell me what you know.’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ Jasmine said. ‘Apparently not even who to trust.’

  ‘All right, that’s enough, kids,’ Cobb stated.

  ‘He wants to see you, boss,’ Jasmine said to Cobb.

  ‘All right. McNutt, Sarah — play nice here. Let Garcia do his job.’

  ‘For once,’ McNutt said bitterly, walking away.

  ‘Garcia, I’ll expect some good news when I get back.’

  ‘You’ll have it,’ Garcia promised. ‘I swear.’

  Cobb glanced at Sarah, who held up her hands in mock surrender and went back to her sofa and the maps. McNutt collapsed onto the chair where he’d eaten his sandwich.

  Cobb nodded at them, then joined Jasmine. ‘Let’s go.’

  The two walked through the command center toward the engine. As he took a step across the linkage, Cobb got his first real-world glimpse of the surroundings.

  Views from train windows must be similar throughout the world, he thought. Rail-side cities whose population is rattled and shaken yet largely oblivious to the noise from passing trains, giving way to hillsides, grassland, and waterways.

  He tried to see it through the prince’s eyes, but the world of the Romanovs was not the world of today. He knew that Felix, in order to safeguard the Romanian treasure, would have wanted to get as far from civilization as possible.

  Cobb’s thoughts on the outside world were cut off by the reality of the locomotive. The brief exposure to the wind and nature between the cars was slammed out of his mind by the dragon-roar of the engine. He and Jasmine had to twist and duck to avoid the head-end power unit on the floor and the cooling fans on the ceiling.

  ‘Do you think Mr Papineau is really plotting against us?’ Jasmine shouted back as they navigated the machinery. Her tone, even muffled by the noise, was fretful.

  Cobb shook his head. ‘No, but there’s definitely something he’s not telling us, and that makes me uneasy.’

  They marched by air compressors and filters, then turned sideways to shuffle along the big main generator, while crouching slightly to avoid the dynamic brake grid and the dynamic brake fan that hung from the ceiling.

  ‘Why?’ Jasmine wanted to know.

  ‘Exactly,’ Cobb said. ‘Why would he? I can think of a few reasons, and none of them fill me with confidence.’

  ‘Anything we should be looking out for?’ she asked.

  ‘Everything.’

  They stopped talking when they had to turn the other way to slide by the main generator and engine turbocharger to finally reach the cab. Thankfully, the fuel tanks, batteries, and compressed air tank were beneath their feet, attached to the underside.

  Andrei Dobrev turned his head when the rear door of the cab opened, letting in the roar until Cobb closed it behind him. He smiled, happy to see the leader again. The man who had given him the opportunity to leave his detested semi-retirement. The man who had put this aged but still regal queen back into operation. Dobrev was proud and eager to show off what he called his ‘old dancing partner’.

  That is exactly what they were, Cobb thought as they entered the cab. The machine did not, could not, fail to impress. He understood how a boy could fall in love with it and never love anything else equally, ever.

  Jasmine took her place on the second of two seats in the small, half-octagonal space that she and Dobrev occupied. It was adjoined by the slightly larger half-rectangular part Cobb stood in. Looking dead ahead out the smallish windshield, he saw more track, more grass, more trees, more hills, and more horizon. From the window to the side, he saw it all speed by.

  Dobrev sat in a tall seat with its own suspension system to Cobb’s right: the engineer’s station. Spread before him were the brake, throttle, speedometers, and more than two dozen buttons dealing with systems spread throughout the train.

  Jasmine sat in the same sort of seat to Cobb’s left: the fireman’s station. Here there were more controls and indicators, as well as the radio to make sure they didn’t collide with anything and nothing collided with them. There was also a narrow door behind her that led to a toilet.

  A minute later, Cobb noticed the terrain outside start to slow noticeably. He glanced at the controls. ‘The throttle is at notch two. That’s pretty slow.’

  ‘Almost the slowest,’ she replied. ‘The cut-off that we’re looking for is somewhere up ahead. We’ll actually have to leave the train in order to find the switch. You might want to let everyone know that we’ll be stopping frequently. Everyone except Garcia.’

  45

  The train squealed loudly — she had a right to, at her age — then hissed steam as she came to a slow stop. Cobb hopped from the engine, then helped Dobrev and Jasmine out.

  As she translated, Dobrev said they were at a spot that he had known about for several decades: ‘the dead end’, he had called it.

  ‘The junction switch was disabled long ago by whoever was leaving,’ Jasmine said.

  ‘Not the track?’ Cobb asked.

  Jasmine asked Dobrev. ‘Not the track, he says.’

  Dobrev continued as Jasmine translated.

  ‘According to lore, the Russian White Army stranded a large faction of the Russian Red Army on the other side, then laid siege. No one has gone back there since. There are rumors of dead lying in the open, deadly munitions hidden by grass.’

  Cobb smiled. ‘In other words, disinformation to keep people out. Stronger motive than just having to repair a junction switch.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said before she took a moment to explain the theory to Dobrev. ‘He says he likes our explanation better than the traditional one.’

  The engine was sitting on the somewhat steep side track that had taken them away from the main line about twenty kilometers back. It was, as Dobrev had promised, a less traveled route. Gone were the villages, waterways, and protective walls. They had left the cow pastures and hay meadows far behind. Now it was just dirt, grass, forests, and hills. At times they couldn’t even see the sky through all the oak and beech trees.

  It had taken an engineer of Dobrev’s skill
just to get them this far. There were times when even Cobb doubted the wisdom of the move, as Dobrev navigated sharp turns on steep inclines and seemingly impossible declines. Cobb found it only mildly amusing as he heard the others react in his ear as if they were on a roller coaster climbing for a drop — or just coming out of one.

  Nearly the entire time Cobb was in the cabin, Dobrev was talking to himself. Even now, outside the train, the old man continued.

  ‘Anything we need to know?’ Cobb asked.

  ‘No,’ Jasmine told him quietly, so as not to disturb or embarrass the engineer. ‘Most of it is about trains, about the old days. Some is about his son and the life they all thought they’d have. And some of it is about the coin and the lost glory that was old Romania. He sounds sorry that his father’s bloodline was mingled with his mother’s Russian blood.’

  ‘Ethnic conflict in your own head,’ Cobb said. ‘Not pretty.’

  ‘I’ve got that with North and South Korea. I’m a second-generation schizophrenic.’

  Cobb smiled. ‘Let me know which side wins.’

  She grinned. ‘You know, I get the impression that Andrei is doing more than babbling. He is taking stock of his life at what he knows is a significant juncture.’

  ‘His life and our train, both diverging. It’s fitting, somehow.’

  Back in the command center, Garcia sat amongst his video screens, checking the surrounding woods by satellite. He also used his ‘roof-cam’ to look for any sign of life that wasn’t bird, animal, or insect. Meanwhile, McNutt was crouched on the rear lip of the engine roof, covering Cobb, Dobrev, and Jasmine with a Heckler amp; Koch MP7 submachine gun, complete with sound suppressor and reflex sight.

  ‘Is there a reason for the firepower?’ Cobb asked him.

  McNutt nodded. ‘I’m still worried about Cossacks. Hordes of ‘em.’

  Cobb grinned. It wasn’t a big leap of the imagination. This kind of rocky, scrubby terrain — miles from any signs of the modern world — did things to a person’s mind.

  Feeling well protected, Cobb turned back to the matter at hand.

  Finding the junction switch.

  At all the previous junctions, either Dobrev or Jasmine had used the radio to call ahead with instructions for the station controller to throw an electronic switch that would move them onto the various tracks they required. Most of those transfers had been on the main line, to let faster trains pass. Two had been on a parallel track they had used to avoid a bridge. Cobb did not want them on a sixty-meter-high trestle or inside a mountain tunnel if they could avoid it.

  Those positions would have been tough to defend.

  Since leaving the main line, Dobrev had jumped to the track to pull the old, heavy metal switches himself. As they got deeper into the wild, Dobrev thought it would be best if he had reinforcements, just in case.

  Cobb was actually pleased to leave the hot engine for the cool, dry, Romanian autumn weather. They were lucky to be here during the moderate season between the sweltering summer of August and the numbing snows of November. He was also happy to be on solid ground. It was subtle, but the vibration of the train made him feel he was being shaken like a cocktail.

  ‘So this is Transylvania,’ McNutt said. ‘If I see any fucking bats, I’m blasting them out of the sky. I’m not taking any chances with my blood.’

  Jasmine laughed, not sure if he was serious or not.

  Just to be safe, she filled him in on some history.

  ‘Transylvania was once the Kingdom of Dacia,’ she told everyone. ‘The Roman Empire gutted it a couple of hundred years after Christ’s death. After that, all bets were off. The country has been overrun by Avars, Bulgarians, Carpi, Gepids, Huns, Slavs, and Visigoths, just to name a few. Then the Hungarian Kingdom took over in 1003. After that, the Ottoman Empire. Then the Habsburgs got it in 1683. In 1867, it became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Sarah deadpanned. ‘The games of impotent men.’

  ‘Listen or don’t,’ Cobb said, ‘but don’t interrupt.’

  ‘There’s not much more,’ Jasmine promised them. ‘After World War One, Austria-Hungary dissolved. The ethnic Romanian population, which was in the majority here, proclaimed union with Romania on December 1st, 1918.’

  McNutt cleared his throat. ‘What about Dracula?’

  Jasmine tried to explain that even though Vlad Tepes — the notorious impaler of the fifteenth century — was real, Dracula was not. He was merely the protagonist of a novel written in 1897 by an Irishman who wanted to decry the foreign influence on the English Rose.

  Of course, McNutt tuned her out early on.

  ‘Vlad the Impaler?’ he said, having heard nothing after that.

  ‘He was a patriot who fought Ottoman rule,’ Jasmine explained. ‘He lined the roadways with impaled soldiers. The higher the rank, the higher the stake.’

  ‘Talk about scarecrows,’ McNutt said.

  Jasmine continued. ‘Unfortunately, the bodies drew vermin, which attracted disease, which killed Romanians. Not a brilliant tactic.’

  Cobb let them babble for a while. It was a good way to let off tension. But he ordered them to stop when he heard Dobrev calling his name. Cobb hustled over to where Dobrev was pointing. It was a spot just in front of him.

  ‘He says to check there,’ Jasmine said.

  All Cobb saw was what appeared to be heavy foliage, dwarfed by fang-like trees. He took a step further and peered closer to see that there was a heavy batch of coralroot, but it was coralroot wrapped around a skeleton of metal bones.

  It was a long-forgotten switch — or at least part of one.

  ‘We’re going to have to rig something to move it,’ Dobrev said through his translator. Then the two of them disappeared into the train. A minute later, Dobrev emerged with a pick and heavy rope while Jasmine took her spot in the engine.

  From the roof, McNutt stared at her through the engine window. ‘What in the hell are you doing in there?’

  ‘I’m going to drive us back if he needs me to.’

  Sarah chimed in. ‘You never know when we might be attacked by vampires.’

  McNutt held his weapon a little tighter. He wasn’t sure what scared him more: hordes of Cossacks, flocks of vampire bats, or Jasmine driving the train.

  With Dobrev’s help, Cobb cleared away the foliage near the base of the switch. It had been sawed, he could see, close to the bracket that fixed it to the base. Holding the head of the pickaxe, Cobb dug the sharper of the two ends into the remaining wood to scoop it out. Then he stuck the iron point into the empty socket.

  ‘Is this what you had in mind?’ Cobb asked.

  ‘Da, da,’ Dobrev said approvingly.

  They tied the rope around the pick handle to form a loop. Slipping it over his chest, Cobb faced away from the switch.

  ‘You want a yoke-mate?’ McNutt asked.

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ Cobb said.

  Gathering his energy, Cobb gripped the side lever and pulled, expecting quite a struggle. To his surprise, the switch moved easily, as if it had been oiled earlier in the day. Puffs of rust rose like pollen as he pulled. He saw what looked like tree roots shift over and the telltale glint of dull metal amongst them. It was track that hadn’t been exposed to the elements for decades.

  Then there was a solid-sounding click.

  He heard Dobrev cheer quietly as the old man turned and hurried back into the cab. Cobb slipped off the noose, grabbed the pickaxe, and followed him.

  The train began to rumble as Cobb swung onboard then trotted back toward the command center, waving at McNutt to do the same. The two met at Cobb’s desk.

  ‘Impressive,’ Sarah said. ‘Brains and brawn.’

  Cobb flashed her a smile as he took his seat. ‘Get ready, everybody. We’re entering terra incognita.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ Garcia added.

  ‘What do you mean?’ McNutt asked, slinging the MP7 across his back.

  ‘This route goes into the woods and
up the mountain. It’s dressed to look like an old mine track.’ Garcia switched to a spectroscopic analysis of the satellite image. It was the kind of technology that the Department of Defense used to search for lead containers in ordinary rail and seagoing cargo, capable of distinguishing variations in density and creating what looked like a negative image of the surrounding area. ‘There are mining tools, hats, abandoned carts, and lanterns amidst the rocks and shrubs.’

  ‘How do you know it wasn’t a mine, once?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘The rails are the wrong gauge for those carts,’ he said, pointing to a mine cart site on the Internet. He looked to the group for praise, but none was forthcoming.

  The air was thick with expectation as the train poked ahead for a half-hour. It did not move steadily but in stops and starts, as Dobrev studied the condition of the tracks.

  ‘Speaks well for Russkie construction,’ McNutt said as they gathered behind Garcia, watching the nose-cam.

  ‘We’re in Romania,’ Sarah reminded him.

  ‘You know what I mean. All those old-timers. They did things right.’

  ‘Except for revolution,’ Sarah said, repeating her mantra about impotent men.

  ‘Actually, women had a hand in this one,’ Jasmine explained. ‘They marched against the tsar, and it was Alexandra who invited Rasputin into-’

  The train lurched, then stopped. Dobrev mumbled something.

  ‘He says we’re close,’ Jasmine told the others.

  ‘How does he know?’

  Jasmine said, ‘The slopes ahead are too steep for most trains, especially fast ones.’

  Cobb studied the charts on his desk. ‘I’m not surprised. Since we left the junction, the line hasn’t been on any map.’ He looked over at Garcia. ‘Find us, Hector.’

  The hacker’s fingers flew across his keyboard, then he looked up at a screen with a glowing blue dot on it. ‘There we are.’

  Sarah leaned over him, looking closer. The dot glowed and moved as they moved, but the background was blank. ‘Okay, so where’s “there”?’

  Garcia stared at the screen intently, trying to bring some geographical grid into play. ‘Tough to say.’

  ‘Explain,’ Cobb barked.