The Hunters h-1

by Chris Kuzneski

  He wandered away, Anna at his side, as the area filled with delicious smells. But before he got too far for Jasmine to translate, Garcia turned to him.

  ‘Colonel, I’m having a little trouble getting a signal. Where precisely are we?’

  ‘The village of the honor guard,’ he replied.

  ‘Yes, but that’s not on any of my maps,’ Garcia said.

  As Jasmine continued to translate, Anna frowned, worried about revealing their location. But Borovsky just tilted his head.

  ‘We are on the Transylvanian Plateau,’ he told them. With that, he playfully bared his teeth, curled his fingers into hooked claws, and hissed loudly like a vampire.

  ‘See, I told you!’ McNutt said. ‘Even he knows Dracula is out there somewhere.’

  Borovsky smiled, his spirits buoyed by the levity, if only for a moment.

  Cobb did not have to worry about the Black Robes. At least, not yet. Scouts had been sent into the field to watch for them. For the time being, he knew the wisest thing to do was to sit, eat, and collect his thoughts.

  The meal was delicious. They started with sarmale, but instead of the usual mincemeat, the vine leaves were filled with minced apricots, plums, and cherries. The appetizer was followed by a hearty vegetable soup, which they sopped up with mamaliga, better known as ‘the bread of the peasants’. The main course was broiled fish in garlic sauce.

  ‘All from our own gardens, streams, lakes, and ovens,’ Decebal said proudly.

  Cobb only left the circle of villagers when Garcia had finally established the connection to Papineau. After Cobb brought him up to speed, he waited silently.

  The usually loquacious Frenchman was speechless.

  ‘Damn,’ Papineau finally said.

  ‘That doesn’t tell me anything,’ Cobb complained.

  ‘Hear me out,’ Papineau said. ‘The Black Robes are a group of zealots who worship Rasputin. They follow his example of sinning, then repenting. Through that, the mad monk gained great political power, just as these men have in their own time. They approached me when we arrived-’

  ‘How did they know who we were?’ Cobb asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Papineau lied, covering for the colleague he had given the Brighton Beach letter to. ‘They have eyes and ears everywhere. They offered to help set up this operation using their influence in key portions of the Transportation and Migration Ministries.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he lied again.

  ‘And you just accepted that?’ Cobb asked incredulously. ‘It never occurred to you that some sort of quid pro quo might be involved? No, don’t answer that. I already know. Of course you did. You just didn’t think it was necessary to tell us. You figured we’d muck through somehow, and if we didn’t there was always some other sucker-team you could bribe with five million bucks.’

  ‘Jack,’ the Frenchman said. ‘I know I’ve lost your trust-’

  Cobb made a scoffing sound. ‘You never had that. The best you can hope for is trying to regain some sliver of credibility at this point. Let’s just leave it at that, okay? We’ll find your treasure because we accepted the contract, and you figure out some reason, any reason, why I shouldn’t take your head as a souvenir when we’ve delivered it.’

  Papineau started to respond, but Cobb made the throat-slashing motion at Garcia. Once Garcia broke the connection, Cobb looked at him steadily.

  ‘What do you think the Black Robes want?’ Garcia asked anxiously. ‘Some sort of revenge on Prince Felix?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Cobb agreed. ‘And I think Borovsky might know the answer.’ He dipped his forehead at the laptop. ‘So the more immediate question is about Papineau. I asked you to find out about him. What’ve you got?’

  The techie looked honestly at his superior. ‘As far as I can tell,’ Garcia confessed, ‘Papineau is who he says he is.’

  ‘I’m aggressively uninterested in what he says, Garcia,’ Cobb replied. ‘I’m interested in what he’s not saying. After you’ve eaten, dig more.’

  Cobb turned around and nearly walked into McNutt.

  ‘Hey,’ the gunman said. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah, McNutt, thanks.’ Cobb thought that would be it, but McNutt just remained standing there. ‘You?’ Cobb finally asked him.

  ‘Yeah. Listen, I just wanted to … you know … back in the armory?’ McNutt looked down for a moment. ‘Thanks, okay? Just … thanks.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ Cobb assured him. ‘Maybe someday you’ll return the favor.’

  ‘I hope so,’ McNutt said.

  ‘You hope so?‘ Cobb teased. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  McNutt quickly realized his mistake. The only way he could save Cobb’s life was if Cobb was in grave danger to begin with. That wasn’t the type of thing he should be wishing on his team leader. ‘Wait! That came out wrong! I mean, um-’

  Cobb laughed. ‘Don’t worry. I know what you meant.’

  McNutt breathed a sigh of relief.

  Cobb continued. ‘But just so you know, that’s why soldiers don’t try to put those things into words. A simple thanks is good enough.’

  ‘How about thanks and a drink?’

  ‘Even better.’

  They both returned to the circular campfire and the villagers for some homemade cheese and that long-awaited tuica. When they were finished, Cobb, McNutt, and Sarah stretched out to look at the setting sun. They knew it was the calm before the storm.

  ‘Okay,’ Sarah said briskly. ‘What now, Jack?’

  Before he could answer, Borovsky appeared, accompanied by Jasmine. The two had been talking with Anna and Dobrev throughout the meal.

  ‘I have thought about this moment for many years,’ the Russian said through their interpreter. ‘All my life, in fact. And the lives of my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather as well. And now that the time has come, I only can think of one proverb to say: “When you meet a man, you judge him by his clothes. When you leave, you judge him by his heart.”’

  One by one, Borovsky looked at the people he had come to respect. When he reached Cobb, he spoke in slow, heavily accented English. ‘Would you come with me, please? There is something I would like to show you.’

  53

  As the group — minus Garcia, who stayed in the village to tend to his gear — made its way across the gentle foothills that led to a mini-plateau, Borovsky pointed out a narrow-gauge railway that cut through the sparse forest. Up ahead was a small mining train. It was covered by tattered tarpaulins and a blanket of carefully meshed twigs and branches.

  Fueled by joy, Dobrev rushed over uneven stone and high grass to reach it. He excitedly pulled off the tarps and twigs, and stared at the train underneath. It consisted of a small, open trolley car; a slightly larger, open freight car; a four-seat passenger car with no glass in its few windows; and a diminutive engine that seemed little more than a lawn mower. In the train industry, it was known as an ‘omnivore’ because it could run on coal or firewood.

  Chasing after Dobrev, Jasmine suddenly saw the little boy in the old man. His somber face erupted in a smile the likes of which she had never seen on him — or anyone else.

  To her, the trains and track looked like an overgrown toy set.

  To him, it seemed like the Romanian treasure itself.

  As he talked, he ran his hands over everything: from the roofs above to the mini-tracks below. ‘Our train rests on thousand-millimeter track. This rail is not even six hundred.’

  Decebal, who was the only villager with the group, nodded in agreement. He waited until everyone had reached the train before he started to speak in broken Russian laced with Romanian. With Borovsky’s help, Jasmine translated the information for her team.

  ‘They laid down the tracks around 1912. Before that, everything was donkeys and carts. After that, they started exporting lumber, barely enough to keep the village going, but enough. Eventually they laid heavier gauge tracks further down, that’s what we came up on, but
then …’ She paused. ‘Well, that’s weird. He said business just stopped.’

  Jasmine confirmed her understanding with Decebal and Borovsky, then passed on the information. ‘Business didn’t decline,’ she explained. ‘It just stopped. Completely.’

  ‘Meaning,’ said Cobb, ‘that when the prince rolled in he bought the town and didn’t want any exports coming from this direction.’

  ‘So they went back to carts,’ McNutt said. ‘After the fall of the Romanovs, that’s all they could afford.’

  ‘Imagine being the guardians of an immense treasure and being poor as dirt,’ Sarah said.

  ‘They didn’t think of it that way,’ Jasmine assured them. ‘It was more like being the palace eunuch. They were honored to serve the queen or lady.’

  McNutt snorted. ‘Now there’s a trade I’m not down with.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sarah said. ‘Without the boys, you’d have to change your name to “McNada”.’

  The other team members groaned. Except for Cobb, who was studying the small, narrow tracks. They reminded him of the kind of tracks used for ore cars inside coalmines.

  The group continued forward, following Borovsky over the flat but scrubby terrain. Since the colonel was left-handed, Anna remained on his right side the entire time. That way, if he ever had to draw his gun or knife, she would be out of his way.

  ‘There’s a reason I prefer cities,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Asphalt, right?’ McNutt said.

  ‘Nope, stores,’ she said as she struggled with her footing. ‘I could’ve stopped and bought the right damn hiking shoes.’

  ‘Point taken,’ McNutt said. ‘That’s reason number eleven in my onging list of ass-kicks I’m gonna give Papi when we get back.’ He frowned. ‘Hey, you did cut him out of the ear-loop, didn’t you, chief?’

  Cobb nodded.

  ‘Good,’ McNutt said as his grip tightened on the duffel bag full of weapons. ‘I want it to be a surprise. After he gives me my money.’

  As they continued their hike, the ground crunched like dry corn flakes. The underbrush was merciless and at least a foot deep. It hungrily snagged at their feet as they pressed forward.

  ‘There hasn’t been a wildfire here in at least a half-century,’ Cobb observed.

  ‘Is that significant?’ Jasmine asked, after translating for Borovsky.

  ‘The two major causes of big fires are lightning and cigarettes,’ Cobb said. ‘I’ve seen a couple of old, charred tree trunks here and there, meaning the region does get big storms. But I get the sense that this area is protected like a sanctuary.’

  ‘Meaning?’ McNutt asked.

  ‘We might not see it, but there is security.’

  Borovsky laughed when Jasmine had finished translating.

  ‘Yes, there is,’ Borovsky assured them.

  McNutt paused in mid-stride. He glanced around nervously. ‘What kind of security? Landmines? Bear traps? Dwarves?’

  The group ignored him.

  ‘The trees have always provided layers of concealment, offered food in the form of wildlife, and prevented erosion with their strong roots,’ Borovsky said. ‘When the train was built, it would have been difficult and counter-productive for the builders to cut the trees down. So the people who anchored the tracks went off in many directions, creating paths wherever they could. The effect is an impression of a train to nowhere.’

  ‘Like one of those sightseeing railroads in parks and on mountains,’ Garcia contributed.

  Jasmine translated for Borovsky.

  ‘Exactly so,’ the colonel said. ‘Complete with bear and deer in the woods to make the occasional appearance.’

  ‘Bears! I knew it,’ McNutt said. ‘Ask them if they can shoot cannons.’

  Jasmine rolled her eyes. She wouldn’t be translating that.

  ‘There was a side benefit to the multiplicity of paths,’ Jasmine continued for Borovsky. ‘Anyone following the train would be paying attention to the tracks — not to the sentries in the trees, who would be waiting with pistols or a noose.’

  Garcia looked up anxiously.

  ‘If you can see them,’ the Russian said, ‘then they’ve failed.’

  ‘Right,’ Sarah said. ‘And those guys wouldn’t be smoking up there. The lit butts would give them away.’

  ‘Bad for your health in more ways than one,’ McNutt laughed.

  54

  They continued walking toward what seemed to be another grove of trees. Borovsky told them to wait before he went into a bordering thicket, stepping around a batch of trees whose branches seemed weighted down as though bearing heavy snows. The limbs formed a wall through which nothing was visible. It took Borovsky nearly a minute of ducking and maneuvering to make his way to the other side. Suddenly, there was a whoosh, and the branches snapped back as if the curtain had never existed.

  From the team’s perspective, there didn’t appear to be anything ahead — not even the Russian colonel. There was only a solid, sunless black that seemed to go on forever.

  Decebal flashed them his gap-toothed smile and followed, stepping into the entrance and vanishing as if a carnival magician had made him disappear. The Americans looked at each other with raised eyebrows and appreciative grins, then followed Anna into the darkness.

  ‘Some kind of spring release?’ McNutt asked, looking around in vain for a pedal or switch.

  ‘A prayer lock,’ Sarah said. ‘Four large branches on the bottom were twined together. That causes the smaller limbs and twigs to come together like hands folded in prayer. Cut the cord and the limbs snap back. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t cause the trees themselves to bend and give the site away, and it doesn’t cause any part of the adjoining trees to knit permanently.’

  ‘And it’s easy to reset,’ McNutt said admiringly, glancing behind to make sure that one of those ‘sentries’ wasn’t doing just that to keep them all inside.

  They collected in a dark gray grotto. Sarah instantly produced a powerful, pen-sized flashlight, which she shined around them in a quick arc. Rock walls swelled up to a dome like a natural amphitheater. They stood on a stone pathway that was made of flat but unevenly edged slate obviously hacked from the walls. They could still see the scars, though some kind of crystalline film had collected over them.

  ‘No stalactities,’ Sarah said. ‘That’s a good sign.’

  ‘How so?’ Jasmine wondered.

  ‘There’s not enough water to drag down major mineral deposits. That means this is a very, very dry cave.’

  Jasmine nodded in understanding. ‘And a dry cave is a great place to store a treasure.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a geology degree,’ McNutt said.

  ‘I don’t,’ Sarah explained, ‘but I’ve been spelunking many times. It’s a good way to keep in shape.’

  ‘Over here,’ Anna said in Russian. Sarah pointed her powerful penlight in the direction Jasmine indicated, illuminating Decebal. He was standing beside what looked like two large cauldrons on their sides with three iron bowling balls between them — all attached by wires.

  ‘Electric generators,’ Cobb recognized.

  ‘Have to be at least sixty years old,’ McNutt estimated.

  As they watched, the Romanian leader churned a crank on the front of the sideways pot farthest to their left, as if he were trying to start an old Model-T car. On the fourth turn, the engine caught and coughed to life. The group looked around as recessed lamps lining the middle of the rock ceiling began to flicker.

  They found themselves in a breathtaking cavern of reddish granite and greenish coral, with cobblestones off to their far left and right. And stretched out deep into the cave, seemingly part of the walls, were eight blue and gold train cars and a small engine. On the side of each car was the Romanov seal: a double-headed eagle with a golden scepter in one claw and a cross-bearing orb in the other, while on its chest a red escutcheon depicted St George on his horse about to slay the dragon.

  On the back of the last car was the most imposing
mark of all: the coat of arms of the Russian Empire. It contained the helmet of Alexander Nevsky, fifteen shields representing the Russian Empire territories, the archangels Gabriel and Michael, and the Order of St Andrew — all residing on an oak and laurel wreath amid a golden ermine mantle, crowned by a golden cap, and liberally decorated by black, double-headed eagles. They flew around the inscription, which Jasmine translated as: ‘God is with us.’

  ‘He sure as shit is,’ McNutt said with a laugh. He wanted to say more — hell, he wanted to sing, and dance, and drink, and punch someone in the face for no reason at all — but Cobb had warned them about celebrating in front of Borovsky or any of the villagers, especially on a day when so many of them had died. He felt that would be in bad taste.

  But they took a moment to celebrate internally.

  The discovery of the train led to visions of their own personal paradises, made possible by the millions they were that much closer to collecting. They all understood that finding the train was only the first step. They knew they still had to get the treasure past Borovsky and the villagers before they could deliver it to Papineau. But that didn’t stop Sarah from imagining a well-funded climb of Mt Everest. Or Garcia from thinking about building a supercomputer that would make Microsoft jealous. McNutt’s fantasy was simple: he wanted to buy his own tank. Then he wanted to drive it across America, only stopping for beer and whores. Unlike the others, Jasmine tried to focus on the historic value of the discovery, but her mind slowly drifted to owning her own museum.

  The looks on their faces said it all.

  They were a happy group.

  Amid the daydreams, Cobb allowed himself a moment to admire the contents of the cave before he began to assess the condition of the train. The engine was in solid shape and the cars looked sturdy enough. They clearly housed royal compartments, though the filigree on the exteriors was cracked, chipped, or broken. Obviously, the train had gone through storms and trials to arrive before being seized by what appeared to be the craggy, gripping fingers of the cave. Some of those fingers were gloved and mossy, some were skeletal and crystalline, and some looked as if hard, fleshy sponge had grown over them.