The Hunters

61

McNutt saw a frightened Lipizzaner in the distance. The speckled stallion bolted along the tree line before it disappeared from view. ‘That’s Decebal’s horse!’

Because of Ludmilla’s monstrous roar, he had to shout even though he was right beside Cobb in the engine cab. Dobrev pushed her as fast as she could go without hurling them off the old, partially recessed rails. The train had taken an agonizing left at the tree line and swept up the slope on the far side, clawing toward a ragged swath of land between their position and the village. Using a map, Cobb had already showed Dobrev where the berm was that they’d have to plow through. The engineer had grunted, accepting the inevitability of the attempt, if not necessarily the success. Both men knew they had to hit it fast if they were going to get through nearly a century of compacted growth and debris.

Using hand gestures and the map, Cobb had made it clear to Dobrev that they had to get to the village as fast as possible. Although the treasure was being taken care of, they had to protect the villagers from the impending raid. Despite the urgency of the mission, they could only go so fast up the incline. Both men, by their intensity and silence, were clearly hoping they would be able to gain sufficient speed.

Cobb addressed the entire team through his earpiece. ‘Everybody: if you haven’t already, get your tactical vests and helmets on,’ he instructed them. ‘The Black Robes that we killed on the train were sacrifices. The rest of them are waiting in the darkness.’

‘Where in the darkness?’ Sarah hissed in his ear, as she hung onto a small ridge at the very top of the cave, her toes wedged in two rock fissures.

‘Somewhere between us and you,’ Cobb surmised. ‘They’re stalking the train. That was their plan all along.’

‘Then why attack us here?’ Garcia demanded. Back in the village, he was desperately trying to keep his eyes on all the train’s security camera images — all crammed onto one laptop screen.

‘To cover their flank or to take hostages,’ Cobb said. ‘They know the cave’s around here somewhere.’

‘God… damn… it!’ Sarah cursed, realizing she was a sitting — make that hanging — target. McNutt had explained exactly what had to be done, but he had made things seem a lot simpler than she was finding them. Still, it was easier for her to learn how to set a charge than it would have been for her to teach him how to climb a cave. ‘How much time do we have?’

‘Not much,’ Cobb stated. ‘Jasmine, what’s happening in the village?’

‘Decebal left orders to organize then went to scout ahead,’ she said. ‘They’re doing the best they can.’ The young woman was ducked behind one of the iron cauldrons, watching as villagers were running all around her, some carrying rifles, others in a panic. ‘Viktor and Anna are trying to organize them, but until they get orders from Decebal…’

‘Decebal is dead,’ Cobb guessed, the image of the galloping horse still fresh in his mind.

‘That gunfire we just heard?’

‘Yes,’ Cobb said. ‘The Black Robes killed him.’ He refrained from adding ‘probably with one of our own guns’.

McNutt, however, did not hold back. ‘They stripped the armory of our weapons before leaving the train as a diversion.’

‘Not now, McNutt,’ Cobb said. ‘Jasmine, tell Borovsky and Anna we’re coming to get them and the villagers. We should get in okay because the Black Robes don’t know there’s track out there. But I have a feeling we’re going to have to fight our way out.’

‘Got it,’ Jasmine said.

‘What’s with uncoupling the sleeper car?’ Garcia asked.

‘The Black Robes uncoupled it. They knew if we moved the train, it would stay as a roadblock,’ McNutt explained.

‘The armory was stripped? How stripped?’ Sarah demanded.

Cobb and McNutt exchanged worried glances.

‘Very stripped,’ McNutt admitted. ‘They got every gun we didn’t take with us, including a Russian RPG-29 rocket-propelled grenade launcher.’

Cobb looked disbelievingly at McNutt.

‘You said prepare for anything,’ the gunman complained. ‘I didn’t bring it before we got here, but when Papi said I could have whatever I wanted…’

‘Sarah, be ready to blow open that tunnel,’ Cobb said. ‘When you do, run for it.’

‘She’s going alone?’ Garcia asked incredulously.

‘For the moment,’ Cobb said.

‘What does that mean?’ Sarah asked.

‘The track that goes to the village doesn’t end in the village,’ Cobb said.

‘How do you know that?’ Garcia asked. ‘There’s no—’

‘The village was a load-on terminal for timber,’ Cobb explained. ‘Which means the flatbeds would have to be pulled even with the stacks. Otherwise, you’d have to move the wood down the rail, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.’

‘The track is a circle!’ Jasmine said. ‘Of course!’

‘Exactly,’ Cobb said. ‘The trains would loop through to load up the timber, then head back down the line. They never reversed. Too inefficient.’

Jasmine nodded in understanding. ‘The prince tore it up on one end, but the treasure train still could have come out and joined the main trunk through the village. That is, if you could find a way past the blockade.’

‘And,’ Cobb added, ‘if everything goes well, that’s how we’re going to do this.’

‘Dobrev must have known that or at least guessed it,’ Jasmine said. ‘He kept talking about how Ludmilla could go both ways.’

‘Wow,’ McNutt said. ‘Normally that statement would turn me on.’

Garcia ignored him. ‘But what about the cave? And all of that stuff clinging to the prince’s train cars? And any debris that falls on the tracks?’

‘He says Ludmilla will take care of that,’ Jasmine reported.

McNutt saw the engineer mutter something encouraging to his cab and pat its wall. ‘He can promise whatever he wants. First we have to get through the molehill these people built.’

‘Get ready,’ Cobb told them all. ‘This promises to be interesting. Oh, and pass the word not to shoot us.’

‘Why would they?’ Sarah asked.

Cobb replied, ‘We’re dressed as Black Robes.’

‘Maybe that’ll make them hesitate as well,’ Jasmine said.

‘Exactly,’ Cobb said.

The train was running hot and hard. In the glare of the single headlight, Dobrev could see a log fence where the track supposedly ended. He throttled up and tore through the barricade, then hit the end of the two-foot-high berm. Sparks spit from the wheels and lit the ground that was still dark beneath the dawning sky. The metal shrieked and the three occupants were jerked forward as the train slowed — but it did not stop. Like a snowplow it pushed through the sunbaked soil, which blew apart in clods. They heard the dirt crunch under the wheels, saw it fly like thousands of gnats in both directions. The screeching was terrible. Cobb hoped that the Black Robes were close enough to be deafened and pelted by BB-fast grains of dirt. It might not penetrate those robes, but it sure as hell would slow them down.

‘Don’t derail, don’t derail, don’t derail,’ was McNutt’s mantra for the seeming eternity it took to cover what was, in fact, less than a half-mile. The longer they moved, the leveler the ground and the easier it was to push through the mound.

And then the village came into view.