The Hunters Box Set, page 22
part #1 of The Hunters Series
“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 & 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 like 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 1, 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 antagonist 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 farther 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.
“GPS says we are in Chioar,” Garcia said slowly, enunciating carefully, eyes darting. “But the maps say we could be in Lăpuş… or Cavnic…or even Campia Transilvaniei. Truth be told, we’re actually in some sort of border null-space between those places.”
“Hold on,” McNutt said. “How can the GPS be wrong?”
“It isn’t,” Garcia said. “But the regions have been redrawn over the last century, sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially by people with ethnic interests. Depending on what maps we use, all of those regions apply.”
He screen-grabbed an image and sent it over to Cobb.
Cobb looked closer himself and compared it to his charts. Sure enough, the Romanian ethnographic regions were denoted with different colored blobs. But there were relatively wide white borders between them with no name or denomination. The glowing, pulsing blue dot representing their train was smack dab in the middle of one of the largest white spaces, between four colored splotches.
“Taking every map into consideration,” Garcia said, “only one thing is certain.”
“And that is?” Sarah asked.
“We’re literally in the middle of nowhere.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Cobb stood and marched to the end of the car. He hit a recessed button on the wall, waited for the door to slide up, then stepped through to the flatbed.
The view was spectacular. The train was slowly rising up the last of the track, climbing a steady incline as if they were in a scenic tram. McNutt appeared behind him and looked over the side of the five-foot lip that encircled the flatbed. The track seemed part of the earth.
“Holy mackerel,” he said.
“Yeah,” Cobb agreed.
Though it was chipped and faded by whatever sunlight had blazed through, the track had been painted brown to appear as if it were roots or the ground itself.
Sarah went to look over the opposite side and was nearly knocked down by a tree branch as they entered an even thicker part of the pine and poplar forest. Cobb looked beyond them to the rolling green mountains, white clouds, and blue sky.
“I wish I knew where the hell we were,” Sarah said. “I don’t mean on a map—I mean, what’s lurking under all that brush? There could be crevasses that cut us off if we have to travel by foot. Dry riverbeds with sinkholes.”
“Quicksand?” McNutt asked. “I hate that. It always scared me in movies.”
“I doubt it,” Garcia said. “The spectro isn’t showing a lot of moisture in any form. No creeks, no bogs, no wells.”
“No wells?” Cobb said. “Interesting. That means this area was completely deserted, even to farmers and shepherds.”
As he spoke, the train emerged into a more open space where the trio could finally get an unobstructed view. Now it was only the train itself that looked wildly out of place amid layers of green, spread amongst leafy dots of red, yellow, and orange fall foliage. The only thing missing was any hint of other humans.
“Too bad,” Sarah said.
“About what?” McNutt asked.
“That there weren’t any sheep or cow herders,” she said. “This is great pastureland.”
“Or battleground,” Cobb said from the rear of the car.
They turned to see their commander standing on the top rung of the ladder attached to the outside of the freight car. Sarah and McNutt ran back to join him. McNutt put both hands on the top of the flat car’s fencing and vaulted up to the top of the lip. He put one hand on the side of the compartment car, twisted his body, and looked to where Cobb was staring.
The train was halfway up the open section of green grass and white flowers, heading toward another long, thick line of trees. The trees were so tall and narrowly spaced that they looked, to Sarah, like the tarnished, bared teeth of a giant bear.
Something was emerging from those teeth.
“Josh,” Cobb said, “do you have your binoc—”
He looked over to complete the question, but McNutt was gone. The sniper reappeared a few seconds later with a pair of Steiner 1600 Yard Laser Range Finder Military Binoculars. He handed them to his commander.
“Thanks,” Cobb said as he put the fog-proof lenses up to his eyes.
“Do you see this?” Garcia asked in his ear.
“Yes,” was all Cobb needed to say.
Coming from between the trees was a herd of horses: white Lipizzaners, praised for their riding; mottled Hungarian Warmbloods, noted for their stamina; and brown Shagyas, depended upon for their endurance.
“Riders!” Cobb and Garcia shouted, almost at the same time.
“I knew it! Cossacks!” McNutt raised his own binoculars—a slimmer Apache 10x25 compact model—as he retook his position on the lip top of the car.
“We don’t know that!” Jasmine said, maintaining her cool in the face of what could be her first firefight.
McNutt saw the horses—now at least three dozen, with more joining them from the tree cover—and their riders: men of every age group, holding reins in one hand and waving something above their heads with the other.
“Are those Mosin-Nagants?” McNutt asked incredulously. “Those were the standard issue rifle of Soviet troops in World War One!”
When no one answered, he lowered his binoculars and understood why.
McNutt was alone on the flatbed.
He jumped to the floor of the car and charged into his armory.
◊ ◊ ◊
The next thirty seconds felt like thirty minutes.
“Two hundred yards, Jack,” Garcia announced anxiously. The IT wizard was intent on the video screens, trying to get a good look at the riders despite the train’s constant up-and-down motion and side-to-side sway, not to mention the bounce of a man on horseback. Even his seasoned fingers couldn’t digitally stabilize the images with that many variables.
“Who are they, Garcia?” Cobb asked. He was visually sweeping the terrain, settling on nothing but seeing everything.
“I’m trying to get an image I can profile,” Garcia said.
“Is profiling illegal here?” McNutt joked.
Cobb didn’t have to tell the sharpshooter to focus. His fall into silence said that, and more.
McNutt was in the freight car, breaking out the Mossberg 590 and Benelli M4 shotguns. He considered both weapons, one in each hand, remembering that the 590 weighs about half a kilogram less but doesn’t have the range of the Italian shotgun. He put down the Mossberg in favor of the one preferred by the Marine Corps. He turned toward the slats on the west side of the car and prepared to open one as he spoke to everyone on their earpieces.
“Could use a little help manning the barricades,” McNutt called.
“Hold your fire,” Cobb snapped from the command car.
“Your wish is my command,” McNutt retorted. “But just so you know: they may have vintage rifles, but their carbine rounds could still pop your head like a balloon.”
Cobb ignored the chatter in his ear and contemplated their next move. Once again, he reminded himself: this is why McNutt was with them and not still with Special Forces. Any regular unit on the globe would have followed Cobb’s orders without backtalk.
