Chris Kuzneski - The Hunters

That was a major step in her growth.

Jasmine surveyed the area from her vantage point. ‘No sign of Sarah or anyone else. She has to be under the train.’

The men had already come to the same conclusion. By then, they were on opposite ends and opposite sides of the four-car length.

‘McNutt, under on three,’ Cobb said quietly. ‘One … two …’

As he said ‘three’, both men rolled and came up crouching low beneath the train. The underside of the train was like an iron enclosure, with openings between the wheels. The ground, like the turf of so many train stations, consisted of small rocks over earth that supported the wooden ties and steel tracks. Cobb and McNutt had unstable footing on loose, uneven stones, their backs bent by the unforgiving underside of the train.

Since Cobb was nearest the fourth car — the sleeping quarters — he spotted her first. Framed in the circle of one of the train’s wheels was Sarah. Her back was to the wheel, which she was seemingly using as a cover or shield. But something about it didn’t seem right. As Cobb peered closer, he saw that her eyes were closed and her head was lolling. She was unconscious.

‘Fourth car,’ he whispered. ‘Back my play.’

Cobb knew what she had done in Brighton Beach. Whoever had taken her down so easily was more than likely not a Russian cop or a neo-Nazi. He was a professional.

‘Wait for me,’ McNutt whispered.

‘No,’ Cobb ordered, ‘just back my play.’

McNutt growled softly but kept his mouth shut.

Wasting no time, Cobb crept closer and closer to Sarah. He quickly realized that her body was in an impossible position. If she was truly unconscious, she should have slumped over to the ground. Instead, she was sitting upright with an arched back.

Instantly, Cobb became still. It was different from freezing in place. When people froze they stiffened like ice, ready to crack or shatter. When Cobb stilled, he settled like calm water, ready to flow in any direction. He stilled because he realized that the backs of the train wheels were not black. They were shades of dark blue and darker gray. But behind Sarah’s blond hair, white skin, and green clothing was a black shape.

Someone was holding her upright.

Approaching from the front of the train, McNutt saw the action before he could comprehend it. Cobb rushed forward in a controlled sprint as a lifeless Sarah — who’d been flung by her nearly invisible assailant — flew through the air toward Cobb. McNutt blinked a few times before he saw a black figure scurry through the shadows. Only then did McNutt realize that Sarah had been thrown by a man, not launched by a wizard.

Thank God , he thought. We aren’t prepared to fight magic .

For Cobb, it wasn’t about thinking; it was about reacting. He reached out with both hands as Sarah’s body hurtled toward him. He caught her head in the crook of his left arm, cushioning and cradling it, while he stopped her forward momentum with the palm of his right hand. At the same time he lowered himself into a wide stance so they would be closer to the hard ground. It wouldn’t have worked on anyone bigger, but this way he could open his arm and slide her head down to the gravel. The back of his left hand took the pain of settling her head down on the stones. The rest of her body might be a little bruised, but her head was safe.

At no time did Cobb lose his balance, but his maneuver meant a nanosecond of blindness when his focus was on Sarah instead of on his adversary. Had the shadow been attacking, that moment of inattention might have been a deadly mistake. Without coming up from his stance, he looked for the black shadow’s position and listened for breathing. He quickly felt a presence.

The shadow hadn’t fled. He had merely gathered himself .

He was preparing to launch an attack .

Cobb sensed a shift in air pressure in the blackness to his left. He responded by adjusting the back foot in his stance, then unleashing his right leg in a sidekick at his opponent’s sternum. With his gloved hands, the shadow stopped Cobb’s foot with a classic V-shaped block, driving down hard on Cobb’s lower leg and pushing it to the gravel.

But Cobb did not panic. In fact, he became calmer.

Now he knew what he was facing.

The man was using a Russian martial art called Samooborona Bez Oruzhiya, which was often shortened to the better-known term ‘Sambo’. Created in the 1920s by the Russian military, it literally translated as ‘self-defense without weapons’, but its combat style combined the most devastatingly effective means of killing from every other martial art in the world. Karate striking, jiu-jitsu choking, judo locking, muay thai crushing, and so on. Nothing was off limits in most martial arts around the world, but everything was encouraged in Sambo.

Cobb almost smiled. He still couldn’t see his adversary, but that didn’t matter. He slid his right leg forward, along the gravel, toward his opponent. That’s all it took to break the figure’s pincer-like grip on his leg. Cobb knew that to execute the move, the figure would have ended up bent slightly forward, presenting his head for whatever Cobb decided to do next. That would have been to grab the back of the individual’s head and send his face into Cobb’s knee, which was there and waiting. But the figure had anticipated his vulnerability and inverted the V of his arms so it was facing up, to catch Cobb’s hand as he reached. That delayed Cobb’s attack long enough for the figure to back deeper into the shadows — back to the left, from the crunch of the rock. Cobb thrust his already extended hand after him, grabbed cloth, but his opponent had enough momentum to spin out of his grip and run away.

Cobb hoped that McNutt knew what to do next. They’d saved Sarah; now it was time to get the attacker. A second later, Cobb was thrilled to see McNutt in hot pursuit.

Wasting no time, Cobb scurried back to Sarah. Even from a distance, he could see that she was breathing evenly, so he had no worries about her long-term health. But just to be safe, he checked her carefully and spotted no obvious damage. In Cobb’s mind, her condition was both good and bad news. It was good because Sarah would recover and his team could move on as planned. It was bad because it reaffirmed his earlier theory: the assailant wasn’t a thug; he was a trained professional. A corrupt cop, black marketeer, or psycho skinhead would have used a weapon to take Sarah out, but this guy took her down with ease.

Someone like that could ruin a mission like theirs.

‘Gone,’ McNutt whispered from the other side of the station. A minute later, he was crouching down next to Cobb, explaining how the assailant had escaped. ‘I’ve never seen anybody move that fast without a jet pack. Who the hell was it?’

Cobb shrugged, his focus still on Sarah. ‘I don’t know, but I’ve got a bad feeling that we’ll find out soon enough.’

Garcia accessed the video feed from a security camera outside the train yard and transferred it to his computer screen. Papineau and Cobb leaned over the seated tech expert and studied the digitally recorded image of the man in black, racing from the yard.

Meanwhile McNutt was in the freight car, doing an inventory to make sure nothing was taken, added, or sabotaged. Sarah was in her compartment, recovering, while Jasmine tended to her. Team members can bicker all they want — that’s to be expected given the danger and their close proximity — but they’re there for each other when it counts. As they went about their various tasks, they were all continuously linked via their earpieces, eliminating the need for repetitious explanations later.