Chris Kuzneski - The Hunters

And just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse …

‘Jack!’ Jasmine cried. ‘The uncoupled compartment car is up ahead!’

Cobb didn’t have to look, and Jasmine didn’t have to explain the danger. If they hit the stationary car at this speed, the crash would likely derail them. But if they slowed now, they’d be easy pickings for the Black Robes.

Cobb could see no alternative. White flags meant nothing to these lunatics. The explorers and villagers would have to fight to their last man, and their last breaths. Cobb shook his head.

‘Jasmine, we’re going to need to-’ he started to say, but McNutt interrupted.

‘Cobb-’

‘I wasn’t talking to you, McNutt-’

‘No, Jack, look!’

McNutt stood at the rail, pointing northeast. Cobb blinked in bewilderment. McNutt was standing up straight, and no one was shooting at him. Cobb sprang to his feet and stared off to where his sniper was pointing. And then he saw it.

Roaring out of the tree line on a sidecar motorcycle were Sergeant Anna Rusinko and Colonel Viktor Borovsky.

And both were armed with assault rifles.

McNutt cheered as he watched Anna steer the bike while Borovsky held the AK-47 against his shoulder in the sidecar, targeting and hitting Black Robe drivers as though they were wolves.

The two had dragged the abandoned bike from a ditch near the village after hauling Black Robe corpses from it. Now they had the remaining Black Robes scattering for cover. Not a one of them charged the new arrivals.

‘White, Red, and now Yellow Russians!’ McNutt taunted.

The others weren’t paying him — or the new arrivals — much attention. Cobb told Jasmine to slow to a crawl to buy time between themselves and the rogue car. He was busy on the flatbed, helping Garcia with the last steps of building the H-4. The only assembly still required for the seven-foot-tall vehicle was the rotor and engine attachments. The footrest had been attached to the two forward legs, the seat at their top, and the spine above, where the rotors were going to be attached. There was no cabin, no tail section. The controls sat on the bicycle-like handlebars that were suspended from the rotor base at the bottom of a periscope-like extension. The whole contraption looked like a skeleton — if a skeleton consisted of a skull, backbone, sternum, two hipbones, a pelvis, and a really long coccyx.

Cobb left the techie standing on the bucket seat to secure the engine atop the structure while he and McNutt stood on the packing case, lifted the rotors, and settled them into the aluminum tube on top. Jasmine had slowed the train and the side-to-side sway was minimal. With the phut-phut-phut of Borovsky’s weapon echoing along the western side of the train, McNutt lent both hands as Cobb fitted the blades into place.

‘So, is this a true helicopter?’ McNutt asked. ‘Not one of those — what do you call them?’

‘Gyrocopters,’ Garcia said as he tightened the screws.

‘Right,’ McNutt said. ‘Saw a guy fly by in one during survival training in Death Valley. We survived. He didn’t.’

‘Nice,’ Garcia said.

It was the casual chatter of weekend hobbyists, not men fighting for their lives. Cobb jumped from the wooden box and put a quick end to it.

‘Finish, Garcia!’ he barked as he ran over.

‘Done, done,’ Garcia told him, as he made sure the rotors were secure. That consisted of pushing them one way, then another, and watching for any vertical wiggle around the central axis. The blades themselves were designed to have significant up-and-down flexibility.

While he did that, Cobb straddled the seat of the H-4. It was plastic to keep the weight down, without padding of any kind.

‘Chief, uh … what’s the plan?’ McNutt asked.

Cobb didn’t answer. His silence was intended as a conversation-ender. A seatbelt was attached to the metal spine of the mini-helicopter. Cobb strapped himself in. ‘Jasmine, after I leave, keep the train slow and kiss that compartment car.’

‘Can you spare any eyes on the back of the train?’ she said.

‘Garcia?’

‘We have an undercarriage cam,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk you through it.’

‘Okay, back away, you two,’ Cobb advised Garcia and McNutt.

Crouching low, the IT man hurried to a corner of the flatbed where he was exposed to gunfire but wouldn’t be beheaded by the spinning blades.

‘Which way you going?’ McNutt asked, walking backwards more slowly.

‘Where the action is,’ Cobb replied, pointing west.

McNutt turned in that direction and knelt down on one knee, his arms firmly planted on the lip of the car, his hands steady, his fingers wrapped tightly around his last remaining weapon, which was his own sidearm — a Glock 17 Gen4 nine-millimeter automatic.

Cobb held a license for single-engine rotorcraft, training he had found useful on a number of missions — not so much for getting into places but for getting out of them. Though he had never flown this particular aircraft, he had selected it because, at least on paper, it didn’t present any unusual challenges. There were only four controls: a starter switch, a switch to engage the rotors, a throttle, and a yaw switch; and one instrument, a tachometer. There were also more redundancies built into this baby than in any grownup aircraft: she had four 10 hp, 125 cc, two-stroke engines. They were connected to the transmission via a single clutch; if one shut down, the others automatically shared the burden to keep the rotors spinning. In theory, the H-4 could fly on a single engine — long enough to set down, anyway.

The engines revved, sounding like four lawnmowers. The two blades spun in opposite directions to provide counterbalance, rotating for all they were worth.

McNutt watched as the horsemen rallied to protect the villagers and the train. Borovsky’s fire had given them that opportunity by driving the Cossack cycles back up the rise to where the hill met the grove. Anna and Borovsky’s bike was racing down between the combatants, taking out Black Robes whenever they could.

As the rotors raced to full power, Cobb’s survey of the battlefield was suddenly rendered meaningless when he saw a new monster cresting the hill in the middle of the remaining motorcycles. It was a stripped-down Boyevaya Razvedyvatelnaya Dozomaya Mashina combat reconnaissance patrol vehicle, otherwise known as the BRDM. Russia, the Ukraine, and Poland had been crawling with them since the 1960s, and there were rumors that many of them had been confiscated by local authorities and sold to militias to fight the Soviets.

Of the four-hundred-odd units that had left Russia, fewer than half had been found.

Like this one, for instance.

Obviously, the Black Robes had been building their own mechanized brigade in this province, knowing that Rasputin’s body had to be somewhere in the area.

As Cobb watched the armored, four-wheel toad of a vehicle, the roof hatch opened and Grigori Sidorov emerged. He was holding their Accuracy International AX-50 sniper rifle. Cobb and McNutt both watched helplessly as the man aimed the gun at Anna and Borovsky’s motorcycle. With the H-4 buzzing like a million bees, there was no way to warn them.

In Cobb’s mind, that left only one option.

It was up to him to distract Sidorov.

In a flash, the H-4 rose into the air as if pulled by a string. Cobb gritted his teeth until he got the hang of the controls. Then he turned and faced the armored vehicle.

Unfortunately, it was not an ideal day for a flight. The wind howled, and strong gusts kept Cobb from getting the height he wanted. He only got up about thirty feet, but it would do. His sudden appearance above the flat car distracted Sidorov enough that the bullet meant for Borovsky’s skull smashed into the front of the motorcycle instead.