Chris Kuzneski - The Hunters

It took a moment for it to all sink in.

The two of them were working together.

Kozlov’s face turned red as he roared, ‘Kill them both!’

It took Callahan nearly ten minutes to reach the surveillance van through the mob of gunmen that filled the street outside of Kozlov’s house. Not because the guards were hassling him — just about everyone in the neighborhood knew what the Feds looked like — but because Callahan was hassling them .

When it came to gun laws, New York City had some of the strictest in the nation. Callahan knew he could bust all of them on felony charges if he had wanted to. Instead, he tried to use the threat of arrest to obtain more information about that night’s events while Koontz filmed the scene from afar.

Callahan realized the odds of getting information from one of Kozlov’s men was pretty unlikely, especially with so many of them packed together. But he hoped this approach would spook someone into revealing something of value in the crowd.

As luck should have it, one of the lead guards spotted Callahan and spread the word through the ranks: if anyone told the Feds about the upcoming art auction or about the intruder who had tried to rob the basement vault, the offending party would be shot in the face and fed to the sharks. That message was repeated again and again in Russian and Ukrainian until everyone on the street had gotten the word.

Unfortunately for them, Koontz got it, too.

Inside the van, he laughed at the irony of the warning. By telling his underlings what they shouldn’t say, the lead guard had actually revealed everything.

That was taking stupid to a whole new level.

Koontz was still laughing when his partner reached the van. He looked forward to briefing Callahan on everything he had heard — and how he had obtained it — but before they had a chance to speak, gunfire rang out from across the street.

Koontz threw open the van door and pulled Callahan inside.

‘Who the hell is shooting?’ Callahan demanded.

‘I don’t know,’ Koontz said as he turned his attention to the van’s computer system. He punched a few keys and tried to locate the source of the sound, using the parabolic microphones that a tech team had covertly planted around the neighborhood.

Callahan checked his weapon. Unlike the thugs outside, he was legally allowed to shoot people in Brighton Beach. ‘Please be Kozlov. I want to be the one to arrest him.’

Koontz shook his head. ‘Sorry. He’s shouting, not shooting.’

‘Figures. What’s he shouting about?’

‘He just yelled, kill them both .’

‘There are two of them?’

Koontz nodded. ‘That’s what “both” means.’

Callahan sneered. ‘And both of them are in the house?’

He shook his head. ‘ Were . They were in the house. They just jumped off a balcony into Kozlov’s pool.’

Callahan waited for more. ‘And?’

‘And nothing. The guards are looking for them.’

‘Then so are we,’ Callahan said as he opened the van door. ‘If they’ve been inside Kozlov’s house, we need to find them before the guards do.’

Jack Cobb was soaking wet, but at least he was alive.

And, thankfully, so was Sarah.

Water poured from his suit as he yanked her from the pool. He had millions of questions for his partner-in-crime, but they would have to wait for now. There was little time for chitchat with Kozlov’s guards giving chase.

Despite the danger, Sarah scolded him as they hustled toward the fence in the back of the grounds. ‘I could have done it myself, you know. I didn’t need your help.’

‘I could see that,’ Cobb replied sarcastically. ‘You had them right where you wanted.’

‘It wasn’t them ,’ she countered. ‘It was one man. No, scratch that. It was the man. I could have ended everything right there.’

‘Ended what, exactly? Our mission wasn’t to kill him. It was to rob him. You need to put your Agency training behind you. The only way you’ll survive as a criminal is to think like a criminal.’

‘But I’m not a criminal!’ she insisted.

‘Not yet, you aren’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you!’

Sarah realized there was no point in arguing. They could pick up this discussion later, once they had evaded the Russians and made it safely to their rendezvous.

That is, if they made it to their rendezvous.

‘Okay, Mr Helper,’ she said as they scaled the fence together. ‘Now that you’ve decided to get involved, what exactly do you have in mind?’

Cobb scurried to his right and scanned the terrain. ‘I say we run down the beach as fast as we can and hope the Russians don’t catch us.’

‘That’s it? That’s your big plan? I swoop down like a bat in the middle of the night and break into the most heavily guarded compound this side of the White House, and your big plan is to run as fast as we can?’

Cobb shrugged. ‘Part of it.’

‘Wonderful. What’s the other part?’

He fought the urge to smile. ‘Hey McNutt, can you hear me?’

A new voice entered the conversation. ‘I can hear you , I can hear her , and I can hear gunfire. The only thing I can’t hear is the nerd. Is he still on the line?’

‘Still here,’ Garcia assured them.

‘Oh goody,’ McNutt teased, ‘if we have any questions about Star Wars or time travel, we’ll be sure to let you know.’

Cobb cut them off. It was bad enough that Sarah was giving him lip. He couldn’t afford antics from the other guys on the team, too. Not with hostiles in hot pursuit.

‘Josh, what’s your position?’ Cobb asked.

‘Two hundred yards west,’ McNutt answered.

‘Sarah and I are headed your way. We’re going to need cover.’

‘It’s about time. Shoot to kill?’

Cobb shook his head. ‘That’s a negative.’

McNutt grumbled but followed his orders.

The man with the dirty beard and unkempt hair had been patrolling the sand with his metal detector for several hours. His ratty clothes and strange demeanor kept passersby at a safe distance, not that there were many at this time of night. Every so often he would dig in the sand and search for buried treasure, but he never came up with anything more substantial than an aluminum can or a foil wrapper.

To most observers, he fit in with half the scavengers who roamed the beaches at night. Over the years, Kozlov’s guards had dealt with so many of these people that they had learned the best way to handle them was to simply ignore them. That might have been a wonderful policy for tourists, but it wasn’t the best strategy when it came to guard duty. If Kozlov’s men had been paying closer attention, they would have realized the crazy man in the Hawaiian shirt wasn’t searching for treasure, he was actually planting devices in the sand. And the ‘metal detector’ that he had been using for half the night couldn’t actually detect metal — but it sure as hell could deliver it.

As Josh McNutt climbed the steps of the lifeguard shack, he detached the circular ‘sensor’ from the end of the bar and examined its contents. He had loaded fifty high-powered rounds into the custom drum magazine. He checked the barrel and the stock that been disguised as the unit’s shaft and stabilizer, then pulled himself on the roof of the stand. By the time he reached the edge, he had reassembled the metal detector into its preferred configuration: an Armalite AR-30.308 Winchester sniper rifle.

‘I’m in position,’ McNutt informed the team.

‘Beta plan is a go,’ Cobb confirmed in his ear.

‘Beta — as in Beach Bum.’