Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

“But do be prepared,” the smoker said, “if I am incorrect and he is not glad—if, say, he is in a bad mood because his plans have been delayed this long—in that case you realize he will kill you just for suggesting such a thing. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Ah, go to hell,” Andras said, but his voice lacked conviction.

“Maybe he’ll use you for practice, the way he did with Janos. Cut you to ribbons. With his saber, perhaps. It has always been his favorite.”

Andras said nothing.

“Or,” the smoker continued, “you could take the pay you were promised, go buy yourself a bottle and a girl, and keep your goddamn mouth shut. Mind you, it’s up to you which you do—I’m just saying you could do that. It’s your choice.”

“You’re a real bastard, Karoly, you know that?”

“Oh, yes,” Karoly said. “I know that—and as long as you don’t forget it, we’ll get along fine.”

Gabriel moved away from the wall of the hangar, where he’d been standing, his ear pressed to the metal. They were taking her back to DeGroet—back to Hungary, presumably, though probably not to the castle, not now that Gabriel had infiltrated it once. Hungary wasn’t a big country, relatively speaking, but it was big enough that one woman could quite easily be made to vanish. There was only one way to be sure that couldn’t happen—and that was to stay with her. But how…?

He waited until the crew working on unloading the truck wheeled the next crate down the short metal ramp in back. There was one man still inside, Gabriel saw, seated on a folding chair; behind the wheel, in the truck’s cab, there’d been one more. But that was all—temporarily the other men were all engaged in steering the bulky crates over to the hangar and onto the plane. That evened up the odds a bit, at least.

Gabriel walked casually up the ramp, gave a two-fingered wave to the seated man. There was only one crate left inside the truck. It was made of black plastic like the others he’d seen, with metal latches to keep the top down; the thing was at least six feet long and maybe two-and-a-half feet wide. It looked a little like a plastic coffin on wheels.

“Who are you?” the man said. He was paunchy and seemed to be thoroughly winded even though the extent of his physical labor appeared to have involved checking off items on a clipboard.

“I’m on Mr. DeGroet’s personal staff,” Gabriel said. “He wanted me to oversee this particular…” he waved at the crate “…container.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s your name?”

“Gabor,” Gabriel said. “Gabor Nagy.” It was the most common Hungarian surname he could think of; it meant “big.”

The man flipped through a couple of pages on his clipboard and didn’t find any Nagy listed. “You’re not on here.”

“I should be—he’d be mad as hell if he found out I wasn’t. Let me see.” He came up beside the man, who didn’t bother standing, just held the clipboard out. “I’m right there,” Gabriel said, pointing, and when the man took the clipboard back to peer at the page, Gabriel clocked him with a solid right cross. The man went down like a felled log.

Gabriel glanced outside. There was still no one in view, thankfully. With one hand under each armpit, he dragged the man down the ramp and around to the side of the truck. Once there, he rolled the man underneath, making sure to shove him far enough that he couldn’t be seen. They’d find him there eventually, or he’d come to on his own; they were unlikely to drive over him. Just in case, though, Gabriel left him between the truck’s wheels rather than in their path.

Then he went back up the ramp and unlatched the crate. It wasn’t full. Inside, under a folded-up blanket being used for padding, were two wooden racks of rifles and, below them, box after cardboard box of ammunition.

Guns and ammo. For what? What private army was DeGroet equipping? His own, presumably—but to what end?

There was no time for speculation: from outside Gabriel could hear the steps of the men returning, still distant for now but getting louder.

He lifted the gun racks out, wrapped the blanket loosely around them, and laid them down where the man had been sitting. He set the folding chair on top for good measure. He then climbed into the crate. It was a tight fit—but it was a fit. He lowered the cover gently and heard the latches catch. Would he be able to open them again from the inside? He thought so. A swift kick should do it. If not, maybe he could blast the latches open—with the vast selection of cartridges he was lying on he figured he could probably find some .45 caliber rounds that would fit his Colt. Not that he relished the prospect of firing a gun in an enclosed container full of black powder.

Pressing up gently against the underside of the crate’s lid with his palms opened the seal a crack, enough to let in a bit of air and a thread of light. The light was interrupted after a moment as two men climbed into the truck. One pair of legs sported khaki workpants, the other denim. Gabriel heard one of the men calling for someone named Stephen. Stephen didn’t answer, presumably because he was otherwise occupied under the truck. A quiet conversation in Hungarian ensued. The men were trying to decide what to do. Wait for Stephen to return from taking a leak or having a smoke or whatever he’d decided he had to do right this moment? Or just take the last crate and the hell with him?

They seemed to settle on “the hell with him” since Gabriel’s view was cut off as the men stepped closer and then he could feel the crate being rolled down the ramp.

They rolled him across level ground for a minute and then up another ramp—longer, steeper—and shoved him against a bulkhead. Raising the cover again, Gabriel saw that the crate was conveniently facing a window, so that even if the activation of the plane’s deafening jet engines minutes later hadn’t been enough of a clue, the view of the land dropping out of sight would have told him they were on their way.

Gabriel did his best to get comfortable in the cramped space. He took his phone from his pocket and glanced at the display. New York to Hungary was a nine-hour flight with good tailwinds.

As he watched, the battery portion of the phone’s readout silently dropped from four bars to three.

Chapter 5

Gabriel hadn’t intended to sleep, but he found himself waking with a start as the plane’s landing gear touched down. They skipped once, twice, then settled on the tarmac, the big plane’s momentum carrying them forward along the runway as the power to the engines cut out. Gabriel chanced a peek outside through the seam, but the window was dark—and so, when he tried it, was his phone. He pressed all the buttons. Nothing.

Had something kept them in the air longer than expected? Or had they landed somewhere farther away than Budapest?

Which led to the next question: For how long had Michael been able to track his location? Maybe only halfway there, maybe up until the moment before he tried his phone. There was no way to know.

Gabriel heard the sound of seat belts unbuckling, heavy footsteps moving around the cabin. He did not hear any lighter steps he could identify as Sheba’s, and he didn’t hear her voice, but that didn’t mean anything—Andras could be carrying her, bound and gagged, or maybe she was being held in another part of the plane. They wouldn’t have hurt her or killed her, he was confident of that; not as long as DeGroet wanted her for some purpose of his own.

Gabriel groped around beneath him, felt the cardboard boxes of varying sizes, slipped his fingers under one flap after another. He couldn’t see a thing, of course, and though he had the Zippo lighter with him that he always carried, he could hardly light it here—even if the sudden appearance of a glow from inside the crate wouldn’t give him away, the explosion it could easily set off would make the whole thing moot. But he’d handled enough guns in his day to be able to tell by feel a rifle cartridge from one for a semiautomatic pistol, a .32 from a .45. Telling a .44 Remington from a .45 Winchester was a bit harder, but not impossible. He ran the selection he found between his fingertips, comparing length and grooving. Wrong caliber was not so much of a worry—a cartridge too wide wouldn’t chamber and one too narrow would announce the fact by the too-roomy fit. Too long, same thing. But slightly too short would be easy to miss, and could lead to a shot that either didn’t go off when the time came or went off in a spectacularly bad way. So care was called for, and he exercised as much as he reasonably could, lying in the dark in a crate in the belly of a plane in the middle of god-only-knew-where.