Jaya Soames was the wealthy heir to a family that had hunted Predators for generations and the leader of a privately funded team of Predator hunters. She appeared in Predator: Hunters, Predator: Hunters II and Predator: Hunters III, published by Dark Horse Comics from 2017 to 2020. From her ship, the Durga, she led survivors of earlier encounters against the Exiles of a South Pacific island, the Djinn Predator in Afghanistan and two hunters in the jungles of Belize. Her purpose was to keep the creatures' technology out of the hands of anyone who would abuse it.
Biography
A Family Tradition
Jaya's great-grandfather, Captain Edward Soames, hunted the killer known as Spring Heeled Jack through London in the late nineteenth century and discovered that Jack was a Predator. He later returned to India, where he hunted man-killing tigers for the maharajas, but the pursuit of the creatures passed from him to his son, then to his grandson and finally to Jaya. As a girl, she stood beside her father in the family trophy room beneath the mounted head of a Predator. Her father raised her in this legacy, although she later admitted that she had not been sure she could carry it on.
Her doubts ended when she saw what one of the creatures had done and knew that it would kill again. She killed that Predator herself, rifle in hand, and later wished that she could have killed it twice. By then the family fortune rested on the sale of technology taken from the creatures, since their trophies held no weapons but were worth fortunes in aerospace, microelectronics and materials science. Jaya inherited both the fortune and the hunt, and in her generation the family pursuit became an organized team with its own ship and soldiers.
Recruiting Enoch Nakai
Jaya built her team from people who had already survived the creatures. With Tyler Swain and Raphael Herrera, she drove to the Snake Pit gas station to recruit Enoch Nakai, a veteran who had killed the Big Game Predator years earlier. She told him that her people had no ties to any government and that she understood what he had faced. When he hesitated, she asked whether, after everything he had seen and learned, this was really how he wanted to spend the rest of his days, and she told him that he was a warrior, not a zookeeper.
On the drive back in the black SUV, she told Nakai the history of her family, from the captain's hunt in London to the tigers of India and the trophy room of her childhood. Swain used the ride to repeat his story about a convoy ambush in Afghanistan, in which he claimed a mortar round had knocked him out. Nakai accepted her offer, and from there the recruits flew out by helicopter to meet the rest of her organization at sea, where the real work of the team was waiting.
Return To The Durga
The helicopter set down on the Durga, and its crew welcomed Jaya back aboard her ship. There the recruits met Mandy Graves, a survivor of the Bad Blood Predator, who threw Swain onto the deck when he grabbed her. Jaya briefed the team on its first target, a cluster of islands in the South Pacific called the Bunting Islands, where a fishing boat from Fiji had disappeared. The reports from those waters pointed to the creatures, and the Durga set course for the islands with the new recruits aboard.
She also showed the recruits the ship's armory and a vault of captured equipment that held bio-masks, armor, wristblades and a smart disc. Every piece in the vault had been taken from a Predator, and she explained that the team carried countermeasures that would stop the creatures from hiding from them. Jaya meant her hunters to face the Predators with advantages that lone survivors such as Nakai and Mandy had never had, and the voyage to the islands gave the recruits a few weeks to train with the gear.
Sparring With Nakai
During the voyage, Jaya sparred with Nakai in the Durga's gym and threw him to the mat again and again until he promised to stop talking. Afterward she showed him the scars across her own stomach, offered her hand and told him that he was now part of an exclusive club. She told him about the first Predator she had killed, and then asked whether he was really sure that the job was for him, assuring him that no one would hold it against him if he changed his mind.
Nakai answered that he had not come along to go fishing. He admitted that he was badly out of shape but promised that he would be ready when it counted. Jaya told him to make good use of the time at sea, since he had two more weeks before they reached the islands. The exchange showed how she led her team, testing each recruit herself, offering a way out and then trusting the people who chose to stay with her.
Amelia Island
The Durga approached the islands posing as a science vessel, with the team's weapons hidden in a locker aboard its launch. At the dock on Amelia Island, a local girl ran to greet Jaya, who knelt to meet her. The colony's leader, Dr. Henry Bunting, hosted the hunters at a feast, where they claimed to be surveying fish stocks. During the meal they learned about the neighboring island of Kehua, which the islanders avoided because of its bad mana. Swain joked to their host that the job paid better and that nobody shot at him.
Bunting invited the visitors to stay ashore, but Jaya declined and kept her people aboard the ship. Before the hunters left, an island woman named Artemis hugged Jaya and quietly begged her to come back and take her away from the colony. Jaya did not yet know what the people of Amelia Island were hiding, but the plea stayed with her, and Artemis would later play a decisive part in the survival of the team. That night she returned to the Durga to plan the operation on Kehua, the island that the colonists feared.
The Raid On Kehua
Back aboard the ship, Jaya studied footage from a drone flight over Kehua that revealed one of the creatures. She ordered its position marked by GPS and the strike team made ready, and before the raid she told Nakai to hang back. She stayed aboard the Durga and commanded the operation by radio while the soldiers went ashore. The strike team killed one of the Exiles, a primitive Predator armed with a spear and a wooden mask, and reported that the target was dead.
The soldiers also reported that they had freed a human prisoner, a gaunt man with long gray hair, which surprised her. The prisoner warned that more of the creatures were still on the island, and when the Exiles struck back, the team retreated to its boats under attack. Several soldiers died, and Herrera was dragged away by the creatures, so the survivors returned to the Durga believing that he was dead. Swain, who had been ordered to cover Herrera during the retreat, came back without him and could not explain what had happened.
The Colony's Betrayal
On deck, Mandy attacked Swain for leaving Herrera behind, and under pressure from Jaya he admitted that he had frozen when one of the Exiles looked at him. He confessed that his story about the convoy had been a lie as well. Jaya told him that the whole team had counted on him, and that Herrera had counted on him most of all. Then the freed prisoner warned her that the islanders she had been so eager to protect were about to put their heads on sticks.
That night, canoes from the colony reached the ship, and with charges fixed to its hull, Jaya ordered everyone to stand down. Masked colonists seized the Durga and lined up the hunters, and Bunting mocked Jaya as an outsider who had arrived only five minutes earlier. His people had lived alongside the Exiles for more than a century, ever since the creatures' ship had crashed into the sea near the colony. He told her that a ceremony awaited the hunters, a tradition reserved for uninvited visitors.
Hunted On Kehua
The ceremony put Jaya, Nakai, Swain, Mandy and the freed prisoner ashore on Kehua as prey for the colony's hunt. Armed with a machete, she fought the masked colonists who chased her through the jungle, crying out to the goddess Durga as she struck. She was wounded, and when one of the real Exiles caught up with her, she faced it ready to finish the fight. Instead, the Exile killed her pursuers, spared her and pointed her away into the jungle.
Artemis found her soon afterward and led her through the trees to a boat. The island woman had a plan to take back the ship, and she hid Jaya in the boat and paddled it out to the anchored Durga. When they reached it, Jaya was to slip over the side, swim under the hull and remove the mine that the colonists had fixed there. After that, Artemis said, they would take over the ship, although she had no answer when Jaya asked how.
Retaking The Durga
Jaya swam beneath the Durga and dealt with the mine, then climbed back aboard unseen. She took a rifle, shot down the guards and freed her crew, while Artemis fought beside her on deck. Some of the crew wanted the captured colonists thrown overboard, but she ordered them secured and told her people to get the ship ready to sail, warning that they might be coming back in a hurry. She would not leave yet, however, because she meant to thank Bunting and his colonists first.
Her crew loaded rockets onto the ship's helicopter, and Jaya flew back toward the colony with it. Bunting and the colonists who had staged the hunt were gathered on the shore of Kehua when the helicopter arrived. The crew declared that it was time for Bunting's people to reap what they had sown, and she gave the order to open fire, sending the rockets into the colonists. The helicopter then went on to find the surviving hunters, and its guns cut down an Exile that had cornered Nakai and Swain beside the sea.
Sparing The Last Exile
When the fighting ended, one Exile was still alive. Mandy wanted to kill it from the helicopter, but Jaya stopped her, explaining that the creature had spared her life and had been the islanders' prisoner just as the hunters had been. Instead of finishing it, she dropped the Exile a bag of gear from the Durga's vault so that it could live out its days with some dignity. The creature had shown Jaya mercy in the jungle, and she answered it with mercy of her own before the helicopter turned away from the island.
The operation had cost her several soldiers and Raphael Herrera, and it had exposed the team to a colony that had hidden its secrets for generations. She kept her word to Artemis, taking the island woman away with her to the family home in the Indian Ocean. The team's first mission had freed the Exiles from their human captors, but Jaya returned home with far fewer people than she had set out with. Artemis became part of the household, and she later resented being left behind when the team went on its next mission.
A Smaller Crew
On the family's private island, a mansion with red roofs where the Durga lay moored, most of the remaining crew gathered in Jaya's library and resigned. They told her that the operation in the Amelia Islands had been too much. She asked whether it was a matter of money, reminded them of the nondisclosure agreements they had signed and arranged a seaplane to take them to the mainland the next day. Many of them had served aboard the Durga through the whole operation, from the raid on Kehua to the colony's seizure of the ship. The crew members left, and Jaya let them go without a fight.
Without them, she no longer had enough people to sail the Durga. Swain admitted that he had failed the team in the islands and offered to resign as well. She told him that she was not comfortable keeping him after his performance, but that she needed every member she had left. Mandy made it plain that she had not forgiven him, and the team that remained was smaller and more divided than it had been. Besides Jaya, the hunters left for the next mission were Mandy, Nakai and Swain.
The Afghanistan Video
The next mission came from a video recorded in eastern Afghanistan, in which a Predator interrupted the execution of a kidnapped CIA agent. Jaya revealed that the footage had come from a secure CIA server in Kabul, obtained through some very talented Russians. She told the team that a plane was waiting on the mainland and that she had assets on the ground. She described the mission as primarily an assessment, and the hunters agreed to go to Afghanistan. Swain admitted that the country held bad memories for him but insisted that he could face them again.
The team flew to Jalalabad, where their guide Malook drove them to a village in the foothills of the Hindu Kush whose people believed that a djinn protected them. Posing as aid workers, Jaya and her team met with the village elders and the local malik, while Swain stayed with the truck. A boy on a crutch named Atal, who had lost his parents to a mortar attack and his leg to an old Russian mine, befriended Swain at the truck.
The Murder House
Wearing a maroon headscarf, Jaya watched the house where the CIA agent had been murdered through binoculars. She recognized someone there and remarked that the team's timetable had just been shortened. When the others asked what was wrong, she told them that there was nothing more for them in the area. Back in the truck, her teammates demanded to know what had spooked her, but Jaya kept her reasons to herself for the moment. As they drove away, she pulled her headscarf across her face.
Atal later told the hunters that the creature in the mountains was no protector and offered to lead them to its lair. He had found and marked many of the old Russian mines in the valley so that no other child would suffer as he had. Swain promised to help him reach Canada in return. Jaya said that she was uncomfortable using a young boy, but Swain reminded her that she had done the same kind of favor for Artemis. The argument ended with Atal as their guide, and from then on Swain was the boy's strongest supporter among the hunters.
Keeping The Djinn In The Bottle
When a drone passed overhead, Jaya told the team that they had to move at once. She admitted that they were not the only ones looking for the Predator, since a well-funded American black ops team with serious gear, codenamed Stargazer, was already in the area. She had seen its strike team leader at the murder house. Swain asked why they should not simply let Uncle Sam kill the creature, pointing out that she was rich, but not as rich as three hundred million taxpayers.
Jaya explained that Stargazer had not come to kill the Predator but to harvest its technology. Her own family's fortune had been built on selling some of that technology, and she knew that America was not the only nation greedy for it. She called her family legacy one stained with blood, and she had vowed to atone by using her fortune to keep the Djinn in the bottle. She admitted that she should have been more forthcoming, but insisted that they had one chance and that the time was now.
The Djinn's Lair
Through a Russian contact, Jaya learned that the Predator was using an old Taliban cave in the mountains. When a teammate asked how many Russians she knew, she answered that she knew as many as she had to. She reasoned that the heat of the day would weaken its thermal vision, and she decided to wire the lair with explosives while Stargazer was busy elsewhere. When the team argued over whether to trust Atal, she settled the matter by asking the boy to lead on, and the hunters climbed into the Hindu Kush in tactical gear.
Just before the cave, she told Swain that it was time to send the boy home. Inside, the hunters found the creature's ship and a vast trophy room, and Jaya ordered charges set to bury the place. When the Djinn returned and pinned them down, the team fought back until she blew the cave. Swain later lured the creature onto one of the old mines in the valley, and the blast killed it, but he died of his wounds on the mountain.
Atal's Choice
The hunters buried Swain beneath a cairn of stones on the mountain. At their camp that evening, Atal was sad to leave his friend alone without the proper rituals. Jaya told him that he could come with them, as Tyler had promised, and offered him a beautiful home by the sea, or in time a place wherever he wished to go. Atal thanked her but chose to stay in Afghanistan, explaining that his friend was staying there and that he would stay too, so that he could visit his grave. Jaya accepted his decision, and the hunters left the boy near the grave of the man who had befriended him.
Herrera's Return
Jaya returned to the family island, where Artemis told her that she should have taken her along. Jaya replied that she was very glad to be home, and when Artemis asked where Swain was, she said that they would speak of it later. The homecoming then took an unexpected turn, because Raphael Herrera, whom the team had left for dead on Kehua, was waiting for them. He was alive, with a bandaged head and his arm in a sling, and nobody on the team could explain how he had escaped the island.
Doubts About Herrera
Herrera's return divided the team, and in the library Enoch and Mandy argued over whether he could be trusted. Jaya ended the quarrel, saying that she also trusted Herrera but that Enoch was right to be suspicious. The people at Stargazer knew as much about the hunters as the hunters knew about them, and Herrera would be of great value to them, so letting him go made no sense. She told the others not to kill each other in the meantime and went to talk to him herself.
On the beach outside the mansion, she apologized to Herrera again for leaving him on the island, explaining that the team had believed him dead. Herrera told her not to worry, since he might have done the same. When she admitted that the team still had concerns about why his captors had let him go, he said that he wondered as well, and he told her how a Predator had slaughtered his men and a rival had murdered his family. He swore that he could not rest while even one of the beasts still walked the Earth.
Schaefer In Belize
Soon afterward, Jaya received a call from John Schaefer, who told her that she had to come out to Belize right away. He was a former detective from New York who had faced the creatures in New York, Russia and South America. Jaya had once tried to recruit him, and when he refused, she offered to stake him if he agreed to feed her intelligence. His brother, Dutch Schaefer, had met one of the creatures years before and vanished, and John was still following his trail.
Jaya brought Enoch, Mandy and Herrera to a bar in Belize, where Schaefer arrived in a loud Hawaiian shirt and she introduced him to her associates. Herrera had slipped away before the meeting, and Enoch suspected that he had gone to make a phone call. When Herrera came back, Schaefer warned him what would happen if he caused any trouble. The meeting had barely begun when a Russian woman and her bald companion walked in and greeted Schaefer as an old comrade.
Colonel Ligachev
The woman was Colonel Valentina Ligachev, and she knew the name of every member of the team. She and Schaefer had history together from years before. She warned the hunters to stay out of her way, and Mandy answered with a threat of her own. Afterward, Jaya remarked to Schaefer that his colonel knew a great deal about them and wondered aloud where she had gotten her intelligence. The Russians wanted the same prey as the hunters, and with a rival unit already in the field, the team knew that it was in a race.
That night, Mandy complained that the team was not equipped to fight Predators and Russian commandos at the same time. Schaefer revealed that the action was not in the jungle but beneath it, where the creatures were moving through flooded limestone caverns. Ligachev's agents had been watching the team at its hotel. To shake them off, the team sent a decoy truck down the Western Highway, and while Ligachev stopped a pair of tourists at a roadblock, the hunters slipped away in a pickup.
The Trophy Caverns
After a hike through the rain, Schaefer led the hunters to a cave linked to a Mayan dig that had closed for the rainy season. He had dived the system before and believed that the creatures used it to move around unseen, adding almost in passing that there were two of them. The system connected to a cenote at the dig, and there had been disappearances nearby. Enoch admitted that his only diving had been in a motel pool, but the team swam into the flooded passages behind Schaefer.
The hunters surfaced in a cavern, unpacked their rifles and found footprints and a skull mounted on a stalagmite. Further in lay the creatures' trophy chamber, packed with skulls and the severed head of a Belize cartel gunman. Jaya said that the discovery proved the Predators were using the caves, and that when they came back, the team would be waiting for them. Then Mandy called the others to a passage that someone had recently blasted open, and Schaefer invited them to guess who had done it.
The Buried Pyramid
The passage led to a vast chamber holding a pyramid, and the hunters guessed that they stood directly beneath the Mayan site. A narrow passage climbed from the chamber to a temple in the jungle above, freshly excavated and not by archaeologists. Jaya judged the spot perfect for an ambush, reasoning that even cloaked creatures would disturb the foliage as they passed and that the rain would make them easier to see. She compared it to shooting fish in a barrel, an expression she credited to the Americans.
The hunters were still waiting at the temple when gunfire broke out in the jungle, where the two Predators were cutting down Ligachev's soldiers. Schaefer decided to join the fight, and Jaya chose to go with him, taking Enoch along and leaving Mandy and Herrera to hold the ambush. Schaefer planned to find the Russians and drive the creatures toward the pyramid, but a plasma blast knocked him off his feet and a wounded Predator came for him through the rain.
The Clan Ship
On the summit of the pyramid, the brown Predator killed its wounded companion, while a beam of light rose into the sky above the temple. A clan ship then descended over the pyramid, where Herrera, who had gone up alone, laid down his rifle and prayed. The Predators carried away the dead hunter, took the survivor with them and left without harming him. When the ship rose into the sky, Jaya could not tell whether the mission had been a success or a failure.
She regrouped in the jungle with Ligachev, who had lost four good men and had nothing to show for the hunt. Schaefer limped back after his own fight with the wounded Predator, explaining that he had run into a tree and an embankment, and his request for a ride back to town earned him a curse from the colonel. Jaya was already planning to return to the cave to salvage the creatures' gear, believing there could be much to learn from it, while Enoch begged for no more diving.
A Last Round In Belize
In the bar afterward, Jaya told Schaefer that her offer to join the team was still open. He replied that he had thought about it, but that until he found his brother he had to keep looking. Before leaving, he warned the hunters to keep an eye on Herrera, saying that he could smell a snitch a mile away. Mandy objected, but Herrera admitted that Enoch had been right all along and that he had come back to the team under false pretenses.
He confessed that Stargazer had nursed him back to health on the island and released him on condition that he report on the team, or else face charges of drug trafficking and murder. After a lifetime of deceit, he could not go through with it. He now understood that God had not killed his family, his own evil life had, and that his last betrayal would be of Stargazer. He chose to stay behind in Belize and disappear while he searched for a way to atone, and Enoch raised a toast to atonement as Jaya's team lost another member.
Personality And Traits
Jaya was formal, composed and direct, and she addressed recruits formally, calling the veteran Mr. Nakai even while she was testing him. She commanded the first raid from the bridge of the Durga, but she fought the colonists of Kehua with a machete, retook her ship almost alone and went into the field herself in Afghanistan and Belize. She tested recruits personally, as she did with Nakai on the judo mat, yet she always offered them a way out. In a fight she was fierce, crying out to the goddess Durga as she struck at the colonists.
Her sense of duty came from family and guilt, since she saw the Soames fortune as built on blood and treated her hunts as a form of atonement. That purpose made her secretive at times, and in Afghanistan she admitted that she should have told her team about Stargazer sooner. She also showed compassion, sparing the last Exile on Kehua, taking Artemis away from the colony and offering Atal a new home. She also owned her mistakes, apologizing to Herrera for leaving him behind on Kehua.
Behind The Scenes
Jaya Soames was created by writer Chris Warner for Dark Horse Comics and first appeared in Predator: Hunters #1, published on May 3, 2017. Francisco Ruiz Velasco drew the five-issue series, with covers by Doug Wheatley. Warner tied her to Captain Edward Soames, the hunter of Spring Heeled Jack in the 1997 series Predator: Nemesis. An editorial by Randy Stradley in Predator: Hunters II called the captain her great-great-grandfather, unlike the comic, and said that the family had hunted Predators for over a hundred years and that Jaya had recently expanded the operation with former soldiers, former law enforcement officers and a former drug runner.
Agustin Padilla drew Predator: Hunters II, a four-issue series published from August 2018 to January 2019, and Brian Thies drew Predator: Hunters III, which began in February 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic halted the third series after two issues, and Dark Horse completed the story in a trade paperback in November 2020. The books disagreed on one detail, since the first series named the island where Herrera was lost Kehua while the sequels called it Tehua. All three series were reprinted in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2, released by Marvel in May 2024.
Famous Quotes
- "Seeing what you've seen, knowing what you know... is this really how you want to play out your days?" (Predator: Hunters)
- "No need for redress here. You're part of an exclusive club, Mr. Nakai." (Predator: Hunters)
- "Soon. We can't leave without thanking our hosts." (Predator: Hunters)
- "He was the islanders' prisoner just like we were." (Predator: Hunters)
- "I should have been more forthcoming, I know that. But we have one chance to do this, and the time is now." (Predator: Hunters II)
- "I have a beautiful home by the sea. In time, if you wish, we can find a place for you wherever you want to go." (Predator: Hunters II)
- "Enough, you two! I also trust Herrera, but Enoch is right to be suspicious." (Predator: Hunters III)
Conclusion
Jaya Soames was the heir to a family that had hunted Predators since Captain Edward Soames tracked Spring Heeled Jack through London. She turned that legacy into a privately funded team, recruiting survivors such as Enoch Nakai and leading them against the Exiles of Kehua, the Djinn in Afghanistan and two hunters beneath Belize. She lost most of her crew, then Tyler Swain and finally Herrera along the way, but she never abandoned her vow to keep the creatures' technology away from Stargazer and its rivals.
Appearances
- Predator: Hunters #1–5 (Dark Horse Comics, May to September 2017)
- Predator: Hunters II #1–4 (Dark Horse Comics, August 2018 to January 2019)
- Predator: Hunters III #1–2 (Dark Horse Comics, February to March 2020)
- Predator: Hunters III trade paperback, completing the story (Dark Horse Comics, November 2020)
External Sources
- Predator: Hunters #1 at Dark Horse
- Predator: Hunters II TPB at Dark Horse
- Predator: Hunters III TPB at Dark Horse
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
