Predator: Hunters II was a four-issue Dark Horse Comics series written by Chris Warner and drawn by Agustin Padilla, published from August 2018 to January 2019 and collected in June 2019. A sequel to Predator: Hunters, it sent Jaya Soames and the survivors of her team of human Predator hunters to the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. A lone Yautja had been killing insurgents there, and the hunters raced an American black ops team code-named Stargazer to find the creature's lair before nightfall.
Plot Summary
The Kidnapped Agent
In a village in Eastern Afghanistan, masked insurgents pulled a blindfolded man out of a van and dragged him into a house. He insisted that he was a construction engineer from Canada, but his captors named him as Robert Fournette, a CIA agent from Burlington, Vermont, and warned him that he would soon talk. One of them reminded him that Afghanistan had been called the graveyard of empires. The insurgents set up a camera to record his beheading, but before the blade fell, their men began to die one after another at the hands of an attacker that none of them could see.
When the killing stopped, a Predator stepped out of hiding and held up the severed head of one of the insurgents, its bio-mask glowing with bright blue eyes. Fournette could only whisper a prayer as the hunter loomed over the bodies of his captors. What became of the agent afterward was never shown, but the camera had kept recording through the massacre. Three days later, the footage of the attack was in the hands of the Soames family, which had spent generations fighting the alien hunters, and it gave the depleted team its next mission.
A Smaller Team
On the private island of the Soames family, somewhere in the Indian Ocean, much of Jaya's crew gathered in her library to resign. They still believed in the mission, but the operation in the Amelia Islands had cost too many lives, and one of them admitted that they would all have died without Artemis. Soames accepted their decision and reminded them of their nondisclosure agreements, and a seaplane was arranged to take them to the mainland the next day. Only a handful of people stayed behind, too few to crew her ship, the Durga.
Tyler Swain admitted that he had botched the Amelia job and offered his own resignation. Soames told him that she was not entirely comfortable keeping him after his performance in the islands, but that she needed every member who remained. Mandy Graves remarked that it was a shame Hernandez was not there to witness his newfound accountability. Soames then turned to the next mission, a video shot in Afghanistan three days earlier, in which an insurgent splinter group had tried to behead a kidnapped CIA agent on camera before something interrupted them.
The Afghanistan Video
Soames, Swain, Mandy and Enoch Nakai watched the footage of the massacre on a monitor. The video had come from a secure CIA server, and Soames explained only that she knew some very talented hackers. A plane was already waiting for the team on the mainland, and she had assets on the ground in Afghanistan to support them. The insurgents in the recording had been cut down one by one, and the team had no doubt about what had killed them.
Soames stressed that the mission was primarily an assessment and that the team should not engage the creature if conditions were unfavorable. Swain had experience in Afghanistan, and he admitted that the country held bad memories for him, since a monster had killed a lot of good men there. Even so, he told the others that he could go through it again. He added that you only live once, a phrase he would repeat later in the mission, and the reduced team set off for the war zone.
Tehua And Jalalabad
Far away in the Amelia Islands, a pair of tiltrotor aircraft calling themselves Salvage One made their final approach to Tehua Island. The damage below them looked extensive. A crew in yellow protective suits went ashore, and their instruments found only minimal radiation, which one of them compared to the explosion in Central America in 1997. Their target was the crater that marked the epicenter of the blast, although one of the salvagers doubted that they had a chance in hell of finding anything at all in the wreckage.
The hunters landed at an airfield in Jalalabad, where the heat was unusual even for the time of year. Mandy complained about wearing a scarf in the heat until one of her companions reminded her that it was a hijab. They were met by Malook, a cheerful local driver who had secured a big truck along with the documents and clearances for the trip. When Swain asked what Malook would be using, he answered that he was coming with them, and he assured the team that there had been no attacks on the road for several days.
The Murder House
The drive into the Hindu Kush was rough, and Swain looked unwell as Malook raced along the road, although he insisted that he was fine. Malook advised against stopping, because it was better to keep moving in those areas. In the foothills, the team reached the village where the video had been shot and found the street outside the house full of armed men. One of the hunters remarked that their first objective seemed to be a popular attraction, and the others wondered why a military investigation would still be underway, or whether the men belonged to the Afghan National Police.
Through her binoculars, Soames studied the men in front of the house and spotted a face that clearly shocked her. She told the others that there was nothing for them there, and the hunters climbed back into the truck. When the others demanded to know what had spooked her, Jaya would only say that their timetable had just become shorter. She did not explain whom she had seen, and the team drove on toward the mountains with more questions than answers about the people who had arrived at the village ahead of them.
Fire In The Mountains
In a cave in the mountains, a lone insurgent fired into the darkness at an enemy he could not see while his comrades lay dead around him. With his rifle useless, he prayed to Allah for protection and then charged into the shadows with a knife, shouting a battle cry. The hunter waiting for him was a Predator with its wristblades extended and a human skull in its hand. Like the men in the village, the fighters in the cave never saw their killer until it was too late.
One night a column of armed fighters moved through the mountains while an unseen narrator reflected that his people had defeated army after army but could never overcome their own divisions, and that it was a shame they could not see in the darkness. A fire broke out on the slopes ahead, and the Predator attacked, its cloak shimmering among the rocks as the fighters died around it. Wreathed in flames, the hunter then rose out of the fire and roared, and the narrator wondered whether Afghanistan was more a punishment than a nation.
The Village Djinn
On the road, the truck passed the rusting wreck of an old tank, and the conversation turned to the powerful nations that had invaded Afghanistan again and again. America, Russia, the British and Alexander had all crashed upon its rocks, because the country had nothing, while those who came had everything and left with nothing. The team's contacts had reported renewed insurgent activity near the next village, an area the fighters had avoided for some time, and said that the fighters were taking casualties from an unknown source. The villagers believed that a djinn protected them, and Soames hoped that the elders could lead the team to it.
Posing as aid workers, Soames and her team met the village elders and the headman, known as the Malik, while Malook interpreted. The visit was meant to open a discussion about the insurgents in the area and, with luck, reveal the location of their target. The Malik was gracious, but he insisted that life in the village was good, that the insurgents did not worry its people and that the djinn had driven them into the mountains. An old man declared that the time for talk was over, and the meeting broke up while Swain stayed behind to guard the truck, troubled by his memories of the country.
Atal
While Swain waited at the truck, a boy on a crutch approached him and asked in English whether he was an American. The boy, whose name was Atal, explained that his father had studied at university and translated for the Americans, and that both of his parents had been killed in a mortar attack. Swain told him that he had lost many friends in Afghanistan, that he had once been a soldier and that he was no longer sure what he was. Swain was surprised to hear a village boy speak English so well.
The boy had lost his leg to a Russian land mine, left behind from long before he was born, but he considered himself fortunate, because a friend of his had been killed. He told Swain that there would always be war in his country. Atal dreamed of going to Canada, where he had heard that the health care was good. Swain explained that there was no way he could take the boy to America. When the team came back from the meeting, Atal spoke to them and guessed the truth that the elders had missed, telling them that they were not aid workers but hunters who had come for the djinn.
The Djinn's Lair
As the sun set, the Predator returned to its lair, a cave in the mountains hung with skulls. Inside, it had built a trophy room of skulls alongside racks of rifles and crates of ammunition taken from the men it had killed. In the village, Atal warned the hunters that the people believed the djinn was their protector, but that it was not. He asked where the creature had been when insurgents killed villagers who cooperated with the Americans, and when his own parents were murdered.
Atal told the team that the djinn killed because it wanted to, and that he had been to the mountain and seen what it did. He believed that it would one day turn on the village as well, and he offered to lead the hunters to its lair. Soames thought it was too dangerous for a boy, but Atal answered that the mountains knew him. Swain promised that the team would help him reach Canada in return, as long as he told no one, and reminded Soames that she had done the same for Artemis back at Tehua.
The Black Ops Team
A drone and a flight of helicopters then passed overhead, and Soames admitted why she had been in such a hurry. At the murder house she had recognized the strike team leader of Stargazer, a well-funded American black ops team with serious gear, and the team was not the only one looking for the Predator. Swain saw no harm in letting the government kill the creature, and Nakai joked that the team did not have 300 million taxpayers behind it. Soames explained that killing the Predator was only incidental to Stargazer's real goal.
The black ops team wanted to harvest the creature's technology, and its people were combing the wreckage of Tehua Island at that very moment. Soames admitted that her own family's fortune had been built on the sale of such technology, without weapons, but even harmless trophies were worth fortunes in aerospace, microelectronics and materials science. Determined to keep the djinn in the bottle, she called a Russian contact and learned that the Predator was using an old Taliban cave nearby. In the heat of the day, its infrared vision would struggle to pick out the hunters.
The Raid On The Cave Complex
As the truck drove on, Atal realized that the helicopters were heading for an insurgent cave complex rather than the djinn's lair, which lay a few kilometers away and could only be reached on foot. The Stargazer strike team rappelled into the caves in daylight, reasoning that the target's thermal vision would be useless in the heat, and it planned to use net tasers if practical. Their commander reminded the soldiers that they were there for the gear and should terminate the creature only if necessary.
Inside the complex, the soldiers found nothing but piles of dead insurgents, and they concluded that the target did not live there, although it had clearly paid a visit. The order came to set charges and withdraw, and the caves were blown behind them as the soldiers reported to their Colonel. As the men gathered for extraction, a plasma bolt struck one of the helicopters and blew it apart. The soldiers fired blindly into the smoke, and one of them complained that they could not see the Predator unless it set itself on fire, before it emerged from the snow and smoke above them.
The Climb
Atal and Malook waited by the truck while the hunters made their plan. Thermal vision would be of little use to the creature in the open, so they intended to plant explosives in its lair and trap it inside when it returned. Malook wanted to see the djinn, but someone had to watch the truck, so he stayed behind. Swain suggested that Atal stay with Malook, but the boy replied that the hunters were the ones carrying weapons, so they were the ones who were not safe, and he warned them not to be in the mountains at night.
On Tehua Island, the salvage crew in yellow suits continued to sift through the wreckage, and one of its members wished that she had stayed at NASA. As a man lit a cigarette, a burned human hand rose out of the rubble beside them and a voice begged for help. In the mountains of Afghanistan, Swain struggled with the altitude during the climb while Atal teased him, and the hunters spotted the Stargazer soldiers fighting on the slopes below. Soames decided to wire the lair while their competitors were busy.
The Snowfield Ambush
Mandy warned that the black ops team might have simply run into insurgents, and that the hunters could be walking into a trap, while Nakai doubted the boy. Atal angrily asked whether they were calling him a liar, and Swain said that he believed him and would go with him. Soames settled the argument and politely asked Atal to lead on. Down on the slopes, the Stargazer soldiers fell back through the snow and smoke by squads, with Mitchell and Grady among those ordered to cover the withdrawal.
The Predator cut through the Stargazer soldiers in the snow and stood among them with the trophies of the men it had killed. The survivors wanted to get off the mountain while the smoke still hid them, but one of them protested to the Colonel that they could not leave their dead behind. Instead, the order went out to warm the place up and send in the fire department, and an aircraft dropped bombs on the creature's position. Higher in the mountains, the hunters heard the blast, and Atal explained that the insurgents feared the djinn.
The Path Through The Minefield
Atal explained that it was dangerous to come that way from Pakistan, because there were no good paths on the other side of the canyon and the valley was full of land mines left by the Russians. He had found and marked many of them himself, since a mine had taken his leg and he wanted to make sure that no other child suffered as he had. Everyone in his village thought that he was crazy, but Swain called it a mighty brave thing to do.
One of the hunters wondered aloud whether the boy might be leading them to the Predator so that it could kill them. When Atal announced that the cave was just ahead, Soames told Swain that it was time to send the boy home. Swain praised Atal for doing an amazing job and told him that the hunters would take it from there. For his own safety, the boy was sent back to the truck, with a promise that the team would be along soon to help him, and the hunters continued alone.
The Trophy Cave
The hunters put on their night vision equipment and entered the cave, where they discovered a Predator ship hidden inside. Soames ordered Mandy to set charges while the rest of them explored further. Deeper in the mountain lay a vast chamber filled with skulls, wrecked vehicles and a motorbike, the spoils of years of hunting in the region. Among the trophies, Swain recognized equipment from his old outfit and realized that this was the hunter that had killed his men.
Soames told Nakai to set more charges and announced that it was time to bury the place. The team took up positions above the cave, planning to drop the lair on the Predator when it returned and add its own skull to the trophy room. As the sun went down and the temperature dropped, Soames ordered everyone to switch to thermal vision, and warned that their heat signatures would also start to show up. Soon the Predator arrived, and its heat signature appeared among the rocks.
Blowing The Cave
A plasma blast tore into the hunters' position, and Swain stood up and shouted at the creature to show itself. Soames warned that they could not risk staying in the open with the temperature falling, and the team was soon caught in a firefight with the hunter. Pinned down and boxed in, they called for better cover and realized that they would run out of ammunition before they could escape. One of them shouted to Jaya that they would not last long like this and urged her to blow the cave at once.
The charges went off, and the cave of the Predator vanished in a huge explosion. In the chaos, Atal appeared on the mountainside, having come back because he could not leave his friend behind. Swain demanded to know what the boy was doing there and pointed out that there was no way out. Atal answered that there was a way, through the minefield, since he had marked the mines, and that if they followed his steps they might escape and perhaps draw the djinn to its doom.
Swain's Last Stand
Atal led the way down into the valley and called for Mr. Swain to follow him, picking his way between the mines he had marked while the fires from the cave still burned on the slopes behind them. Swain followed the boy while taunting the Predator to draw it after them, and he shouted at Atal not to stop for anything, no matter what happened. The creature leapt after them through the fire and smoke, roaring as it closed in on the pair. Swain eventually ran out of ammunition, and he drew his knife and prepared to fight the hunter Texas style.
Swain stood his ground beside a red flag that Atal had used to mark a mine and goaded the Predator into attacking him. The hunter blocked his knife and struck him with its wristblades, and as it lunged for the kill, Swain roared "Do it!" The mine went off beneath them in a massive explosion. When the smoke cleared, the creature lay dead, its body burning in green fire, while Atal found Swain lying mortally wounded and promised to get him to a doctor.
A Grave In The Mountains
Swain told the boy that he did not think so. He said that the Predator had killed a lot of his friends and that he had been supposed to die in Afghanistan with his brothers. Lying on a ledge high in the Hindu Kush, he asked Atal to be quiet and listen to the wind with him, and he died there as the sun set over the mountains. The hunters later left him beneath a cairn of stones on the mountainside.
Nakai asked why they spent their lives trying to fix something in the past that could never change, and Mandy replied that it was because they were stupid. Atal regretted leaving Swain alone without the proper rituals, but believed that Allah would watch over him. Soames offered to take the boy to her beautiful home by the sea and to find him a place wherever he wished to go. Atal thanked her, but he chose to stay in Afghanistan so that he could visit his friend's grave.
Home By The Sea
On the drive back, Malook pointed out some friends of theirs, a column of surviving Stargazer soldiers trudging along the road on foot. The truck drove straight past them without stopping, and one of the hunters laughed at how rude it was. The team then returned to the Soames family island in the Indian Ocean, where Artemis welcomed them home and scolded Soames for not taking her along. Soames told her that she was very glad to be home, and the hunters insisted on carrying their heavy gear themselves.
Artemis said that she had a surprise for them and led the team into the house. Waiting inside was Raphael Herrera, with his head bandaged and his arm in a sling. He greeted Soames, Nakai and Mandy and remarked that their expressions told him they were surprised to see him. The three hunters stared at him in disbelief, since they had last seen him during the disaster in the Amelia Islands. Herrera admitted that he was a little surprised himself, surprised to be alive, and promised that how he came to be there was an interesting story.
Key Characters
- Jaya Soames led and funded the hunters from her family's island in the Indian Ocean. She recognized the Stargazer strike team leader in Afghanistan, wanted to keep alien technology out of the hands of governments and had the cave wired with explosives.
- Enoch Nakai was the Navajo veteran of the first mission who doubted Atal's story. He set charges in the trophy cave and joined the escape through the minefield.
- Mandy Graves was the survivor of a Bad Blood Predator attack who mocked Swain and doubted the boy. She set the first charges in the Predator's cave.
- Tyler Swain was the former private contractor who returned to Afghanistan, befriended Atal and recognized gear from his old outfit in the trophy cave. He lured the Predator onto a marked mine and died on the mountain.
- Atal was a village boy who had lost his leg and his parents to the wars in Afghanistan and marked the old Russian mines himself. He led the hunters to the lair, guided them through the minefield and stayed behind to visit Swain's grave.
- Malook was the driver and interpreter who met the hunters in Jalalabad with a truck and their clearances. He interpreted at the village meeting and guarded the truck during the climb.
- Artemis was the young woman from the Amelia Islands who had saved the team on its previous mission. She welcomed the hunters back to the Soames family island and presented Herrera as her surprise.
- Raphael Herrera was the team member left behind in the Amelia Islands, whom Mandy called Hernandez. He reappeared alive at the end, with a bandaged head and his arm in a sling.
- Robert Fournette was the man the insurgents accused of being a CIA agent from Burlington, Vermont, although he claimed to be a Canadian engineer. The Predator interrupted his filmed execution.
- Mitchell and Grady were Stargazer soldiers ordered to cover the withdrawal by squads when the Predator attacked in the snow.
- The Predator was the lone hunter that the villagers called a djinn. It hunted insurgents and soldiers in the Hindu Kush, kept a trophy cave of skulls, weapons and vehicles beside its ship and died in the explosion of a Russian mine.
Behind The Scenes
Dark Horse announced Predator: Hunters II in May 2018, alongside the first volume of Predator: The Essential Comics. Issue #1 went on sale on August 8, 2018, followed by the second issue on September 5 and the third on October 24, while the fourth and final issue, once advertised for November, arrived on January 9, 2019. Chris Warner, who had drawn Dark Horse's first Predator series in 1989, wrote the story, and Agustin Padilla drew the interiors and the regular covers. Neeraj Menon colored it, Michael Heisler lettered it under editor Randy Stradley, and Andy Brase painted a variant cover for the first issue.
The series picked up after the mission of the first Predator: Hunters series, but the details shifted between the books. The first series set its story on Amelia Island and Kehua in the Bunting Islands, while this one referred to the islands as the Amelia Islands and to the hunters' island as Tehua. Raphael Herrera had been killed by the Exiles in the first series, yet he returned alive here, and Mandy even called him Hernandez. Warner continued the story in Predator: Hunters III in 2020, without Tyler Swain, who died in this series.
Dark Horse collected all four issues in the Predator: Hunters II trade paperback, a 96-page book with an Andy Brase cover that was released on June 12, 2019. After the Predator comics license moved to Marvel, the series was reprinted in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2, a 992-page hardcover released on May 22, 2024. That omnibus also collected the first and third Predator: Hunters series, along with older Dark Horse series such as Nemesis, Homeworld and Xenogenesis. The trade paperback carried the ISBN 978-1-50670-938-3.
Conclusion
Predator: Hunters II was the four-issue Dark Horse sequel by Chris Warner and Agustin Padilla that took Jaya Soames's reduced team to the mountains of Afghanistan. Guided by Atal, a village boy who had marked the old Russian mines himself, the hunters raced the Stargazer black ops team to the lair of a Predator that the villagers called a djinn. They blew up its trophy cave, and Tyler Swain gave his life to lure the creature onto a mine. The story ended with Atal staying beside Swain's grave and with Raphael Herrera waiting for the team at home, alive.
External Sources
- Predator: Hunters II TPB at Dark Horse
- Predator: Hunters II #1 at Dark Horse
- Dark Horse announcement of Predator: Hunters II
- Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2 at Marvel
Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Predator Lore
