Predator: Hunters III was a Dark Horse Comics series written by Chris Warner and drawn by Brian Thies, launched in February 2020 and completed in a trade paperback that November. A sequel to Predator: Hunters II and the first Predator: Hunters, it brought Jaya Soames's team of human Predator hunters to the jungles of Belize, where two Yautja were slaughtering drug cartel soldiers. With Dutch's brother John Schaefer at their side, the hunters raced a Russian unit to the creatures' lair, while Raphael Herrera kept a secret about how he had come home alive.
Plot Summary
Herrera's Memory
Years earlier, Raphael Herrera had run drugs from a camp deep in the jungles of South America. He remembered the night that heavily armed soldiers stormed it, and as they cut down his men, he asked God why he had chosen such an evil path. He had cared for his people and would gladly have died beside them, and the United States flag patches on the raiders' sleeves showed who had sent them. Then the raiders began to die as well, struck down by something that none of them could see.
A spinning disc cut through the soldiers, and then Herrera saw the hunter itself, a Predator in dark armor that raised a skull and spine as a trophy. To Herrera it was the devil, and the slaughter became a war between heaven and hell fought in his own camp. The creature was brought down at last, bleeding green, but its death brought only more destruction, and the innocent died with the guilty. Years later, living with the hunters on the Soames family island, Herrera still asked God why he had been spared.
The Fallen Family
On the island, Herrera spent his days staring at the sea, and the team argued about him. Enoch Nakai suspected that the people who had found him had made a deal with him to spy on the hunters, but Mandy Graves told Enoch that he was still the new guy and had no right to question anyone. Jaya Soames trusted Herrera, yet she admitted that suspicion was reasonable, since Stargazer knew as much about the hunters as they knew about it. Letting him go made no sense, and she went down to the beach to talk to him.
Jaya apologized for leaving him behind on Tehua, where the team had believed him dead, and Herrera said that he too wondered why his captors had let him go. He told her what had happened after his camp was destroyed. Alone in the jungle for two days, he made his way home and found his family murdered and hanging in the house. With his organization gone, he had been an easy target for a rival cartel or the police, and he felt that God kept surrounding him with death while leaving him alive to suffer.
Captive On Tehua
Herrera believed that the Lord had a sense of irony. On Tehua, a Predator hung him upside down from a tree, just as his family had been hung, and he took it as revenge for the creature he had killed years before. He was later locked in a cage, where he heard fighting across the island and prayed for strength, time and deliverance until an explosion left him alive once again among the dead. He did not know what lesson God wanted him to learn, but standing beside Jaya on the beach, he swore that he could not rest while even one of the beasts still walked the Earth.
Russians And Smugglers
In Belize, a party of Russians came ashore, led by a woman who told her people to keep to themselves and reminded them that they were not in Red Square. She warned them to stay alert, because others were interested in their venture. From a balcony across the water, a man with binoculars recognized her and her bald companion as old acquaintances. He phoned Jaya and told her that she had to get out to Belize right away, because she was going to love what he had found.
Elsewhere in Belize, a crew of drug smugglers pushed a boat up a jungle river with a load of heroin. They hauled their cargo along a forest trail, joking and complaining about the heat and the weight, until one of them heard something moving in the bushes. Before they could react, a rival gang opened fire from the trees. The smugglers had walked straight into an ambush laid by a tattooed, shaven-headed killer and his men, and none of them knew that a Predator was already watching the trail.
The Cartel Ambush
Most of the smugglers died in the first volley. The young survivor surrendered, and the tattooed leader told him that he was wise to give up before beheading him with a machete. The gang posed for a photo with the heads of their victims to impress their buyers and packed up the heroin, which the leader called caballo in Spanish slang. Unseen in the trees, a Predator watched them in thermal vision through its bio-mask and repeated the leader's words in a perfect copy of his voice, and the leader assumed that one of his men was joking.
A plasma bolt tore through him a moment later. The gang was cut down one by one, shot, speared or slashed, until a silver-masked Predator walked among the bodies, still mimicking the offer of surrender. The last man fled to a pool beneath a waterfall, where a second, brown-skinned hunter rose out of the water and dragged him under. Neither hunter left a single survivor on the trail beside the river in Belize. The ambushers had become the prey, and the creatures took the heroin along with the bodies.
The Mayan Underworld
Nearby, the cave diver Kim led two friends, Donny and Tamara, past an excavation that had closed for the rainy season. She promised them that a visit to the Mayan Underworld would change them forever, and warned them to stay close underwater, since the caverns ran for miles in every direction. Beneath the jungle they swam through flooded passages and surfaced in an air pocket, where Kim showed them the bones of a Mayan sacrifice about a thousand years old.
The divers then found a fresh human skull mounted on a stalagmite. Deeper in, they came upon an alcove packed with skulls and with bags of heroin, which one of them recognized at once. The friends realized that someone had been using the caves, and that the old bones of the Maya were not the only remains down there. Before they could swim back the way they had come, the owners of the trophies found them, and the three divers became the next victims of the Predators hunting beneath Belize.
Two Hunters In The Cave
The air shimmered as a hunter dropped its cloak, revealing a silver-masked Predator among the stalagmites, and the divers begged to leave. Donny drew a knife and was killed by a thrown spear. The brown Predator rose from the water, and when Kim reached for a rifle, she was blasted by a plasma bolt. Tamara fled into the water, but one of the creatures caught her beneath the surface and drowned her. With the divers dead, the two Predators stood mask to mask over the bodies, the silver hunter with its wristblades extended, and roared at each other in the dark.
Schaefer And Ligachev
At a bar in Belize, Enoch was asking where Herrera had gone when a blond man in a loud Hawaiian shirt walked in, complaining that it was hot and that he was thirsty. Jaya introduced him as John Schaefer, a former New York detective who had faced the creatures in New York, Siberia and South America. His brother, Dutch, had run into one of them years before and had not been seen since, and Schaefer had been following his trail ever since. When Herrera returned, Schaefer warned him what would happen if he caused any trouble.
Then the Russian woman walked in with her bald companion and greeted Schaefer as an old comrade. She was Colonel Valentina Ligachev, and she knew the name of every member of the team, claiming that hackers had supplied her intelligence. She warned the hunters to stay out of her way, and Mandy answered with a threat of her own. The Russians wanted the same prey as the hunters, and with Schaefer now on their side, the team knew it was in a race.
The Search Party
On a river in Belize, a cartel search party led by a long-haired gunman in glasses found the abandoned boats of its missing crew. On the trail the men found the ambush site and spent shell casings, but the product was gone and so were the bodies. Deeper in, they came upon skinned, headless corpses hanging from the trees, and the leader swore to do far worse to whoever had done it. Moments later an explosion erupted from the water, and the survivors opened fire on Predators they could not see.
The leader came to in the grass and found his men torn apart across the hillside. A silver-masked Predator rose over one of the bodies with a skull and spine in its hand, just as the hunter in Herrera's memory had done. The leader drew his machete and charged, cursing the creature, but it cut him down with a single blow and took his head. The creature carried the head away as a trophy, and the second cartel crew to enter that stretch of jungle had died as quickly as the first.
Under The Jungle
That night, in a bar, Mandy complained that the team was not equipped to fight Predators and Russian commandos at the same time. Schaefer told her to cheer up. He admitted that he had been far too serious as a policeman, but years in the tropics had taught him to relax, and he had even taken up scuba diving. The whole Yucatan was laced with flooded limestone caverns, and what the Russians did not know, he said, was that the action was not in the jungle but under it, where the creatures had been moving unseen through the caves of Belize.
The Predators' Quarrel
In a cave lit by the glow of a holographic skull, an unmasked Predator crouched among its trophies, holding a human skull. Its masked companion attacked it, pinning it against the rock as the two hunters snarled at each other. The unmasked hunter roared back, its mandibles spread wide. Their fight ended in a roar, but the rift between them was out in the open. Whatever had brought the two creatures to Belize together, they no longer agreed on how the hunt should be fought.
At the same time, Ligachev briefed her soldiers. She told them that no one could see the future but a nation could shape it, and that one which failed to do so would be at the mercy of others. Some of them might think they were chasing fairy tales, she said, but the aliens' technology was real, and in the wrong hands it would be a disaster. Whichever power controlled it would own the century, and she meant that power to be Russia.
The Decoy
Ligachev's agent Nadia and a partner watched the team at its hotel, where Schaefer, in his loud shirt, helped the others with their gear. Later a white truck pulled out, and Nadia followed it and reported that the target was heading for the Western Highway. Ligachev set up a roadblock with her soldiers, warning them not to underestimate the American. When the truck stopped, she called Schaefer out by name, certain that she had caught the hunters on their way to the caves.
The man behind the wheel was not Schaefer, although he wore the loud shirt that Schaefer had worn at the hotel. He and his wife were tourists on their way to San Ignacio for a jungle waterfall trip, and a search of the truck turned up only clothes. While Ligachev cursed, the team loaded a pickup and slipped away. In the back, Enoch mocked Herrera's knowledge of the Bible, Herrera corrected his quote with a verse from 2 Samuel, and Mandy told them both to focus on the mission.
The Flooded Caverns
After a hike through the rain, Schaefer led the hunters to a cave mouth. He explained that he used to make a living finding things that bad people did not want found, and that now the bad people were from another planet. He had dived the system before, and it connected to a cenote at a new Mayan dig that had closed for the rainy season. There had been disappearances nearby, and he believed the creatures were using the caves to move around, adding almost in passing that there were two of them.
Enoch, who had grown up in the desert, admitted that the only diving he had ever done was in a motel pool. The team swam into the flooded passages, past forests of stone columns. Above them, Ligachev led her soldiers through the rain toward the same quarry, believing that this time the killers from the stars would face the finest fighters ever born on Earth. Schaefer was formidable, she thought, but only a policeman, and she meant to spare him and his puppies if she could.
The Trophy Cave
The hunters surfaced in a cavern, unpacked their rifles and found footprints and a skull mounted on a stalagmite. Further in, they reached a chamber filled with skulls, the creatures' trophy room, where the severed head of the cartel search party's leader had joined the collection. Jaya said that the find firmly established the Predators' presence and that the creatures would return to find the team waiting. Then Mandy called the others to a passage that had been blasted open recently, and Schaefer invited them to guess who had done it.
The Buried Pyramid
The passage opened onto a vast chamber with a pyramid inside it, and the hunters guessed that they were directly below the Mayan site. Bodies lay rotting in the water at its foot, and as the team crossed toward it, Herrera recited a line of the Creed in Spanish about judgment of the living and the dead. There was fresh blood on the steps. A narrow passage led upward, recently excavated and not by archaeologists, and it brought the team out at a temple in the rain-soaked jungle.
Jaya declared the spot perfect for an ambush. Even if the creatures came cloaked, the hunters would see and hear the foliage move as they passed, and the rain would make them easier to spot. She compared it to shooting fish in a barrel, and Mandy joked that she loved barrel fish. The hunters crouched in the wet undergrowth around the ruins with their rifles ready and waited for the Predators to come back to their lair beneath the pyramid.
The Russians Under Fire
In the jungle, Ligachev's soldiers advanced through the downpour without knowing that they were being watched by small drones guided by a hologram from a Predator's wrist gauntlet. Ligachev thought of the Maya, a great civilization swallowed by the forest, and resolved that the aliens' treasures would let Russia build monuments that lasted instead of vanishing the same way. Her soldiers moved through the trees in a spread-out line with their rifles raised. Then the drones struck, and her men began to fall one after another in the rain.
Soldiers shouted that the attacks were coming from everywhere. Ligachev ordered controlled fire and shot back herself, while her men switched to infrared and hurled grenades into the trees. One of the Predators was caught in the blasts and wounded. The colonel had brought the finest soldiers she could find to the jungle, but against hunters that struck from the trees and the sky, they could do little more than fire back blindly into the rain as their comrades died around them.
Into The Fight
At the temple, the hunters heard the gunfire. Schaefer said that he and Ligachev had history and went to help, taking Jaya and Enoch with him, while Mandy and Herrera stayed behind to hold the ambush. His plan was to find the Russians and drive the creatures toward the pyramid. A blast of plasma soon knocked him off his feet, and a wounded Predator came for him through the rain. It hurled its spear and missed, then lunged with its wristblades and buried them in a tree as Schaefer rolled clear.
Schaefer And The Silver Predator
The Predator caught Schaefer and lifted him off the ground. He drove his knife into its arm, drawing green blood, and the creature kicked him down an embankment. The wounded hunter did not follow him. Instead, the brown Predator arrived to help its injured companion away through the jungle toward the pyramid. From the ambush point, Mandy and Herrera saw the two creatures heading for the summit, and Herrera went up after them alone, telling his teammate to stay in case they came back down.
The Pyramid Summit
At the summit, the silver Predator sent a beam of light into the sky and armed a device that began to beep. Then the brown hunter turned on its wounded companion and stabbed it, a fight between Predators that ended with the silver hunter dead. Its device, which threatened a self-destruct, never went off. Herrera reached the top in time to see the killing, and he found himself alone with the survivor, as the beam of light still shone into the sky above the pyramid.
The Clan Arrives
As a Predator ship descended over the pyramid, Herrera laid down his rifle and prayed the Lord's Prayer in Spanish. Armored hunters came down to the summit, led by an elder of their clan who wore a gold cross among his trophies, while Herrera clutched a small cross of his own. He had sworn never to rest while one of the creatures walked the Earth, yet he made no move against them. The Predators carried the body of the silver hunter aboard, the brown hunter went with them, and they left Herrera unharmed.
When the ship rose into the sky, Jaya could not tell whether the mission had been a success or a failure. Ligachev had lost four good men, the creatures were gone, and she had nothing to show for it. Schaefer limped back, explaining that he had run into some trouble, a tree and an embankment, and asked the Russians for a ride back to town, which earned him a curse from Ligachev. Jaya planned to return to the cave to salvage the creatures' gear, since there could be much to learn from it, and Enoch begged for no more diving.
The Last Round
In the bar afterward, Jaya told Schaefer that her offer to join the team was still open. He said that he had thought about it, but 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 said that Schaefer had no right to talk to him like that, but Herrera admitted that Enoch had been right all along and that he had come to the team under false pretenses.
He confessed that Stargazer had found him on Tehua and nursed him back to health, on condition that he report on the team or be sent home to face charges of drug trafficking and murder. He had agreed, but he could not go through with it after a lifetime of deceit. Herrera 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, hoping that God would show him how to atone, and Enoch raised a toast to atonement.
Key Characters
- Jaya Soames led the hunters from her family's island. She went to Belize at Schaefer's call, planned the ambush at the temple and offered Schaefer a place on the team.
- Enoch Nakai doubted Herrera from the start and needled him about scripture. He joined Schaefer during the battle, begged for no more diving afterward and toasted Herrera's atonement.
- Mandy Graves defended Herrera against Enoch and Schaefer, complained that the team was not equipped to fight Predators and Russians at once and held the ambush with Herrera.
- Raphael Herrera was the former drug runner who had survived the slaughter of his men and the murder of his family. He confessed that Stargazer had freed him to spy on the team and chose to stay behind in Belize to atone.
- John Schaefer was the former New York detective and brother of Dutch who had settled in the tropics. He called the team to Belize, guided it through the caverns, fought a wounded Predator and declined to join the team until he found his brother.
- Dutch Schaefer was mentioned as the brother whose trail John Schaefer was still following.
- Valentina Ligachev was the Russian colonel and old comrade of Schaefer who led a unit after the aliens' technology, set a roadblock for the decoy truck and lost four men in the jungle.
- Nadia was one of Ligachev's agents who watched the team at its hotel and followed the decoy truck.
- Kim was the cave diver who led her friends into the Mayan Underworld and was killed by a plasma bolt.
- Donny and Tamara were Kim's friends. Donny was killed with a spear and Tamara was drowned.
- The Silver Predator was the silver-masked hunter that mimicked the cartel leader's voice, killed the divers and was killed by its companion on the summit of the pyramid after signaling the sky.
- The Brown Predator was the hunter that rose from the water to take its prey. It turned on its wounded companion and left with the clan.
- The Clan Elder was the leader of the Predators who came for the dead hunter. He wore a gold cross among his trophies and spared Herrera.
- The unnamed bald Russian was Ligachev's companion, whom Schaefer recognized from their past.
- The tattooed leader of the ambushers and the long-haired leader of the cartel search party were not named. Both were beheaded by the Predators.
- Herrera's family was murdered in his house after the raid on his camp.
Behind The Scenes
Dark Horse announced Predator: Hunters III on November 13, 2019, promising story ties to its first Predator series. Issue #1 went on sale on February 5, 2020 as a 32-page comic priced at $3.99, with a cover by Brian Thies and a glow-in-the-dark variant by Andy Brase. Chris Warner, who had drawn Dark Horse's first Predator series in 1989, wrote the story, and Thies penciled and inked it. Wes Dzioba colored it and Michael Heisler lettered it, under editors Randy Stradley and Judy Khuu.
Issue #2 followed on March 18, 2020, with another Thies cover and a glow-in-the-dark variant. The series was planned as four issues, but the COVID-19 pandemic halted it after the second, and when the Predator license moved to Marvel after Disney bought Fox, the last two issues never appeared as single comics. The story brought back John Schaefer from Dark Horse's first series, later novelized as Predator: Concrete Jungle, and gave him his first name. Ligachev returned from the comic adapted as Predator: Cold War, where the novel spelled her name Ligacheva.
Dark Horse completed the story in the Predator: Hunters III trade paperback, a 96-page book collecting all four parts that was released on November 4, 2020 for $19.99. It was the last Predator comic from Dark Horse, and it carried the ISBN 978-1-50671-813-2. The series was reprinted in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2, released by Marvel on May 22, 2024, alongside the first two Predator: Hunters series. Like Hunters II, it called the island where Herrera was left Tehua, although the first series had named it Kehua.
The series also settled the fate of Raphael Herrera, the former drug runner whom the first Predator: Hunters series had shown captured, hung upside down and missing an ear before the team left him for dead. Hunters II brought him back alive in its final pages, and Hunters III revealed that Stargazer had nursed him back to health on Tehua and sent him home to report on the team. His flashback also showed how he had lost his men and his family, and the story ended with him confessing and turning his back on both the hunters and his handlers.
Conclusion
Predator: Hunters III was the last part of Chris Warner's Hunters saga at Dark Horse, taking Jaya Soames's team to Belize, where two Predators hunted drug runners from caves beneath a Mayan pyramid. With John Schaefer at their side, the hunters stayed ahead of Ligachev's Russians, only to watch one creature kill the other and a clan ship carry them both away. The story also explained how Raphael Herrera came home alive, revealing that Stargazer had freed him to spy on the team, and it ended with his confession and his choice to stay behind and atone.
External Sources
- Predator: Hunters III TPB at Dark Horse
- Predator: Hunters III #1 at Dark Horse
- Dark Horse announcement of Predator: Hunters III
- Predator: Hunters III #1 preview at The Beat
- Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2 at Marvel
Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Predator Lore
