Scarecrow

by Matthew Reilly

  The aircraft flying toward London—a sleek Gulfstream IV executive jet—was pulling rapidly away from the second one, a lumbering Royal Air Force C-130J Hercules cargo plane.

  Right now, Knight’s Sukhoi was paralleling Larkham’s planes, flying just beyond the horizon, its stealth features on full power.

  ‘Common tactic for the Demon,’ Knight said. ‘Dividing his men into a delivery team and a strike team. The Demon takes the strike team to liquidate the next target while his delivery team ferries the heads to the verification venue.’

  ‘Looks like the strike team is going to London,’ Schofield said. ‘They’re going after Rosenthal.’

  ‘Likely,’ Knight said. ‘What do you want to do?’

  Schofield could think of nothing else but Gant, sitting in the belly of the Hercules.

  ‘I want that plane,’ he said.

  Knight punched some keys on his computer console.

  ‘All right, I’m accessing their flight data computer. That Hercules is scheduled for a mid-air refuelling over western Turkey in ninety minutes.’

  ‘Where’s the tanker plane taking off from?’ Schofield asked.

  ‘A VC-10 aerial tanker is scheduled for lift-off from the Brits’ Akrotiri air force base on Cyprus in exactly forty-five minutes.’

  ‘Okay,’ Schofield said. ‘Book and Mother, Rufus here will take you to London. Find Benjamin Rosenthal before Larkham’s strike team does.’

  ‘What about you?’ Mother asked.

  ‘Captain Knight and I are getting off in Cyprus.’

  Forty-five minutes later, a British Vickers VC-10 air-to-air refuelling tanker lifted off from its island runway on Cyprus.

  Unbeknownst to the plane’s four-man crew, it contained two stowaways in its rear cargo bay—Shane Schofield and Aloysius Knight—whom Rufus had dropped off, under the curtain of active stealth, in the shallows three miles away.

  For their part, Rufus, Mother and Book II had powered off immediately in the Black Raven, cutting a beeline for London.

  Soon the VC-10 was zooming through Turkish airspace, pulling alongside the RAF Hercules coming from Afghanistan.

  The tanker moved in front of the Hercules, rose a little above it. Then it extended a long swooping fuel hose—or ‘boom’—from its rear-end. The boom was about 70 metres long and at its tip was a circular steel ‘drogue’, which would ultimately attach itself to the receiving aircraft.

  Controlled by a lone operator, or ‘boomer’, lying on his stomach in a glassed-in compartment at the rear of the tanker plane, the boom angled in toward the receiving probe of the Hercules.

  The Hercules’ receiving probe—essentially, it was just a horizontal pipe—was located just above the cargo plane’s cockpit windows.

  The aerial ballet went perfectly.

  The tanker’s boom operator extended the boom, manoeuvred it into place, just as below and behind it the Hercules flew forward and—kerchunk—the Hercules’ receiving probe locked into the drogue at the end of the boom and fuel started pumping between the two moving planes.

  While this was happening, Knight started loading his H&K pistol with some odd-looking 9mm rounds. Each bullet had an orange band painted around it.

  ‘Bull stoppers,’ he said to Schofield. ‘Every Delta man’s best friend. Gas-expanding nine-millimetre rounds. Better than hollow points. They enter the target and then blow big.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘Big enough to cut a man in half. Want some?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Here, then,’ Knight placed some of the orange bullets in a pocket on Schofield’s combat webbing. ‘For when you reconsider.’

  Schofield nodded at Knight’s utility vest, at the peculiar array of devices hanging from it—the Pony Bottle, the mini blowtorch, the mountaineering pitons. There was even a very small pouch-like rollbag which Schofield recognised.

  ‘Is that a body bag?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah. A Markov Type-III,’ Knight said. ‘Gotta hand it to the Soviets. Nobody ever built a better one.’

  Schofield nodded. The Markov Type-III was a chemical body bag. With its double-strength ziplock and poly-coated nylon walls, it could safely hold a body infected with the worst kind of contamination: plague, chem weapons, even superheated radioactive waste. The Russians had used a lot of them at Chernobyl.

  It was the pitons, however, that intrigued Schofield the most. He could understand a bounty hunter carrying a portable body bag with him, but pitons?

  Pitons are small springloaded scissor-like devices that mountain climbers jam into tiny crevices. The piton springs open with such force—pinioning itself against the walls of a crevice—that climbers can attach ropes to it and hold up their bodyweight. Schofield wondered what a bounty hunter might use them for.

  ‘Question,’ he said. ‘What do you use pitons for?’

  Knight shrugged casually. ‘Climb over walls. Up the sides of buildings.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Schofield asked. Like torture, perhaps.

  Knight held Schofield’s gaze. ‘They do have . . . other uses.’

  When the refuelling was almost complete, Schofield and Knight sprang.

  ‘You take the boomer,’ Knight said, drawing a second 9mm pistol. ‘I’ll take the cockpit crew.’

  ‘Right,’ Schofield said, before adding quickly: ‘Knight. You can do whatever you want on the Hercules, but how about using non-lethal force here.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘This crew didn’t do anything.’

  Knight scowled. ‘Oh, all right . . .’

  ‘Thanks.’

  And they moved.

  With its fifteen wraparound cockpit windows, the C-130 cargo plane provided its pilots with exceptional visibility, and right now the two pilots of the British Hercules could see the bird-like rear-end of the VC-10 high above them, the long swooping fuel hose extending out from it like a tail and attaching itself to the receiving probe directly above their cockpit.

  They’d done this sort of mid-air refuelling a hundred times before. Once the two planes were connected, the pilots had switched over to automatic pilot and become more concerned with observing the fuel pumping stats than with watching the amazing view outside.

  Which was probably why they didn’t notice when—twenty-two minutes into the refuelling—a lone black-clad figure came whizzing down the length of the fuel hose like a death-defying stuntman and their cockpit windows exploded under his withering assault of gunfire.

  The sight was truly spectacular.

  Two gigantic planes flying in tandem at 20,000 feet, connected tail-to-nose by the long swooping fuel hose . . .

  . . . with a tiny man-shaped figure sliding down the hose as if it were a zipline, hanging onto a makeshift flying-fox one-handed, an H&K pistol held in his free hand, firing at the cockpit of the Hercules plane!

  The two pilots of the Hercules went down in a hail of smashing glass.

  Wind rushed into the cockpit. But the plane, under automatic pilot, remained steady.

  For his part, Aloysius Knight slid down the fuel hose at incredible speed, hanging onto a seatbelt that he had lashed over the hose—his face covered in a high-altitude breathing mask, an ultra-compact MC-4/7 attack parachute strapped to his back.

  Since the Hercules’ receiving probe was situated directly above its cockpit, Knight’s slide ended with him blasting right through the shattered glass windows of the Hercules and landing inside its wind-assaulted cockpit.

  He keyed his radio mike. ‘All right, Scarecrow! Come on down!’

  A few seconds later, a second figure—also wearing a breathing mask and a small attack parachute—swung down from the tanker plane, shooting down the length of the fuel hose before disappearing inside the shattered windows of the Hercules.

  In the cargo hold of the Hercules, everyone turned—eight black-clad commandos, two men in suits, and two prisoners—as a terrible crash rang out from the cockpit, followed by the roar of inrushing air.

&nb
sp; The eight commandos were members of the IG-88 delivery team. The two men in suits had no names that anyone knew but they did possess MI-6 identity badges: British Intelligence.

  And the two prisoners were Lieutenant Elizabeth ‘Fox’ Gant and General Ronson H. Weitzman, both from the United States Marine Corps, both captured by the Demon’s forces in Afghanistan.

  Just before the mid-air attack had commenced, Gant had regained consciousness—to find herself seated in the wide cargo hold of the Hercules, her hands flex-cuffed behind her back.

  A few feet away from her, Ronson Weitzman—one of the most senior officers in the entire US Marine Corps—lay spreadeagled on his back, on the bonnet of a Humvee parked in the cargo bay, tied down, his arms stretched wide as if he had been crucified horizontally, his wrists attached by two separate pairs of handcuffs to both of the Humvee’s side mirrors.

  The right sleeve of Weitzman’s uniform had been torn off and a rubber tourniquet was tied tightly around his exposed arm.

  Flanking the General were the two MI-6 men. Gant had awoken just as the shorter one had been removing a hypodermic needle from Weitzman’s arm.

  ‘Give it a couple of minutes,’ the short one had said.

  The General had raised his head, his eyes glazed.

  ‘Hello, General Weitzman,’ the taller intelligence officer smiled. ‘The drug you are feeling right now is known as EA-617. I’m sure a man of your rank has heard of it. It’s a neural disinhibitor—a drug that retards the release of the neurotransmitter “GABA” in your brain—a drug that will make answering our questions truthfully just that little bit easier.’

  ‘Wha—?’ Weitzman looked at his arm. ‘. . . 617? No . . .’

  Watching the scene from a discreet distance were the members of the IG-88 bounty hunting team—led by the tall and strikingly handsome soldier Gant had seen in the caves in Afghanistan. She had heard the other IG-88 men calling him ‘Cowboy’.

  ‘All right, General,’ the tall MI-6 man said. ‘The Universal Disarm Code. What is it?’

  Weitzman frowned, squinting hard, as if his brain was trying to resist the truth drug.

  ‘I . . . I don’t know of any such code,’ he said unconvincingly.

  ‘Yes you do, General. The United States Universal Disarm Code. The code that overrides any and every security system in the US armed services. You oversaw its entry into a secret US military project called the “Kormoran Project”. We know about Kormoran, General. But we don’t know the code, and the code is what we want. What is it?’

  Gant was completely shocked.

  She’d heard rumours about the Universal Disarm Code. It was the stuff of legend: a numerical code that overrode every US military security system.

  Weitzman blinked, fighting the drug. ‘It . . . it doesn’t . . . exist . . .’

  ‘No, General,’ the tall man said. ‘It does exist, and you are one of five people in the US military establishment who know it. Maybe I will have to increase the dosage here.’

  The tall man pulled out another syringe, inserted it into Weitzman’s exposed arm.

  Weitzman groaned, ‘No . . .’

  The EA-617 serum went into his arm.

  And that was when the cockpit windows had exploded under Knight’s hailstorm of gunfire.

  Schofield dropped into the cockpit of the Hercules, landed next to Knight.

  ‘Now can I use lethal force?’ Knight shouted.

  ‘Be my guest!’

  Knight pointed to a TV monitor on the cockpit dashboard—it showed a high-angle view of the Hercules’ rear cargo hold.

  Schofield saw about a dozen large wooden crates near the cockpit steps, one Humvee with Weitzman crucified on the bonnet, eight bad guys in black combat uniforms, two bad guys in suits and on the floor, up against the wall of the cargo hold, on the left-hand side of the Humvee, her hands cuffed behind her back . . .

  . . . Libby Gant.

  ‘Too many to take out with guns,’ Schofield said.

  ‘I know,’ Knight said. ‘So we take guns out of the equation.’

  He pulled two small grenades from his combat webbing—small hand-held charges painted pale yellow.

  ‘What are—?’ Schofield asked.

  ‘British AC-2 charges. Adhesive-chaff grenades.’

  ‘Anti-firearm charges,’ Schofield said, nodding. ‘Nice.’

  The British SAS, experts in counter-terrorist ops, had developed the AC-2 for operations against armed hostage takers. They were basically standard flash-bang grenades, but with one very special extra feature.

  ‘You ready? Just remember, you get one shot before your gun jams,’ Knight said. ‘Okay, let’s rock this joint.’

  At which point, he cracked open the cockpit door and hurled his two AC-2 charges into the cargo hold beyond it.

  The two pale yellow grenades flew into the hold, skipping across the tops of the wooden cargo crates before landing on the floor beside the Humvee and—

  —flash-bang!

  The standard explosion came first: blinding white flashes of light followed by ear-crashing bangs, designed to deafen and disorient.

  And then came the AC-2 grenades’ extra feature.

  As they exploded, the two grenades sent brilliant starbursts of tiny white-grey particles shooting out in every direction, completely filling the enclosed space of the cargo bay.

  The particles looked like confetti, and after they dispersed, they floated in the air, infinitesimally small, forming a white-grey veil over the scene, making it look like a snowglobe that had just been shaken.

  Only this wasn’t confetti.

  It was a special form of adhesive chaff—a sticky stringy compound that stuck to everything.

  The cockpit door burst open, and Knight and Schofield charged into the cargo hold.

  The nearest IG-88 commando reached for his rifle, but received an arrow-bolt in his forehead—care of the mini-crossbow attached to Knight’s right forearm guard.

  A second-nearest man also spun quickly, and—shlip!—received an arrow from Knight’s left-arm crossbow square in the eye.

  It was the third IG-88 commando who actually managed to pull the trigger on his Colt Commando assault rifle.

  The machine-gun fired—once. One bullet only. Then it jammed.

  It had been ‘chaffed’. The sticky adhesive chaff of Knight’s grenades had got into its barrel, its receiver, all its moving parts, rendering it useless.

  Schofield nailed the man with the butt of his Maghook.

  But the other IG-88 men learned quickly, and within seconds, two Warlock hunting knives slammed into the wooden cargo crates beside them.

  Knight responded by pulling one of the most evil-looking weapons Schofield had ever seen from his utility vest: a small four-bladed ninja throwing star, or shuriken. It was about as big as Schofield’s hand: four viciously-curving blades that extended out from a central hub.

  Knight threw the shuriken expertly, side-handed, and it sliced laterally through the air, whistling, before—shnick! shnick!—it cut the throats of two IG-88 commandos standing side-by-side.

  Five down, Schofield thought, three to go, plus the two guys in suits . . .

  And then suddenly a hand grabbed him—

  —a stunningly strong grip—

  —and Schofield was hurled back toward the cockpit doorway.

  He hit the floor hard, and looked up to see an enormous IG-88 trooper stalking toward him. The IG-88 man was huge: at least six feet nine, black-skinned, with bulging biceps and a face that bristled with unadulterated fury.

  ‘Wot the fuck d’you fink you’re doin’?’ the giant black man said.

  But Schofield was already moving again—he quickly jumped to his feet and unleashed a thunderous blow with his Maghook’s butt at the black trooper’s jaw.

  The blow hit home.

  And the big man didn’t even flinch.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ Schofield said.

  The giant black trooper punched Schofield, sending him flying back
into the wind-blasted cockpit like a rag doll. Schofield slammed into the dashboard.

  Then the big black trooper picked him up easily and said, ‘You came in froo that window. You go out froo that window.’

  And without so much as a blink, the gigantic trooper hurled Shane Schofield out through the broken cockpit windows of the Hercules and into the clear open sky.

  In the particle-filled cargo hold, Aloysius Knight—charging forward, hurling throwing stars—spun around to check on Schofield . . .

  . . . just in time to see him get thrown out through the cockpit windows.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Knight breathed. Like himself, Schofield was wearing a parachute, so he’d be okay, but his sudden disappearance didn’t help the mathematics of this fight at all.

  Knight keyed his radio mike. ‘Schofield! You okay?’

  A wind-blasted voice replied: ‘I’m not gone yet!’

  Seen from the outside, the Hercules was still cruising steadily at 20,000 feet, still behind and below the VC-10 tanker plane . . . only now it was possessed of a tiny figure hanging off its nose cone.

  Schofield clung to the bow of the speeding Hercules, his body assaulted by the speeding wind, 20,000 feet above the world but thanks to his Maghook, now magnetically affixed to the nose of the cargo plane.

  His big black attacker—the man’s IG-88 nickname was, appropriately, ‘Rocko’—stood peering out the cockpit windows above him.

  Then Rocko ducked inside and suddenly reappeared with a Colt .45 pistol which had been kept in the cockpit and as such had been unaffected by Knight’s chaff grenades.

  ‘Whoa, shit!’ Schofield yelled as the first shot went flying over his head.

  He’d been hoping that Rocko would just assume he’d fallen to his death and then head back inside the plane, giving Schofield a chance to climb back in through the cockpit windows.

  But not now . . .

  And so Schofield did the only thing he could do.

  He unclipped Gant’s Maghook from his belt, and now moving downward with two Maghooks, affixed it to the hull of the Hercules below him—clunk!—and swung down below the nose-cone of the massive plane, out of the line of Rocko’s fire, so that he was now hanging from the underbelly of the cargo plane, 20,000 feet above the earth.