Scarecrow

by Matthew Reilly

‘All right,’ Schofield said. The Universal Disarm Code. The sixth Mersenne prime was still written on his hand: 131071.

  He started punching the numerical keypad on the CincLock unit when without warning the lifeboat beneath him moved and—

  Beep!

  The screen squealed in protest.

  FIRST PROTOCOL (PROXIMITY): FAILED.

  ALL PROTOCOLS REACTIVATED.

  ‘What!’ Schofield snapped his eyes up to find Knight gunning their lifeboat away from the missile console, while Mother fired off their stern at two pursuing IG-88 boats.

  They weaved in between the missile silos.

  ‘Sorry, Captain!’ Knight yelled. ‘But we had to go! We were dead if we stayed there!’

  ‘Yeah, well we have to get back within range of that console in about ten seconds! Because I need at least twenty-five seconds to complete the response pattern!’

  Bullet geysers raked the water all around their speeding lifeboat.

  00:00:35

  00:00:34

  00:00:33

  Knight brought the lifeboat round. ‘How close do you have to be!’

  ‘Sixty feet!’

  ‘All right!’

  Bullets whizzed past their ears, pinged off the missile silos.

  Knight swung their boat around and brought it into a wide circular path around the steel island that was the control console, a circle that included the occasional weaving run in amongst the forest of silos.

  00:00:27

  00:00:26

  00:00:25

  Schofield’s screen beeped to life.

  FIRST PROTOCOL (PROXIMITY): SATISFIED.

  INITIATE SECOND PROTOCOL.

  The light-response display began—which meant so did Schofield’s screen-tapping.

  Mother kept firing at the IG-88 boats behind them.

  Knight drove with one hand, fired with the other, careful to keep their boat within sixty feet of the control console.

  00:00:16

  00:00:15

  00:00:14

  But then the IG-88 boats, now aware of the circular path Knight was taking, split up.

  One of them pivoted in the water, and took off in the opposite circular direction: the effect being that the first IG-88 boat was now driving Schofield’s boat toward the second one.

  Oblivious to the chase, Schofield’s hands moved more quickly now.

  Red-white-white . . .

  Tap-tap-tap . . .

  00:00:11

  00:00:10

  00:00:09

  Knight saw IG-88’s plan. He fired at the oncoming boat’s driver.

  Blam!-blam!-blam! . . .

  Miss-miss-miss . . .

  00:00:08

  00:00:07

  00:00:06

  Schofield’s hands were a blur now, tapping smoothly left and right.

  Mother hit one of their pursuers. But then roared as she took a sizzling-hot round to her shoulder.

  00:00:05

  00:00:04

  00:00:03

  They came on collision course with the second IG-88 boat, Knight still firing at its driver.

  Blam!-blam!-blam! . . .

  Miss-miss . . .

  Hit.

  00:00:02

  The driver flopped and fell, dead. The IG-88 boat peeled away, and Knight kept his boat within the 60-foot zone of the console.

  00:00:01

  And Schofield’s hand movements changed slightly. Instead of tapping circles, it looked as if he was entering a—

  00:00:00

  Too late.

  None of the Chameleon missiles, however, fired.

  The countdown timer on the console was frozen at:

  00:00:00.05

  The seconds may have hit zero, but the very last second—calculated in blurring digital hundredths—had yet to fully expire when Schofield had punched in the Universal Disarm Code and hit ‘ENTER’.

  The screen now read:

  THIRD PROTOCOL (CODE ENTRY): SATISFIED.

  AUTHORIZED DISARM CODE ENTERED.

  MISSILE LAUNCH ABORTED.

  Schofield breathed a sigh of relief.

  No missiles had launched.

  London, Paris and Berlin were safe.

  It was then, however, that the open starboard side door of the MV Talbot went slowly under the waterline.

  SHOOOOOOM!!!

  The roar was absolutely deafening.

  It was, literally, like the opening of the floodgates.

  Like an invading army overwhelming its enemy’s lines, an unimaginable quantity of seawater came gushing in over the threshold of the Talbot’s wide starboard-side doorway.

  A wall of water—a super tidal wave of unstoppable, ravenous liquid.

  The result was instantaneous.

  The entire supertanker rolled dramatically, righting itself as the inrushing water from the starboard side began to balance off against the inflow from port.

  This righting of the Talbot, however, had one very important side-effect: it served to disengage the Talbot from the bow of the Eindhoven. And with the loss of its grip on the other supertanker, the Talbot lost its only means of staying afloat.

  And so it began to sink—at speed—into the depths of the English Channel.

  For Schofield, Knight and Mother, in their lifeboat on the water’s surface inside the missile hold, the noise was all-consuming.

  The roar of the waterfall flooding into the hold echoed throughout the ship. Waves crashed against steel walls. Whirlpools formed.

  And the water level rose at frightening speed.

  Indeed, to Schofield, it seemed as if the ceiling was lowering itself toward them. Quickly.

  Within moments, they found themselves speeding along the surface halfway up the gigantic missile silos, 20 feet below the steel catwalks suspended from the roof.

  In addition to this, with the breaching of the star-board-side door, Demon Larkham and his IG-88 men broke away from their chase, heading instead for the various ladders that led to the hold’s ceiling.

  ‘Damn, he’s good,’ Knight said. ‘The Demon’s heading topside, for the foredeck. He’s going to cover all the hatches. Then he just waits for us to come up—which we’ll have to do eventually.’

  ‘Then we have to find another way out,’ Schofield said. ‘All I need now is to get away from this ship and find a safe place to hole up while I disarm the missiles aimed at America.’

  Schofield pulled out his Palm Pilot to see which was the next Kormoran ship to launch.

  He called up the bundle of documents that he had seen on the Pilot before:

  He clicked on the abbreviated launch list. The full list came up:

  He saw the familiar list.

  It was the same as the one Book II had decrypted before. He saw the GPS locations of the first three boats: Talbot, Ambrose and Jewel.

  The Ambrose was next: set to fire at 12 noon from GPS co-ordinates 28743.05,4104.55.

  That’s right, he remembered. New York.

  Wait a second, his mind stopped short.

  This list was different to Book’s list.

  He looked at it more closely.

  Some of the missiles on the lower half of the list had been altered.

  Book’s list had featured only two varieties of missile: the Shahab and the Taep’o-Dong.

  Yet this one featured several others in their place: the Sky Horse (from Taiwan), the Ghauri-II (Pakistan), the Agni-II (India) and the Jericho-2B (Israel).

  It also, Schofield saw, had an extra launch vessel on it—the last entry, the Arbella—set to fire more than two hours after the first group of missiles.

  This wasn’t even mentioning another disturbing fact: the Taiwanese and Israeli missiles on this list were armed with American nuclear warheads, the powerful W-88—

  A withering volley of bullets smacked the water next to Schofield. He hardly noticed.

  When he looked up, he saw that Knight had brought their lifeboat alongside a ladder leading up to a ceiling catwalk. Once upon a
time that catwalk had been suspended eighty feet above the floor of the hold. Now it was barely eighteen feet above the fast-rising water level.

  On it, however, sixty yards away in both directions and closing fast, were two four-man teams of IG-88 troops. They had just burst down through hatches in the ceiling and were now charging down the length of the catwalk from either end, firing hard, their bullets hitting the girders all around Schofield’s boat.

  Ping!-ping!-ping!-ping!-ping!

  ‘Bastard!’ Knight yelled. ‘He’s not waiting for us to come up. He’s forcing us up!’

  Mother lifted Schofield up by the collar. ‘Come on, handsome, you can get back to your computer later.’ She hauled him out of the lifeboat and up the ladder, covering him with her body.

  They climbed the ladder quickly, shooting as they did so, reached the catwalk, where they were met by a million impact sparks.

  Mother took up a covering position while Knight led Schofield aft.

  Ping!-ping!-ping!-ping!-ping!

  Bullets were spraying everywhere.

  Knight and Schofield fired at the IG-88 men coming from the stern-end of the catwalk. Schofield went dry.

  ‘Are we actually going anywhere in particular!’ he yelled.

  ‘Yes! To a safe place!’ Knight called, still firing. ‘A place where you can do your disarming thing, and where, at the same time, we can all get out of this sinking death-trap! Here!’

  Knight cut sharply right, running past a small maintenance shack erected at a T-junction of this catwalk and another, emerging behind the shack to behold—

  —the two yellow mini-submarines suspended on chains from the ceiling of the missile hold.

  Like the catwalks, the subs weren’t very high up anymore. Seventeen feet above the water level. A wide hood-like awning covered both the two subs and the catwalk between them. It now partially covered Schofield and Knight from the IG-88 teams.

  Ping!-ping!-ping!-ping!-ping!

  Trailing a dozen yards behind Knight and Schofield, Mother came to the maintenance shack at the T-junction, still returning fire at the IG-88 troops, now only twenty yards away from her on either side.

  Schofield watched as she tried to make a break for the mini-subs, but the IG-88 troops blocked her way with a storm of bullets.

  Mother ducked inside the shelter of the maintenance shack.

  She was cut off.

  ‘Mother!’ Schofield yelled.

  ‘Get out of here, Scarecrow!’ she said over the radio.

  The IG-88 men assaulted her shack with the most violent fusillade of MetalStorm rounds Schofield had seen yet.

  The shack erupted in bullet impacts.

  Mother ducked out of view—and Schofield feared that she’d been hit—but then she popped up again, firing and yelling, and took out two of the IG-88 men.

  ‘Scarecrow! I said, get out of here!’

  ‘I’m not leaving without you!’

  ‘Go!’ She loosed two more shots.

  ‘I won’t lose you and Gant in one day!’

  Mother’s voice became serious. ‘Scarecrow. Go. You’re more valuable than an old grunt like me.’ Mother looked over at him from the shack. ‘You always were. My value comes in keeping you alive. At least let me do that. Now, go, you sexy little thing! Go! Go! Go!’

  And with that, Schofield saw Mother do something both courageous and suicidal.

  She stood fully upright in the windows of the shack and, issuing a primal yell of ‘Yaaaahhhhhhh!’, started firing with two guns at both of the IG-88 forces.

  Her sudden move stopped the two IG-88 teams in their tracks—each of them lost their front man in a gruesome fountain of blood—but crucially, it gave Schofield and Knight the opening they needed to escape.

  ‘Get in!’ Knight yelled, hitting the ‘HATCH’ button on one of the yellow submarines. With a quick iris-like motion, the circular hatch on top of the sub opened. ‘Don’t let her sacrifice count for nothing!’

  Schofield took a half-step into the hatch, looked back at Mother—just as the two IG-88 forces overwhelmed her with their fire.

  ‘Damn it, no . . .’ he breathed.

  A volley of MetalStorm bullets hit Mother, slamming into her chest armour . . .

  Mother snapped upright, swaying, not firing anymore, her mouth open, her eyes suddenly blank—

  —and then she fell and in the haze of smoke and flying glass, Schofield lost sight of her as she dropped out of sight below the maintenance shack’s window frames.

  A moment later the two IG-88 forces put the issue beyond doubt.

  At the exact same time, both IG-88 teams fired rocket launchers at the maintenance shack.

  Two fingers of smoke lanced toward Mother’s little shack from both fore and aft.

  They hit it together and—boom!—the shed’s four walls blasted outward, the whole structure exploding in an instant, its flat floor section just dropping through the air to the water sixteen feet below.

  Schofield made to step out of the sub but Knight pushed him back in.

  ‘No! We go! Now!’ Knight yelled above the gunfire.

  He shoved Schofield into the mini-sub, and Schofield landed inside it—

  —only to discover that someone else was already there.

  Schofield’s feet hit the floor of the mini-sub, and he looked up to see a sword blade rushing directly at his face.

  Reflex action.

  He whipped up his empty H&K pistol and—clang!—the blade rushing at his throat hit the pistol’s trigger-guard and stopped: one inch from Schofield’s neck.

  Dmitri Zamanov stood before him.

  He held a short-bladed Cossack sword in his hands, and his eyes blazed with hatred.

  ‘You chose the wrong hiding place,’ the Russian bounty hunter growled.

  Then before Schofield could move, he punched two buttons.

  First, the internal ‘HATCH’ button.

  The hatch whizzed shut, its steel door irising closed.

  And second, the ‘ASDS RELEASE’ button, and suddenly Schofield felt his stomach turn as the entire mini-submarine dropped from its chains and fell sixteen feet straight down, landing with a massive splash in the rising body of seawater.

  ‘Goddamn it!’ Aloysius Knight couldn’t believe it. ‘What is this shit!’

  One moment, he’d been shoving Schofield into the yellow ASDS and was about to climb in after him—the next, the sub’s hatch closed right in front of him and then the whole fucking thing dropped down into the water below!

  Hypercharged bullets hit the girders all around him as the IG-88 teams rushed past the destroyed maintenance shack and onto the submarine catwalk.

  So Knight did the only thing he could do. He dived into the second mini-submarine, bullet-marks sizzling across the soles of his boots as he did so.

  Schofield and Zamanov fought.

  No style here. No graceful technique.

  It was pure street-fight.

  In the tight confines of the mini-sub, they rolled and punched—and punched and punched.

  Schofield’s empty gun was useless, but Zamanov’s Cossack sword was the key.

  Which was why the first thing Schofield had done after their sub had bounced with a splash into the water was hit Zamanov’s wrist, causing him to drop the sword.

  And then they wrestled—ferociously—Schofield because he was fuelled by Mother’s recent sacrifice, Zamanov because he was a psychopath.

  They hurled each other into the sub’s walls, fighting with venom, drawing blood with every blow.

  Schofield broke Zamanov’s cheekbone.

  Zamanov broke Schofield’s nose, while another of his blows dislodged Schofield’s earpiece.

  Then Zamanov tackled Schofield, throwing him against the sub’s control panel, and all of a sudden—shoosh—the mini-sub began to . . .

  . . . submerge.

  Schofield peeled himself off the instrument panel, saw that he’d knocked the ‘BALLAST’ switch. The ASDS was going under.

/>   And suddenly they were underwater. Out through the sub’s two hemispherical domes, Schofield saw the now-submerged world of the missile hold.

  Everything was silent, tinged with blue—the floor, the missile silos, the dead bodies—an amazing man-made underwater seascape.

  The Talbot was now leaning slightly to starboard, the hold’s floor tilted at least 20 degrees to that side.

  Zamanov scooped up his sword.

  The yellow mini-sub continued its slow-motion freefall through the watery hold.

  And Zamanov and Schofield engaged—Zamanov swinging lustily, Schofield grabbing the bounty hunter’s sword-hand as it came down.

  But then, with a muffled crash, their ASDS hit the floor of the missile hold . . .

  . . . and started to slide on its side toward the open starboard cargo door!

  Schofield’s world tilted crazily.

  Both men were thrown sideways.

  The sub slid down the sloping floor before, to Schofield’s utter horror, it tipped off the edge of the doorway and fell out through it, into the open sea.

  The little yellow sub fell quickly through the darkened water of the English Channel—beneath the gigantic hull of the MV Talbot.

  The sheer size of the foundering supertanker above it dwarfed the ASDS. The mini-sub looked like an insect underneath a sinking blue whale.

  But while the supertanker was sinking slowly and gradually, the mini-sub—its ballast tanks full—was descending at speed.

  More than that.

  It shot vertically down through the water, free-falling like an express elevator.

  The average depth of the English Channel is about 120 metres. Here, off Cherbourg, it was 100 metres deep, and the ASDS was covering that depth quickly.

  Inside it, Schofield and Zamanov fought in near darkness, struggling in the ghostly blue glow of the mini-sub’s instrument lights.

  ‘After I kill you, I am going to cut your fucking American heart out!’ Zamanov roared as he struggled to extract his sword-hand from Schofield’s grasp.

  Up until then, the fight had used more or less standard moves. But then Zamanov went for what Marines call ‘the Lecter move’—a very uncivilised tactic.

  He bared his teeth and tried to bite Schofield’s face.

  Schofield recoiled instantly, stretched his face out of range, and Zamanov got what he really wanted—his sword-hand back.