Scarecrow Returns ss-5

by Matthew Reilly

HIGH-VALUE TARGET LIST (USSR)

  List of first-strike targets in the USSR in the event of a major conflict

  Holman, G

  1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991

  NRO/USAF

  SATELLITE LOCATION LIST

  Interagency swap of GPS data concerning Russian bases

  Gaunt, K

  2001 (updated 2006)

  ARMY

  SOVIET CHEMICAL & BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS SURVEY

  List of known chemical and biological weapons kept by USSR/Russian Special Weapons Directorate

  Gamble, N

  1980–1991; 1992–present

  Right now, Dave wanted to run that list by the person most knowledgeable about the Army of Thieves, the author of the DIA’s background report on it, Marianne Retter.

  Fairfax came to an office marked: B2209 RETTER, M. He could see a light under the door and raised his fist to knock—

  —just as the door opened and an attractive woman in her mid-thirties appeared before him, wriggling into an overcoat.

  She stopped short. “Hi there . . . ?”

  “Hi,” Fairfax said awkwardly. “I’m Dave Fairfax, Cipher and Cryptanalysis.” He pointed dumbly at his security badge. “You’re Marianne Retter?”

  “Yeah, and I’m kinda in a hurry.”

  “I just have a few quick questions for you.”

  “Can you talk as you walk?”

  “Sure.”

  Marianne Retter was a fast walker. Dave struggled to keep up with her as she strode toward the Pentagon’s River Entrance.

  “I want to ask you about a background report you wrote recently about a terrorist group called the Army of Thieves,” Dave said.

  Retter glanced at him as she walked. “I’ve been monitoring their activities for a couple of months now, but until today, nobody of note seemed to care too much. But today, well, now everybody wants to know about the Army of Thieves—right now, I’ve been summoned to the Situation Room at the White House.” She shrugged. “I predicted that they were gonna do something and they musta done it.”

  “You don’t know what they’ve done?” Dave asked.

  “Nope. Do you?”

  “No, but I know someone who’s close to it and that it’s ongoing.”

  Retter stopped so suddenly that Dave tripped as he stopped, too.

  Her hazel eyes bored into his. “It’s ongoing and you know where it’s happening?”

  “Yes.”

  “So where is it?”

  Fairfax blinked. This was a classic exchange between intelligence folk: he had to show the strength of his knowledge, but not too much of it, at least not till he knew this woman better.

  “My source is a Marine in the Arctic Circle. He’s been ordered to take them down.”

  Marianne Retter gave nothing away. She eyed Fairfax up and down, her brain visibly deciding whether or not she should share information with him.

  “Fairfax. You were the analyst who stormed that fake supertanker with the nukes a while back with a team of Marines.”

  “That’s supposed to be classified . . .”

  “I gather intelligence for a living,” Retter said with a cute smile. “Plus, I also did a tour in ICI.”

  ICI stood for Internal Counter-Intelligence. The DIA’s version of internal affairs.

  “That’s me,” Fairfax said.

  “You have a Navy Cross,” Retter said. “And they don’t give those away for nothing.”

  Fairfax said, “All I know about you is that you’re currently America’s leading expert on the Army of Thieves and that your surname is a palindrome.”

  “Palindome,” Retter said. “Most of the guys I meet these days can’t even spell palindrome let alone use it in a sentence. You’re smart, and kinda quirky, and that Navy Cross of yours means you aren’t a total schmuck, so listen up: I’m on my way to the White House to brief the President on everything I know about the Army of Thieves. There’s a car waiting for me right now at the River Entrance. Between here and there, I’ll tell you what I know if you tell me what you know. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “That background report I wrote covers most of what we know about the Army of Thieves,” Retter said as she and Dave rode down the elevator to the River Entrance lobby. “They basically came out of nowhere last year. They look like a gang of anarchists, but I don’t know if I buy that; I couldn’t say it in my report because it’s far too speculative, but I think that’s what they’re supposed to look like. Taken individually, all of their acts look opportunistic, wild, random and violent. But taken together—with a pinch of imagination—all those acts could be interpreted as, well, calculated and coordinated.”

  “Try me,” Dave said. “I like imagination.”

  Retter counted each point off on her fingers:

  “One, they break out a hundred assholes from a Chilean military prison in Valparaiso, including a dozen officers, most of whom we trained at the School of the Americas, a delightful Spanish-language training facility at Fort Benning. If you were a murderous Latin American dictator in the 1980s and ’90s, you sent your henchmen to the School of the Americas.”

  “Really?” Fairfax said.

  “Oh, yeah. Then they steal a Russian freighter filled with every assault rifle and RPG known to man; a Greek plane packed with hard currency; and then and this is fucking ballsy—they steal those Ospreys and Cobras from a Marine base in Afghanistan. They break out another hundred fundamentalist foot-soldiers from a U.N. prison in the Sudan, and hey presto, they’ve suddenly got a fully armed assault force the size of a small battalion, complete with officers and infantry, ready to do some serious damage.

  “What I can’t figure out, though,” Retter shook her head, “are the last two incidents. The apartment bomb in Moscow on February 2 and the torture of the old Secretary of Defense here in D.C. last month.”

  “What’s wrong with them?” Dave asked as the elevator doors opened. They walked out into the lobby.

  “They just don’t . . . fit,” Retter said. “All those men, weapons and gun-ships that the Army acquired over six months and that’s what they do? Blow up a building and cut up an old man? It doesn’t make sense. They could do so much more. As I said, it just doesn’t fit.

  “The way I see it, this Army was building up to something much bigger. They were preparing for a fucking siege and those two incidents were small-time. Sure, the Moscow one got a lot of press, but still, they didn’t have to break out two hundred men to blow up an apartment building in Moscow, did they?”

  “When you put it that way, no,” Dave said. She was certainly direct, he thought, but her conclusions were sound.

  “Maybe the Moscow explosion was designed to occupy the world’s attention while the Army did something else,” he suggested. “Perhaps both it and the SecDef incident were distractions to make us look the other way while they were preparing for today’s activities up in the Arctic.”

  Retter looked at him as she walked. “That’s a definite possibility.”

  Dave said, “Okay. I don’t know nearly as much as you do, but I think what little I know can help you. My Marine up in the Arctic wanted me to look up both the Army of Thieves and some old Soviet Arctic base called Dragon Island. Maybe that’s the siege you were looking for.”

  “Dragon Island . . .” Retter said. “Never heard of it.”

  “It was built in 1985,” Dave said. “Looks like it was a big Soviet experimental-weapons facility. In its heyday, it was a first-strike target. Just about every branch of our military, from the Air Force to the CIA, kept an eye on it.”

  They came to the River Entrance.

  Two unmarked Lincolns with flashing police lights mounted on their dashboards were waiting in the turnaround.

  “This your first VIP trip to the White House?” Dave asked as he pushed open the door.

  “My first with POTUS himself.”

  “I got a VIP pick-up during that supertanker thing,” Dave said. “Fast ride. No stopping for t
raffic lights. Certainly makes you feel important. My Marine escorts told me that whenever you get a VIP pick-up, look for four things about the car, the four things that make it a vehicle that the police will never stop: special DoD license plates that start with a Z, an all-access ID tag affixed to the inside of the windshield, run-flat tires and, lastly, alloy wheels. If you get into a high-speed pursuit, you want some heavy-duty rims on your car.”

  “What is it with boys and cars?” Retter said. “When someone’s on their way to brief the President, I don’t think they look too closely at the car they’re traveling in.”

  Two burly men in suits waited by the Lincolns. Both were bald, which only seemed to accentuate their sizable frames. As Dave and Marianne approached the cars, one of the men stepped forward. “Marianne Retter? Dwight Thornton, Special Transit.”

  He held up his ID.

  She held up hers.

  Thornton nodded and opened the rear door of the first car for her.

  Retter stopped and turned to Dave. “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Fairfax. Maybe we can meet again under less urgent circumstances.”

  “I hope so—” Dave cut himself off. “Those aren’t alloy wheels,” he said, eyeing the first car’s wheels. It was the same with the second car—it had the right plates and ID tags and even run-flat tires, but inside those tires, it just had standard rims.

  Dave turned to see two more big men materialize from the darkness behind them, subtly blocking the way back to the River Entrance.

  “These men aren’t here to take you to the White House,” he whispered. “They’re here to kidnap you.”

  Retter glanced from Dave to the man who’d said his name was Thornton.

  And, just slightly, ever so slightly, his eyes flickered. “Is there a problem, ma’am?”

  “You see it now?” Dave asked.

  “Yep,” Retter said.

  “Run.”

  They broke into a run, dashing suddenly right, heading for the entrance to the Metro system twenty yards away.

  The two men by the cars took off after them. So did the two blocking the way back into the Pentagon, all four drawing silenced Glock pistols as they did so.

  Fairfax and Retter bolted down the stairs to the subway station, hurdling the turnstiles and arriving on the platform just as a train pulled to a halt and opened its doors.

  They dived into it, melding in with the bored members of the evening commuter crowd, just as the train’s doors shut and it moved off, a moment before their pursuers arrived on the platform, flushed and out of breath, their pistols now concealed beneath their coats and their faces furious at the fact that their quarry had got away.

  DRAGON ISLAND

  1042 HOURS

  18 MINUTES TO DEADLINE

  NO SOONER had the cable car stopped beside the platform of the upper terminal on Dragon Island than Schofield was racing out of it at full speed.

  He joined Bertie in the doorway, arriving there in time to see the two enemy trucks skid to simultaneous halts twenty yards away. The main tower soared skyward before him. With its white exterior, it looked futuristic, imposing and impenetrable.

  “Bertie, cover us,” he said. “Hold this doorway for as long as you still have bullets.”

  “Yes, Captain Schofield.”

  Army of Thieves troops began pouring out of the two trucks. Bertie started firing at them and they dived for cover.

  As the little robot held the main doorway, Schofield led the others westward, toward the garage Ivanov had said was on that side. Schofield threw open a door that revealed a darkened garage with two small trucks parked inside it. The first was a medium-sized fuel truck with a rusty cylindrical aluminum gasoline tank on its back. A steel-rung ladder ran up the back of the tank and along the length of its upper side. The second truck, parked behind the tanker, was a compact cement mixer with a rotatable barrel mounted on its back.

  Schofield pointed at the tanker truck as he moved. “Mother, Baba. Onto the tanker. Mother, start her up. Everyone else, when we drive out of here and get their attention, go as fast as you can to your assigned positions.”

  The others—Champion, Ivanov, the Kid, Mario, Zack and Emma—all nodded at him in reply.

  Schofield gave them a look. “If this doesn’t work, Mother, Baba and I won’t get out of it alive, so you guys’ll have to come up with something yourselves. Good luck. I’ll either see you all later or see you on the other side.”

  Behind him, the engine of the tanker truck came alive.

  “Captain.” Baba was peering at a gauge on the side of the tanker truck. “This tank still has fuel in it. Given the plan, it might be wise to empty it. It’ll make it lighter.”

  “Do it.”

  Baba turned a spigot on the back of the truck’s cylindrical tank. Diesel fuel started pouring out of it, splashing to the ground.

  Schofield then climbed into the driver’s seat, while Mother and Baba clambered up the steel-rung ladder on top of the truck’s tank, weapons ready.

  “Open the door,” Schofield said.

  Ivanov hit a switch and the garage’s roller door slid upward. Daylight flooded into the garage.

  Schofield gunned the truck and it roared outside, into battle.

  As Schofield’s tanker truck sped out of the garage, Zack turned to check on Bertie back in the terminal’s doorway.

  He saw the little robot firing out through the open door, saw enemy rounds ping harmlessly off his flanks.

  “Come on, Zack.” Emma pulled him away. “We have to get into position. Bertie’ll be okay.”

  Just as she said those words, however, a rocket-propelled grenade hit the doorway in which Bertie stood.

  A fireball erupted all around the little robot, consuming him, and a split second later Bertie came flying out of it, hurled backward through the air at alarming speed.

  Bertie sailed back across the terminal and slammed into the opposite wall—a few feet from the gaping aperture through which the cable car had entered the terminal; a sweeping view of the northern bay and the islets lay beyond that aperture, as well as a 300-foot sheer drop.

  Bertie lay on his side, looking dazed and confused, if a robot could look that way. His fat rubber tires spun but got no traction.

  Zack shouted, “No!” but then Bertie righted himself, rolling back up onto his tires and seemed okay—

  —just as the first Army of Thieves man, moving low and fast, entered the terminal with another RPG on his shoulder, crouched and fired it at Bertie.

  This time the robot stood no chance.

  The RPG lanced across the space toward him and detonated.

  This blast sent Bertie sailing out through the aperture in the northern wall of the terminal into nothing but air.

  With a squealing whistle, Bertie disappeared from Zack’s view and fell a full 300 feet down the face of the cliff before disappearing into the freezing waters of the bay with a tiny splash, his part in this battle now well and truly over.

  The sudden emergence of Schofield’s tanker truck from the garage attached to the western side of the terminal caught the other Army of Thieves troops assailing the terminal’s main entrance by surprise.

  The tanker truck, with Mother and Baba crouched on top of it and a gushing trail of diesel spilling out behind it, thundered out of the garage and sped in a dead-straight line toward the circular chasm containing the main tower.

  The Army men raised their guns, but Mother and Baba sprayed them with a deadly burst and half of them fell. The others took cover—and so didn’t see some of Schofield’s other people scamper out of the garage on foot.

  It didn’t matter. The tanker truck had seized the Army men’s attention completely.

  Chiefly, this was because its path was very unusual.

  For it wasn’t heading toward either of the two crane-bridges that granted one access across the moat to the tower.

  No.

  It was speeding in a dead-straight line—not on any road, but over open ground—a lin
e that ran directly from the cable car terminal to the tower, a line that would end at the sharp concrete edge of the moat.

  “What the hell are they doing?” one of the Army men breathed.

  The Lord of Anarchy was watching the speeding tanker truck from his command center on the tower.

  “What the hell is he doing?” he said.

  The tanker truck picked up speed as it rushed toward the edge of the moat.

  It was only twenty yards from the moat and still accelerating when the remaining Osprey thundered by overhead, cannons blazing.

  Sizzling rounds strafed the ground all around the speeding truck, raking the dirt behind it, igniting the leaking trail of diesel fuel there.

  The line of diesel fuel burst to life, erupting as an elongated wall of flames behind the speeding truck!

  Schofield saw it in his side mirror. “As if this wasn’t crazy enough,” he muttered as he kept driving toward the edge of the moat. “Mother! Baba! You ready?”

  “Ready up front!” Mother called back.

  “Ready at rear!” Baba shouted.

  “Please God, this better work . . .” Schofield whispered before he floored it completely and the tanker truck rushed toward the edge of the moat and flew off it into empty, open air.

  WHEELS SPINNING, the tanker truck shot off the outer edge of the circular chasm and soared out into space; a small concrete gutter on the rim of the moat kicked its nose upward as it did so.

  As the truck’s tires left the ground, Baba fired both of his Magneteux’s two grappling hooks back at the concrete rim of the moat. With loud twin thunks! the two drill-bit-tipped hooks plunged deep into the concrete and held. Their cables—unspooling rapidly—stretched back to Baba on the truck and he quickly looped the Magneteux’s launcher under the tanker truck’s steel ladder.

  At the same time, crouched at the forward end of the truck’s roof, Mother waited. Waited . . . waited . . . and waited . . . for the truck’s flight to get them as far out into the void as possible. Then, as the truck’s nose dropped, she fired the two hooks from the Magneteux that she held—Champion’s—only Mother fired her pair of hooks at the disc-shaped tower in front of the flying truck.