Scarecrow Returns ss-5

by Matthew Reilly

  Champion said, “Go on.”

  “I needed to function, to be able to keep going,” Schofield said. “I didn’t want to forget Fox, but I needed to be able to . . . compartmentalize . . . the memory of her so I could move on and function and continue to be the person I am.”

  “And what is your memory location?” Champion asked.

  “It’s stupid. You’ll think it’s silly.”

  “I’ll probably be dead within the hour, so what can it hurt to tell me?”

  Schofield took a deep breath. He’d never actually told anyone about this, not even Mother.

  “It’s a submarine,” he said.

  Despite herself, Champion snuffed a brief laugh. “I’m sorry.”

  “I told you it was stup—”

  “No, it’s clever. It’s very clever. Submarines have strong walls, and compartments that you can close off with airtight steel doors. It strikes me as an excellent location to store memories, especially painful ones.”

  “It was Ulacco’s idea,” Schofield said. “She suggested a spaceship or an aircraft carrier but I liked a sub the best. I’ve been on many, so I know the layout well and can conjure it up easily. I seal off the most painful memories in the farthest reaches of my imaginary submarine, behind many watertight doors. They’re still with me, but I only access them when I really want to, when I’m ready to. Getting to them requires substantial mental effort. There’s also another reason why a submarine is good.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you can purge a submarine,” Schofield said flatly. “Eject the trash, so to speak.”

  “You mean jettison memories for good?” Champion frowned. “Forget things forever?”

  “If you’re disciplined enough, yes.”

  At that, Champion made a strange face, a sorrowful one.

  She said, “This Fox, this Gant, she sounds like an impressive woman. So impressive that she captured your heart—a heart, I imagine, that is not often or easily caught. I can understand how damaged you were by her death. But to try to forget someone entirely”—Champion shook her head—“this is a very sad thing. Not even I did that. Is that what you did to keep going? Did you jettison her entirely from your memory?”

  Schofield looked away again, kept paddling.

  “I don’t—”

  At that moment, his wrist guard vibrated.

  Schofield looked down at it.

  A message had come in, from David Fairfax.

  “This conversation is to be continued,” he said, looking down at the message.

  THE MESSAGE read:

  FFAX: THANKS FOR GETTING ME INTO HUGE TROUBLE. ON THE RUN FROM SOME CIA THUGS THANKS TO YOU. READ THIS AND ALL WILL BE REVEALED. I THINK THIS CALDERON GUY IS LEADING YOUR ARMY OF THIEVES. GOTTA RUN NOW.

  Schofield frowned. The CIA?

  Attached to the message was a document in PDF form, titled OPERATION “DRAGONSLAYER.” He opened it and, sitting down beside Champion so she could look on, started reading:

  OPERATION “DRAGONSLAYER”

  ANALYSIS AND OPERATION CONCEPT BY

  MARIUS CALDERON

  AUGUST 1, 1984

  Pursuant to my report of July 2, 1982, titled THE COMING RISE OF CHINA AND THE ENSUING FALL OF AMERICA, I have been tasked by the Agency’s Director (Operations) with formulating a plan by which the United States can avoid the fate described therein. The plan I propose is this:

  We use Russia to kill China.

  Schofield glanced at Champion. “Use Russia to kill China? This is about China?”

  They kept reading:

  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  I have been looking into some of our recent prototype weapons programs and found one—an atmospheric or “Tesla” device that uses the global jet stream to send a flammable plume of gas around the northern hemisphere. Weather models have shown that if placed in certain Arctic locations—including one Soviet fleet maintenance station in the Arctic Circle called Dragon Island—the chief victim of such a device will not be Russia but rather China.

  Soviet spy agencies love nothing more than stealing our secrets. They thrive on it. The only thing that gives them greater pleasure than stealing an American military secret is subsequently constructing one of our own superweapons for use against us.

  I propose we allow the KGB to steal the plans to this Tesla device—but we include with the device’s plans some fake data showing optimal locations for such a device. In that data will be a note that, if built at Dragon Island, the device will destroy much of America.

  Schofield looked over at Dragon Island, looming above the network of leads.

  “No way . . .” he said aloud.

  If the Soviets build the device—which I am quite certain they will do—the next step is setting it off at a time of our choosing, at a time when China is assuming global dominance, but in a way that cannot be connected to America.

  For this I propose—

  Schofield looked up.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me. Those CIA sons of bitches . . .”

  For this I propose that we create a fake terrorist army, perhaps two hundred men strong. We could call it the Army of Terror or some similar name—and use it to seize and set off the Tesla device on Dragon Island.

  A crucial note: it is important that the members of this terrorist army do not know that their army is a sham.

  Regular infantrymen are poor actors, mercenaries can never truly be trusted and private contractors are worse than mercenaries. Only true believers can pull off this mission. We must also account for the possibility that members of our army might be captured and interrogated by a friendly nation (indeed, if they are unaware of the true nature of their army, having one or two members captured will actually be advantageous to us).

  To that end, I propose we recruit genuinely disaffected militarily trained individuals and we indoctrinate them to a cause of global chaos and anarchy. Under the leadership of a small inner core of Agency men including myself, this army will then carry out a series of terrorist acts to establish the group in the global consciousness. After that, we take Dragon Island and set off the Russian device. Of course, when the mission is over, the members of our counterfeit army will need to be liquidated.

  Schofield skimmed to the document’s concluding paragraphs:

  The predicted outcomes of the proposed operation are as follows:

  China is completely destroyed, its population and cities incinerated by a firestorm of never-before-seen proportions. Ninety percent of India, our next rising low-cost industrial competitor, is also wiped out. A few small slivers at the edges of the continental United States are lost (a necessary loss; we cannot be totally unharmed as that would arouse suspicion). And the Russians are blamed. The story is familiar—once again, Russia’s notoriously poor safety protocols have failed and China’s innocent population has suffered for it. A terrorist group is to blame and America rises again, the income of its working-class population secured for the foreseeable future.

  The American way of life survives.

  Schofield stared at the screen in silence.

  “ ‘The American way of life survives.’ Goddamn.”

  He’d seen some messed-up plans in his time—he’d even done battle with an ultra-patriotic American intelligence agency called the ICG once before—but this took the cake.

  He quickly brought up another screen on his wrist guard, one he’d seen at the start of all this, showing a map of the world and the spiraling gas plume contaminating it:

  And there it was.

  The plume completely covered China.

  He hadn’t really noticed that before. Like everyone else, he had been concerned about his own country; but even now that took on a new perspective: compared to China, Asia, Europe and India, America would only suffer a glancing blow at the hands of this atmospheric weapon.

  Champion frowned. “So the Army of Thieves is a CIA creation? A fake terrorist army?”

  “One hundred percent made in A
merica,” Schofield said sourly.

  Looking again at the Dragonslayer document, he even saw that Calderon had accounted for something else: the fall of the Soviet Union.

  It has been suggested to me that this plan might be hindered by the potential fall of the Soviet regime (an event which this analyst believes will occur around the end of this decade). I do not believe that such a fall will adversely affect the plan. In fact, I think it will strengthen it.

  Any new confederation that follows the fall of the Soviet regime will still have to safeguard all of the Soviet Union’s many weapons of mass destruction, in particular its nuclear arsenal and weapons like the Tesla device. High-value “exotic matter” weapons installations like Dragon Island will require upkeep by skeleton crews of military staff, who will be very easily bought off—

  Schofield shook his head. “And there you have it. A plan that was hatched back in 1984 comes to fruition now—now that China has become the world’s 800-pound gorilla. There were only two things this Calderon guy didn’t predict: that Vasily Ivanov would manage to get away for long enough to send out a distress signal . . .”

  “And the second thing?”

  “That my little test team would be in the area when he did.”

  With those words, Schofield brought their life raft to a halt, just short of the end of the lead they were in.

  A hundred yards beyond the end of the lead rose Dragon Island, or more particularly the long-abandoned frost-covered whaling village situated on the north-west coast of Dragon.

  Schofield gazed at the village.

  “There was a third thing he didn’t anticipate” he said. “How determined I’d be to stop him.”

  MARIO AND the Kid crouched behind a low concrete wall near the main vents, at a spot overlooking Dragon Island’s missile battery. They were tense and alert, careful to stay out of sight.

  Earlier, they’d watched and listened in astonishment as Schofield had rampaged through the complex, ultimately fleeing with the spheres to the runway.

  But now things had changed.

  Schofield had failed and now they had to step up. Their mission: destroy the Army of Thieves’ missile battery and thus prevent the Army from firing any remaining spheres into the contaminated sky.

  The Kid was also mindful of their last-ditch option: finding and destroying the Army of Thieves’ uplink, the satellite dish that was connecting them to a missile-spotting satellite up in orbit and thus protecting them from a nuclear strike.

  This was a tougher task. An uplink dish didn’t have to be that big, which meant it could be anywhere with a line of sight to the sky. If the Army of Thieves was smart—and by all accounts they were—it wouldn’t be easy to spot, and sure enough, neither the Kid nor Mario had seen anything resembling such a dish.

  And so, while Schofield had gone on his rampage, Mario and the Kid—still dressed in their Army of Thieves parkas—had carefully made their way toward the missile battery on the south side of the gas vents.

  As they’d arrived at this vantage point overlooking the battery, however, a missile had been launched and the southern sky had lit up with blazing-white light—and they thought they’d failed completely, that the Army of Thieves had succeeded. But then they heard frantic voices and saw Army men frantically running in all directions.

  During this mayhem, a lone Army sentry caught sight of them, but Mario put him down with a single, silenced shot. As they hid the body, Mario had quickly grabbed the man’s earpiece.

  The two of them crowded around the single earpiece and listened in on the Army of Thieves’ commentary of Shane Schofield’s escape down the river:

  “—just drove the fucking plane into the river!—”

  “—Get the Strelas in there!—”

  “—Something just came out the back—”

  “—Three of them are on that cement mixer. Get them! They’ve got two spheres!—”

  “—Get those fucking spheres—”

  Shortly after, the plane had gone over the waterfall and after that, they heard a few transmissions about something happening over at the quarry and then nothing; radio silence.

  And so now here they were, alone, Mario and the Kid, looking out over Dragon Island’s missile battery. They might have been too late to stop the first launch, but they wouldn’t let another one happen.

  The battery was basically a high, flat-topped rocky mount attached to the rest of the base by a long thin bridge that spanned a gorge. The top of the rocky mount had been leveled, and on it sat half a dozen semi-trailer-like “transporter erector launchers” with missiles on their backs.

  The Kid gazed at the missile battery. “I think we can get there unnoticed if we rope down this side of the bridge, hopscotch along the base of the gorge and then use Maghooks to get up the other side.”

  Mario shook his head. “Jesus Christ, don’t you see? We’re fucked. Scarecrow’s dead and soon the others will be, too.”

  “We keep fighting anyway,” the Kid said firmly. “We have to. Now come on. We got a battery to blow up.”

  He scurried off.

  Mario scowled. “Not everybody’s a hero, Kid,” he muttered.

  They made it across just as the Kid had planned, traversing the gorge and then slithering up onto the flat top of the rocky mount via their Maghooks, before rolling under one of the transporter erector launchers unseen.

  Almost unseen.

  A lone surveillance camera had caught them in its sights.

  Returning to his command center, the Lord of Anarchy watched silently as the two Marines crab-crawled up onto the mount.

  He picked up his microphone.

  The Kid lay tensed underneath the launcher, panting.

  “Okay. Gimme your grenades,” he said to Mario.

  Not very enthusiastically, Mario reached for a pouch on his webbing containing some grenades when a voice spoke in his ear: “Hello, Lance Corporal Puzo. Lance Corporal Vittorio Puzo from the state of New Jersey. I see you there on the missile battery, lying on the ground underneath one of my launchers.”

  Mario started. He glanced at the Kid, who showed no sign of hearing anything. Then he realized: the voice had come through his Army of Thieves earpiece.

  “He can’t hear me, Vittorio. Only you can. And it’s probably better that way, given the offer I’m about to make to you.”

  Mario froze.

  “Dude, give me the grenades,” the Kid urged.

  Mario held up his hand, as if he was afraid of a sentry nearby, when he was actually listening to the voice in his ear.

  “I am the Lord of Anarchy, Vittorio, the commander of the Army of Thieves. I am your enemy, but this needn’t be so.”

  “Mario . . .” the Kid hissed.

  Mario handed him four grenades—but kept listening.

  “Go on,” he said aloud.

  “Huh?” the Kid said, but let it slide.

  “I can see what you have been ordered to do, Vittorio: destroy my missiles, thereby preventing me from launching the spheres into the gas cloud. Come now, Vittorio. You know the world. Seriously. Do you think these are the only missile launchers I have at my disposal?”

  Mario frowned. This had occurred to him. As soon as they blew up these launchers, they’d become hunted men straightaway. And that would be a useless suicidal gesture if there were other launchers elsewhere.

  “Vittorio. Look at the situation. If you blow those launchers, my men will come over there in large numbers and kill you.”

  The Kid frowned at Mario, saw that he was mentally far away, listening to something. “Hey, man, what the hell are you doing?”

  Mario waved him off.

  “Of course, I have other launchers, Vittorio. So your death will be a futile and stupid sacrifice, a sad waste of your life. But I know you, Vittorio. I’ve got your file here in front of me. You aren’t stupid. Your uncle Salvatore in Jersey would tell you that this is the time to cut a deal.”

  “What are you offering?” Mario said roughly
.

  The Kid came over. “I said, what the hell—”

  The Lord of Anarchy said, “If you kill young Corporal Thompson right now and refrain from destroying my launchers, not only will I let you live, I will give you safe passage from this island when this is all over, a mansion in Chile, as many women as you desire, and four million U.S. dollars to live out the rest of your days in substantial luxury.”

  Close enough now, the Kid realized what Mario was doing, and he looked at Mario in shock.

  “What the fuck, man—?”

  Mario answered him by drawing his Marine-issued M9 pistol and firing it at point-blank range into the Kid’s forehead.

  Blam!

  The Kid snapped violently backward and dropped to the ground.

  Mario stood up and walked away, not even trying to conceal himself from the nearby Army of Thieves men.

  THE OLD whaling village sat in a canyon that delved into the cliffs of the north-western coast of Dragon Island. There was only one way to get to it from the island’s main complex: a fenceless one-lane road that ran steeply down one wall of the triangular canyon.

  The village itself was a cluster of 19th-century shacks, slaughterhouses, water tanks, gangways and jetties. Chains, hooks and pulleys hung everywhere. The dry cold of the Arctic had preserved it all perfectly, although every piece of wood was pale and faded and every surface was covered in an undisturbed layer of frost.

  Schofield and Champion swam, SEAL-style, across the hundred yards of flat open sea from the ice field to the cliffs, careful not to cause ripples that a sentry might see; to assist the wounded Champion, Schofield had clipped his combat webbing to her weapons belt, so that he pulled her along as he swam.