Scarecrow Returns ss-5

by Matthew Reilly

  Schofield fired both his pistols and the bear went sprawling headfirst into the snow, hit squarely in the back of the head, and it slid up against Champion’s feet, its tongue lolling, its brains oozing out from a huge exit wound.

  Champion looked up and saw Schofield and exhaled with deep relief.

  He hurried over, quickly lifted her in his arms and carried her back to the motorbike.

  As he carried her, Champion found herself looking directly at Bertie, peeping over Schofield’s shoulder.

  “Hello,” Bertie’s electronic voice said pleasantly.

  “’Allo,” she replied.

  “Looks like we got here just in time,” Schofield said, sliding her into the bike’s sidecar.

  “I still can’t believe you came back at all.”

  Schofield checked his watch.

  8:01 . . . 8:00 . . . 7:59 . . .

  “In eight minutes, this island is going to be wiped off the face of the Earth by a Russian nuclear missile,” he said. “And my philosophy is simple: when it comes to my teammates, I don’t leave anyone behind.”

  He gunned the motorbike. “Hang on.”

  They zoomed up the hill, away from the whaling village, back up into Dragon Island.

  Sixty seconds later, they arrived at the fork in the road at the top of the hill. From there they could see all the main features of Dragon Island: the airstrip, the disc-shaped tower, the northern bay.

  7:01 . . . 7:00 . . . 6:59 . . .

  Schofield stopped the bike, his eyes focused on the runway—

  “Oh, no . . .”

  He saw the Antonov, surrounded by cheering members of the Army of Thieves, being pushed slowly toward the cliff at the end of the runway!

  The plane tipped off the runway and began to roll down the short embankment separating the airstrip from the cliff-edge. Then the Antonov tumbled over the cliff and fell out of sight.

  The Thieves all around it cheered.

  Schofield swallowed, his eyes wide. Of all the things that might have happened, he hadn’t expected that. But then, the Army of Thieves had no idea of the thermonuclear strike only six minutes away.

  “What?” Champion said. “What?”

  “That plane was our escape,” Schofield said flatly. “We are now officially stuck here.”

  SCHOFIELD STARED out at the spot where his Antonov had disappeared over the cliff, stunned.

  Champion said, “There must be another way out of this. Another plane or helicopter, or maybe some kind of bunker we can hide in—”

  Gunfire sizzled over their heads from the two Army of Thieves jeeps that had just arrived from the runway.

  It roused Schofield from his reverie and he snapped around to face Champion, something in his eyes. “A bunker, yes . . . a nuclear bunker.”

  Champion said, “Ivanov said there was a special bunker-like laboratory buried under the main disc—”

  “No. Not that one. We’d never reach it in time anyway. I saw another one. Earlier. But where was it . . . ?”

  More bullets whistled past them.

  Champion ducked. “Can you think as we ride!”

  “Right,” Schofield gunned the bike away with renewed intensity, fleeing from the jeeps.

  A few seconds later, he turned to Champion. “I just remembered where it is.”

  6:00 . . . 5:59 . . . 5:58 . . .

  Schofield’s bike-and-sidecar skidded to a halt in front of the cable car terminal.

  Schofield carried Champion toward the terminal’s side garage, the door of which was suddenly hurled open from within by Zack and Emma. As requested, they’d gone to the place where Baba had released diesel fuel earlier.

  Zack ushered them inside. “What’s going on?”

  5:10 . . . 5:09 . . . 5:08 . . .

  Schofield hurried past him, still carrying Champion. “When they saw the uplink had been turned off, Russia fired a nuclear missile at this island. It’s five minutes away.”

  Zack went pale. “Five minutes? What can we possibly do in five—?”

  “We get to a nuclear bunker.” Schofield raced through the garage and entered the terminal proper. He hurried over to the cable car and looked up at its cable stretching all the way down to Acid Islet.

  He recalled seeing the thick lead door in the hall on Acid Islet earlier, the one down on the bottom level with a nuclear symbol and a warning sign in Cyrillic on it. At the time, he’d thought it was a chamber for nuclear storage, but it wasn’t: it was a nuclear bunker.

  Of course, Dragon Island would have several fallout bunkers on it. It was a first-strike Cold War target. And placing a bunker under Acid Islet made sense: the islet was already partially protected by the cliffs of the bay, plus the sea water separating it from Dragon Island would act as an extra buffer against the concussion wave from any nuclear explosion.

  “That cable car is too slow. It won’t get us down fast enough,” Emma said.

  “You’re right, it won’t.” Schofield was still looking up at the cable. It stretched steeply away from them, sweeping down to the station on Acid Islet 1,000 feet away.

  He turned.

  “Everybody up onto the roof of the cable car. We’re gonna zip-line down that cable.”

  4:20 . . . 4:19 . . . 4:18 . . .

  They all clambered up onto the roof of the bullet-battered cable car.

  The cable stretched away from them, impossibly long and dizzyingly steep, ending at the islet far, far away.

  Once they were all up there, Schofield said, “Okay, Zack and Emma: use your belts. Loop them over the cable like this.”

  He looped Zack’s belt over the cable, then crossed its two ends so they formed an X. “We dislodged most of the ice on the cable when we came up earlier, so the cable shouldn’t be too icy. To slow yourself as you slide, pull your hands outward; that’ll cause your belt to squeeze on the cable and arrest your slide. Got it? Good. Go.”

  Zack went. He leapt off the cable car and with a scream of terror shot down the superlong cable. He became very tiny very quickly as he slid away.

  Emma was next. She stepped tentatively to the edge of the cable car’s roof.

  “We’re seriously out of time, Emma,” Schofield urged. “You gotta go now.”

  “Right,” she said, and with a final deep breath, she slid away down the outrageously long zip-line.

  That left Schofield and Champion. Schofield lashed his own belt over the cable—

  3:31 . . . 3:30 . . . 3:29 . . .

  —and pulled Champion into a tight embrace.

  Their faces were inches apart. Her arms were wrapped tightly around his neck while his hands were stretched upward, holding his belt looped over the cable.

  “Hang on tight,” he said.

  And for the briefest of moments, Veronique Champion looked deep into his scarred eyes.

  And to Schofield’s complete surprise, she suddenly gave him a quick but passionate kiss on the lips. “I’ve never met a man like you. You are special.” She pulled back from him. “Now fly, Scarecrow! Fly!”

  As she said it, five members of the Army of Thieves burst through the terminal’s door, machine guns blazing.

  But their bullets hit nothing, for the moment they entered the terminal, Schofield—with Champion gripping him tightly and Bertie still on his back—leapt off the cable car’s roof.

  THE TINY figures of Schofield and Champion shot down the superlong cable that connected Dragon Island’s cliff-top terminal with Acid Islet’s sea-level station.

  They looked infinitesimally small in front of the towering cliffs behind them and the vast horseshoe-shaped bay around them—but they didn’t care for the view now.

  They slid fast, very fast, shooting down the long swooping cable, their enormous slide lasting a full twenty seconds.

  Schofield gripped his belt tightly, and as he saw the yawning square doors of the station on the islet getting closer, he pulled outward on his belt, causing it to tighten around the cable.

  They slowed immedia
tely and at first he thought he had left his braking move too late, and he pulled with all his strength on the belt and it bit against the cable, trying to slow, and they entered the lower station fast and—

  —swung to a lurching halt.

  Zack and Emma were already on the platform and they helped Champion down.

  When she was safely down, Schofield dropped to the platform and checked his watch:

  3:01 . . . 3:00 . . . 2:59 . . .

  “Three minutes, folks,” he said. “Run. Run as fast you can.”

  They bolted out of the cable car station, down the short road and into the huge hall-sized building filled with vats and tanks.

  2:00 . . . 1:59 . . . 1:58 . . .

  Zack and Emma ran in front, while Schofield ran with Champion draped over his shoulder, limping along as fast as she could.

  1:30 . . . 1:29 . . . 1:28 . . .

  Across some catwalks, zigzagging.

  1:00 . . . 0:59 . . .

  “One minute!” Schofield called.

  Down some ladders. Champion made it awkward, slowing them down.

  0:40 . . . 0:39 . . .

  Schofield landed on the bottom level and saw the door he’d seen before: the superthick metal door with the nuclear symbol on it. “There it is!”

  0:30 . . . 0:29 . . .

  They rushed across the floor of the hall.

  0:18 . . . 0:17 . . .

  Zack and Emma dashed inside the thick reinforced doorway.

  0:16 . . . 0:15 . . .

  Schofield, Bertie and Champion ducked in after them.

  0:14 . . . 0:13 . . .

  Zack and Emma swung the heavy door shut behind them. It closed with a resounding boom.

  0:10 . . . 0:09 . . .

  They all scampered down a concrete stairwell, down several levels.

  0:05 . . . 0:04 . . .

  Through two more thick doors.

  0:03 . . . 0:02 . . .

  Through a final door, which Schofield slammed shut behind them as they all dropped to the floor, backs pressed against the solid concrete wall.

  0:01 . . . 0:00.

  There was a moment of silence.

  Then it came.

  Impact.

  THE RUSSIAN ICBM came rocketing out of the sky like a thunderbolt, lancing down toward Dragon Island at over 700 miles per hour.

  The remaining members of the Army of Thieves had perhaps five seconds to admire its dazzling tail-flame and smoke-trail—enough time to realize with horror exactly what it was and that it brought with it their deaths.

  The missile detonated.

  A flash of light and an almighty boom were followed by a shockingly powerful outward-moving blast-wave that consumed Dragon Island.

  The base’s two gas vents—previously so huge and gigantic—were instantly ripped apart by the shock wave. They simply disintegrated to dust. The disc-shaped tower tilted and fell before also being obliterated completely by the thermonuclear flame. Some of Dragon’s coastal cliffs trembled under the weight of the colossal explosion and spilled giant chunks of rock into the sea. The cable car terminal toppled off its perch, falling into the bay.

  Everything was incinerated; every structure and person on the island was vaporized.

  A towering mushroom cloud rose into the sky.

  Dragon Island was no more.

  So was the Army of Thieves.

  DEEP WITHIN the earth, in their nuclear bunker on Acid Islet, Schofield and the others all looked up at the deafening roar of the blast.

  The concrete walls around them shook, but held. The lights flickered, but the generators worked.

  When it was over, they all looked at each other.

  “What do we do now?” Zack asked.

  Schofield saw an old communications console on the wall. He walked over to it. It was connected to a generator and appeared to be in working order.

  “We radio home. Then we settle in and wait for someone to come and pick us up.”

  That wait, it turned out, wasn’t long, only a few days.

  After contacting the listening post at Eareckson Air Station again, Schofield was once again put through to the Situation Room.

  An attack submarine with nuclear shielding—the USS Seawolf—was dispatched to pick them up. It would arrive, he was told, in three days. Until then, all they could do was wait.

  During that wait, they drank what water they had sparingly and shared the few MREs that Bertie carried.

  Schofield thought of Mother and Baba—especially Mother. They had apparently succeeded in stopping the launch of the megatrain’s missile, but at what cost: Had they been shot? Wounded? Killed? They hadn’t replied to his radio calls earlier. Schofield wondered what had happened to Mother. If she had even been alive when the Russian nuke had hit, he couldn’t see how she could have survived its blast. And if she had been killed, he hoped she had gone out the way she had lived—all guns fucking blazing.

  “Farewell, Mother,” he said softly. “You were my loyal, loyal friend. I wish I could’ve been with you at the end. I’ll miss you.”

  When the Seawolf eventually arrived, it stayed under the surface of the icy waters of the bay.

  The main island was a charred wasteland, a black apocalyptic hellscape.

  Although partially sheltered from the primary blast, the hall on Acid Islet was now a skeleton of its former self: every single one of its many glass windows had been shattered and its roof had been wrenched away by the concussion wave. Its many vats and tanks now lay open to the sky.

  Three crew members left the Seawolf in full biohazard suits. They carried a trunk with four more protective suits in it and a stretcher.

  It took a while, but eventually everyone was transferred to the Seawolf in the biohazard suits. Once aboard, they would be quarantined in a radiation-proof chamber, scrubbed down and continually checked for residual radiation.

  Schofield entered the Seawolf last, carrying the broken Bertie in one hand. In front of him walked Zack and Emma, and in front of them, two crewmen carried Champion on the stretcher. During the wait in the bunker, Schofield had cleaned and redressed her stomach wound several times, but now she needed proper medical attention.

  On the way to the quarantine chamber, Champion was diverted into the sub’s specially equipped infirmary—a sealed-off medical area specifically designed to treat crew members affected by a radiation leak in the sub’s nuclear reactor. There she would be treated by the sub’s medical officer, also in a biohazard suit.

  As he handed Champion over to the medical officer, Schofield heard a muffled shouting coming from inside the sealed-off medical area. It sounded like, “Hey! Scarecrow!”

  He peered inside—and saw Mother sitting up on a bed, yelling and waving at him.

  “Yeah, you! You big sexy hunk of hero stuff!” She grinned broadly. “You fucking-A did it! You are the man! The fucking man!”

  In a bed to her left, attached to a bunch of tubes and drips, and currently in a deep coma, was Baba. Beside him, a heart-rate monitor pulsed weakly; he was alive, barely.

  Despite his fatigue, Schofield couldn’t help but smile. Next to him, Zack’s jaw just dropped.

  Schofield said to Mother, “I tried to call you on the radio but got no response. What happened on the train? How did you get away from the blast?”

  Mother grinned. “I did what you would’ve done: I drove that train at full fucking speed into the submarine dock’s pool! The firefight was brutal and my French buddy here got shot up bad—but he held them off long enough to get us over the line. Anyway, just as the train shot into the water, I grabbed Baba and dived off the top of the locomotive, and while it went under, we landed with a splash right beside the bow of that freighter, where I’d seen a little Russian submersible.

  “We were both wounded—him worse than me—so I just dragged him across into that submersible and climbed inside it, to get somewhere dry where I could check his wounds.”

  Schofield looked at the still figure of Baba in the bed besi
de her. He had about six body wounds, including one right in the center of his chest. Chest wounds were usually fatal unless you had some kind of hemostatic, or blood-clotting, agent like Celox gel or a QuikClot sponge—and Schofield knew that Mother and Baba hadn’t had either of those.

  “How on earth did you patch him up and stop him bleeding out?”

  Mother grinned again and jerked her chin at Zack. “It was all thanks to him, actually. You may find this hard to believe, Boss, but sometimes I do actually pay attention to technobabble. One day back at camp, before all this started, Zack was telling me about our new MRE ration packs. He said the water-filtration pills in them were chitosan-based and that chitosan is the key ingredient of Celox gel. Now, those MREs also have a crap-tasting jelly in them, and jelly is just gelatin. I figured, well, if I mixed the filtration pills with water and the jelly, I might end up with a gooey gel vaguely like Celox. So I pulled out my MRE and did exactly that. It produced a nice thick gel which I applied to his major wound. It formed a decent clot, not a perfect one, but one that was good enough to seal and contain the wound. The submersible had a first-aid kit with some bandages in it, and I used them to cover it all up. Not sure how much longer it would’ve lasted, but it kept him alive long enough till we got picked up.”

  Schofield shook his head. “You made a clotting gel from the ingredients of your ration pack. You sound like—”

  “I know!” Mother said. “I’m fucking MacGyver!”

  “You sure are. Wait a second. How did you get away, then? I tried to call you on the radio.”

  Mother said, “I heard you on the radio but my microphone got shot off during the shoot-out on the train and Baba’s musta fallen off at some point, probably when we landed in the water; we did land pretty hard. Anyway, I could hear you but I couldn’t transmit. You said we had to get off the island, pronto, so I figured some kind of serious boom-time was coming. So I fired up that submersible and drove it as deep as possible, to put as much water between us and Dragon as I could. The Mir worked fine but its radio was a half-broken piece of shit. I only managed to attract this sub’s attention by pinging constantly on the active sonar.”