Scarecrow (38 page)

Knight and Rufus turned to see the final explosion, but as they did so, there came another noise from across the waves—a deep ominous
boom
from within the aircraft carrier.

‘Faster, Mother. Faster,' Schofield eyed his stopwatch:

00:09 . . .

00:10 . . .

The jeep shot up the circular ramp, kicking up sparks against the ramp's close steel walls.

Abruptly, the entire carrier banked sharply, turning to port, tilting the whole world thirty degrees.

‘Keep going!' Schofield yelled.

The first-stage blast of the Palladium charge had knocked out the
Richelieu
's hydrogen recombiners: that was the ominous boom.

Which meant that uncontrolled hydrogen was now building inside the carrier's cooling towers at an exponential rate. In exactly 30 seconds the second stage of the palladium charge would detonate, igniting the hydrogen and bringing about aircraft carrier Armageddon.

00:11

00:12

The jeep burst out from the ascension ramp into sunlight, bounced to a halt.

There was pandemonium on the flight deck.

Smoking planes, charred anti-aircraft guns, dead sailors. One Rafale fighter—nose down, its front wheels destroyed—blocked the
Richelieu
's No. 2 take-off runway. The fighter must have been just about to take off when the
Black Raven
had hit it with a missile.

Schofield saw it instantly.

‘Mother! Head for that broken fighter!'

‘That thing ain't gonna fly, Scarecrow! Not even for you!' Mother yelled.

00:15

00:16

Amid the chaos, the jeep skidded to a halt beside the destroyed Rafale fighter. Mother was right. With its nose down and its front wheels crumpled, it wasn't going anywhere.

00:17

00:18

‘I don't want the plane,' Schofield said. ‘I want this.'

He jumped out of the jeep, reached down and grabbed the catapult hook that lay on the runway in front of the destroyed plane. The small, trapezoidal catapult hook had formerly been attached to the front wheels of the plane. Normally you would attach it to the steam-driven catapult mechanism that ran for the length of the flight deck in order to get your plane to take-off speed in the space of 90 metres.

Schofield, however, wedged the catapult hook crudely under the front axle of his jeep and then clipped the other end of the hook to the deck catapult.

00:19

00:20

‘Oh, you cannot be serious . . .' Mother said, eyeing the empty runway in front of their jeep—a runway that simply stopped at the bow horizon of the ship. The catapult's rails stretched away for the length of the flight deck like a pair of railway tracks heading toward a cliff edge.

00:21

00:22

Schofield jumped back into the jeep beside Mother.

‘Put her into neutral and buckle up!' he said.

00:23

00:24

Mother snatched up her seatbelt, clicked it on. Schofield did the same.

00:25

Then he drew his MP-7 and levelled it at the nearby catapult controls, long since abandoned during the
Black Raven
's attack . . .

00:26

. . . and fired.

00:27

Ping!

The bullet slammed into the launch lever, triggering the catapult.

And the jeep shot off the mark at a speed that no humble jeep had ever gone before.

 

Ninety metres in 2.2 seconds.

Schofield and Mother were thrust into their seats, felt their eyeballs ram into the backs of their sockets.

The jeep shot down the runway at
unbelievable
speed.

The deck blurred with motion.

The jeep's front tyres blew out after fifty metres.

But it still kept rocketing forward—like a cannonball out of a cannon—propelled by the tremendous force of the catapult.

Truth be told, they weren't travelling as fast as a fighter jet on take-off, since a fighter is also propelled by its own thrusters.

But Schofield didn't want to fly.

He just wanted to get off this aircraft carrier before she—

Blew.

The jeep hit the edge of the runway . . . and shoomed straight off it . . . blasting out into the sky . . . nose up, wheels spinning . . . 
just as the entire aircraft carrier behind it shattered spontaneously.

There was no fire.

No billowing clouds.

There was just a mighty, mighty BANG! as every exterior steel wall of the aircraft carrier
instantaneously
expanded outward—pushed out by the tremendous pressure of ignited hydrogen—bursting at the seams like the Incredible Hulk busting out of his clothes.

A starburst of a billion rivets was thrown high into the sky.

The rivets were thrown for miles, and rained down for the next whole minute. A helicopter that had just taken off from the rear of the carrier was shredded by the sudden rivet-wave, destroyed in mid-flight.

Dislodged pieces of the carrier—including entire plates of steel—flew out into the air and slammed down into the surrounding French destroyers, denting their sides, smashing their bridge windows.

The greatest damage to the
Richelieu
occurred at the aft end of the carrier, around the epicentre of the blast: the cooling vents.

The exterior walls there were simply ripped apart at the seams—at the vertical rivet joints—opening up wide gashes on both sides of the carrier, gashes into which the Atlantic Ocean flowed without mercy.

And the
Richelieu—
the largest and greatest aircraft carrier ever built by France
—
began to sink unceremoniously into the ocean.

Schofield and Mother's jeep, however, flew off the bow of the massive carrier.

As it soared through the air in front of the ship, they unclipped their seatbelts and pushed themselves up and out of the jeep, allowing themselves to sail through the sky above it.

The drop from the flight deck to the water level was about twenty-five metres.

The jeep hit the water first. A large foamy explosion of spray.

Schofield and Mother hit it next. Twin splashes.

It hurt, but they angled their bodies as they entered the water—so that they entered it boots-first and knifed under the surface not a moment before the carrier erupted and its storm of rivets blasted across the surface of the ocean like a rain of deadly shrapnel.

The mighty aircraft carrier was sinking fast, ass-end first.

It was a truly spectacular sight.

And then, as its hapless crew hurried for the lifeboats or simply leapt for their lives into the ocean, the great warship went vertical—its bow rising high, its aft section completely submerged.

The rest of the French carrier group was frozen in shock.

Outside full-scale war, this sort of thing was unthinkable. No country had lost an aircraft carrier since World War II.

Which was probably why they were slow to react when, a minute after the explosion, the
Black Raven
swung into a hovering position ten feet above the waves of the Atlantic and plucked two tiny figures from the chop, raising them up on a cable-harness into its rear bomb bay.

Once the two figures were safely inside it, the sleek Sukhoi rose into the air and blasted off into the sky, away from the shattered remains of the
Richelieu
carrier group.

 

Aloysius Knight strode back into the holding cell of the
Black Raven
, saw Schofield and Mother lying there looking like a pair of drowned rats.

Schofield glanced up at Knight as he entered. ‘Set a course for the English Channel, off Cherbourg. That's where the first Kormoran ship is. We have to find it before it launches its missiles on Europe.'

Knight nodded. ‘I've already told Rufus to take us there.'

Schofield paused.

Knight appeared unusually sombre, almost . . . sensitive. What was going on?

Schofield looked around the tight confines of the holding cell, and it hit him.

‘Where's Gant?' he asked.

It was then that, behind his amber-tinted glasses, Knight's eyes wavered—just slightly. Schofield saw it and at that moment, he felt something inside him that he had never felt before.

Absolute, total dread.

Aloysius Knight swallowed.

‘Captain,' he said, ‘we have to talk.'

40 (a) (ii) In the event of a conflict involving the major global powers, it is highly likely that the poverty-stricken populations of Africa, the Middle East and Central America—some of which outnumber the populations of their Western neighbours by a ratio of 100-to-1—will flood over Western borders and overwhelm Western city centres.

From: United States National Security Council Planning Paper Q-309, 28 October, 2000

(UN PRESS, NEW YORK)

‘Who must do the hard things? He who can.'

Quote attributed to Confucius

 

ENGLISH CHANNEL COASTLINE, NORTHERN FRANCE 26 OCTOBER, 1700 HOURS LOCAL TIME (1100 HOURS E.S.T. USA)

With a burst from its thrusters, the
Black Raven
landed on a cliff-top overlooking the English Channel, lashed by driving rain.

Out of its cockpit stepped Shane Schofield. He dropped to the muddy ground and staggered away from the fighter, oblivious to the storm around him.

After Knight had finished telling him about what had happened in the Shark Pit with Gant and Jonathan Killian and the guillotine, Schofield had said only three words.

‘Rufus. Land now.'

Schofield stopped at the edge of the cliff, jammed his eyes shut.

Tears mixed with the rain hammering against his face.

Gant was dead
.

Dead
.

And he hadn't been there. Hadn't been there to save her. In the past, no matter what happened, he'd
always
been able to save her.

But not this time.

He opened his eyes. Stared into space.

Then his legs gave way beneath him and he dropped to his knees in the mud, his shoulders heaving violently with every desperate sob.

Mother, Knight and Rufus watched him from the open cockpit of the
Raven,
twenty yards away.

‘Fuck me . . .' Mother breathed. ‘What the hell is he going to do now?'

Schofield's mind was a kaleidoscope of images.

He saw Gant—smiling at him, laughing, holding his hand as they strolled along the beach at Pearl, rolling up close against him in bed. God, he could almost feel the warmth of her body in his mind.

He saw her fighting in Antarctica and in Utah. Saving his life with a one-in-a-million Maghook shot inside Area 7.

And then—shocking himself—he saw Killian at the castle saying, ‘I love to observe the look of pure horror that appears on a person's face when they realise that they are, without doubt, going to die.'

And he saw the world from now on . . .