Scarecrow (44 page)

—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.

He made to swing, just as with a jarring thud, their sub hit the bottom of the Channel and both men fell to the floor.

They rose together, moving like lightning.

Zamanov leapt up and swung—just as Schofield lunged forward, ducking inside Zamanov's swing arc, at the same time whipping something metallic from his borrowed utility vest and
jamming it into the Russian's mouth!

Zamanov didn't have time for shock, because Schofield didn't hesitate.

He activated the mountaineering piton—and turned his head away, not wanting to see this.

With a powerful
snap!
the piton's pincer-like arms expanded, shooting instantaneously outward, searching for something to wedge themselves against.

What they found were Zamanov's upper and lower jaws.

Schofield never saw the actual event, but he heard it.

Heard the foul
crack
of Zamanov's lower jaw being stretched far further than it ever was designed to go.

Schofield turned back to see the Russian's jaw hanging grotesquely from his face, dislocated and broken. The upper arm of the piton, however, had done more damage: it had bruised Zamanov's brain, leaving Zamanov frozen bolt upright in mid-stance, the shock having shut down his entire body.

The Russian fell to his knees.

Schofield seized his sword, stood over the fallen bounty hunter.

Zamanov's eyes blinked reflexively. The only sign that he was still conscious.

Schofield wanted to run him through, or even cut his head off, to do to Zamanov what he had done to others . . .

But he didn't.

He
couldn't
.

And so he just let the Russian waver where he knelt, and then he watched as a moment later Zamanov fell flat on his face with a final bloody splat.

The fight over, Schofield grabbed his dislodged earpiece, put it back in his ear—

‘
Schofield! Schofield! Come in!
' Knight's voice blared in his ear. ‘
Are you alive out there!
'

‘I'm here,' Schofield said. ‘I'm on the bottom. Where are you?'

‘
I'm in the other sub. Put your exterior lights on so I can see where you are.
'

Schofield did so.

At which moment Knight's voice said, ‘
Oh, fuck me
 . . .'

‘What?'

‘
Do you have power?
' Knight said quickly.

Schofield tried his instrument panel. No response. ‘I have air, but no propulsion. Why? What is it? Can't you just come and get me?'

‘There's no way I can make it in time
.'

‘In time? In time for what? What's the problem?'

‘
It's a . . . uh . . . very big one
 . . .'

‘What?'

‘
Look up, Captain.
'

Schofield peered up through the top dome of his mini-submarine.

And saw the hull of the supertanker
—
impossibly huge—gliding steadily down through the water above him, freefalling through the Channel waters like the moon falling out of the sky . . . its colossal mass heading straight for him.

 

Schofield swallowed at the awesome sight: 100,000 tons of pure supertanker was about to land right on top of his tiny submarine.

Its bulk was so vast, so immense, that it generated a deep vibrating
rrmmmmmm
as it moved down through the water.

‘Now you don't see that every day,' Schofield said to himself. ‘Knight!'

‘
I can't make it in time!
' Knight yelled in frustration.

‘Shit,' Schofield said, looking left and right.

Options!
his mind screamed. He couldn't swim away from the tanker. At 1000 feet long and 200 feet wide, it was just too big. He'd never get out from under it in time.

The only other alternative was to stay here and be crushed to death.

Some choice. Certain death or certain death.

But if that was all there was, then at least he might be able to achieve something before death came.

And so on the bottom of the English Channel, Shane Schofield keyed his satellite mike.

‘Book! How are you doing over there in New York?'

‘
We own the
Ambrose
, Scarecrow. All enemy troops are down. We're at the control console now, and I've plugged the satellite uplink into it. I have the time as 1152. You've got eight whole minutes to disarm this thing
.'

Schofield saw the supertanker falling through the water above him—a silent freefalling giant. At its current speed, it would hit the bottom in less than a minute.

‘You might have eight minutes, Book, but I don't. I have to disarm those missiles now.'

And so he pulled his CincLock-VII unit from its waterproof pouch and hit its satellite uplink.

The unit came to life:

 

SAT-LINK: CONNECT ‘AMBROSE-049'--UPLINK CONNECTION MADE.

ACTIVATE REMOTE SYSTEM.

MISSILE LAUNCH SEQUENCE IN PROGRESS.

PRESS ‘ENTER' TO INITIATE DISARM SEQUENCE.