Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (19 page)

The cable car lurched to a halt beside the terminal’s platform.

‘I just landed on your island.’

Schofield clicked off the earpiece/mike and raced out of the cable car, guns up, setting foot for the first time on Dragon Island.

THE PENTAGON 3 APRIL, 2142 HOURS 1042 HOURS (4 APRIL) AT DRAGON

At the same time as Shane Schofield was arriving at Dragon Island under fire and under pressure, David Fairfax was walking quickly down a deserted corridor in the Pentagon’s B-Ring.

In the Pentagon, status radiates outwards: if you’re in A-Ring, the centremost ring, you’re somebody. D-Ring, on the other hand, is a backwater. If you’re in D-Ring, you’re nobody, an Oompa-Loompa in the vast military system. A mathematician by training, Dave worked in the DIA’s Cipher and Cryptanalysis Department in a basement office buried deep beneath C-Ring, so he existed somewhere in the middle of it all.

Today, Fairfax wore his standard work attire: jeans, Converse sneakers, Zanerobe T-shirt plus a new red ‘WristStrong’ rubber bracelet of which he was immensely proud.

Even by the standards of the computer boffins who worked at the Pentagon, it was casual attire, but for Dave Fairfax it was tolerated, especially by the Marine Corps colonels who always nodded respectfully as they passed him by.

They knew that in his service file there was a most unusual notation: a classified Navy Cross that Fairfax had been awarded for acts of extraordinary bravery while engaged in action against an enemy of the United States. During the ‘Majestic-12 Incident’—which Schofield had roped Fairfax into—Fairfax had found himself, shaking with nerves and wearing a helmet two sizes too big for him, leading a team of twelve United States Marines into battle on a heavily guarded ballistic missile–equipped supertanker anchored off the west coast of America.

His actions had saved three US cities from annihilation but only a few very high-ranking people knew it. Fairfax was just pleased he could still wear jeans and sneakers to work.

It was going on 9:45 p.m. as he walked down the curving corridor of B-Ring. It was late and nearly all of the workers in this wing, mainly analysts working for the DIA, had gone home for the day.

After Schofield had asked him to look into Dragon Island and the Army of Thieves, Fairfax had discovered a few things about Dragon and not much about the Army. It had taken time; it had also required him to peek into some databases that he was technically not authorised to enter.

As far as Dragon Island was concerned, he’d found that it was mentioned several times on the JCIDD, the ultra-high security document database accessible only to the highest ranking military and intelligence officers . . . and computer jockeys like him.

Dave had a list of those documents in his hand now:

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.’

‘Palindrome,’ 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 the elevator down 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 co-ordinated.’

‘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 UN 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 gunships 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 traffic 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 licence plates that start with a Z, an all-access ID tag affixed to the inside of the windshield, runflat tyres 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 travelling in.’

Two burly men in suits waited by the Lincolns. Both were bald which only seemed to accentuate their sizeable 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 runflat tyres, but inside those tyres, it just had standard rims.