Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (23 page)

Schofield stared at it helplessly as the Lord of Anarchy said in his ear, ‘
Detonate
.’

A blinding flash lit up the southern sky.

What followed was a sight the likes of which neither Schofield nor Champion had ever seen in their lives.

A dazzling, incandescent, white-hot body of air expanded laterally from the point where they had last seen the SS-23 missile. The blast flame expanded with shocking speed, at an exponential rate. And in a single, horrifying instant, the entire sky to the south of Dragon Island went from pale blue to flaming yellow-white.

The atmosphere had been ignited.

The Earth was on fire.

THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM WASHINGTON, D.C. SAME TIME

In the Situation Room, an Army tech manning a satellite console turned sharply.

‘Sir!’ he called to the Army general in the Crisis Response Team, ‘I have a missile launch from Dragon Island!’

The President strode over and saw a real-time overhead satellite image of Dragon Island and the Arctic Ocean surrounding it.

‘They’re igniting the gas cloud,’ DIA deputy director Gordon said. ‘Our efforts have failed . . .’

No sooner had she said this than, on the monitor, a section of the ocean to the south of Dragon Island flared suddenly with blazing white light.

The tech said, ‘Missile detonation detected . . .’

The President stared at the image, horrorstruck. ‘God help us.’

If someone were looking down on the Earth from space, Schofield figured, they would have seen a blinding flash from up near the North Pole, and then they would have seen the extending yellow-white inferno advancing around the globe in a spiral of fiery devastation.

At that thought, Schofield whipped up his wristguard and flicked on its satellite imagery, bringing up his own real-time overhead view of Dragon Island and the Arctic Circle.

On the black-and-white screen, he saw the atmospheric inferno.

It reached outward from Dragon Island like the claw of some mythical creature, reaching southward before curving eastward, following the course of the jetstream.

Schofield felt ill. He was literally watching the end of the—

And then suddenly the expanding wave of devastation and destruction stopped.

Abruptly and without warning, as if it had come up against an invisible wall in the atmosphere.

Schofield frowned. ‘What the hell . . . ?’

By his crude reckoning, the roaring atmospheric fire had only gone about six hundred miles before it hit the invisible wall and stopped.

Then he heard the Lord of Anarchy’s voice, only it wasn’t directed at him: ‘
What the fuck just happened!
’

Another voice: ‘
Sir! We just caught an intruder in the gasworks under the main vents! He cut the TEB pipes feeding the vents! By the look of the oxidisation around the valves, he must’ve cut them two hours ago! We’ve been pumping useless gas up into the sky for the last two hours!
’

‘
What? Who is he?
’ the Lord of Anarchy demanded.

‘
Says his name is Barker. Navy SEAL. Musta slipped past us when we killed the others in the submarine dock.
’

Schofield’s mind raced.

It was Ira Barker.

Ironbark.

Somehow, Ironbark had survived the clusterfuck in the submarine dock and while Schofield and his people had been islet-hopping to Dragon Island and stealing the spheres, Ironbark had penetrated Dragon, got to the gas vents and, unknown to anyone, sabotaged them.

The SS-23 missile had detonated its quasi-nuclear payload but thanks to Ironbark, the gas cloud close to Dragon was
not
combustible, so the missile had ignited nothing—or perhaps it had just ignited some leftover trace particles of the gas, causing the ‘smaller’ incandescent flash in the sky that he had just seen.

At that exact moment something
else
became clear to Schofield . . . at exactly the same time as it appeared to dawn on the Lord of Anarchy.

‘Thanks to Ironbark’s sabotage,’ Schofield said aloud, ‘the sky for a few hundred miles is safe, but the atmosphere over the
rest
of the northern hemisphere is still contaminated with combustible gas. This isn’t over. If the Army of Thieves gets another sphere, they’ll fire the next missile
past
the safe zone and detonate it inside the infused atmosphere. Which means . . .’

He snapped to look outside.

‘. . . they need our spheres again. They’re not going to toy with us anymore. They’re going to attack this plane with overwhelming force
right now
.’

No sooner had he said it than twelve berserkers burst forth from the ring of vehicles surrounding the plane, AK-47s blazing, followed by the rest of the Army force on the runway.

The Army of Thieves had just declared war on Shane Schofield and his plane.

Mother and Baba started firing straight away and managed to take down the first rank of berserkers, but this attack was far larger than any of the previous ones. It was simply too big to repel.

‘We have ten seconds to do something!’ Champion said urgently to Schofield.

Beside them, Ivanov said, ‘But we have nowhere to go—’

‘There’s always
somewhere
to go . . .’ Schofield said, his eyes searching as the sound of gunfire increased.

His gaze landed on the broad river right in front of their plane, the one that flowed parallel to the runway, ending at the high western cliffs of Dragon Island in a mighty waterfall.

‘Why not?’ he said as he reached past Ivanov and jammed forward on all four of the Antonov’s throttles and—just as the next rank of berserkers reached it—the big cargo plane suddenly lunged forward, engines surging, tyres squealing, its destroyed forward landing gear shrieking as it scraped across the runway.

The plane shot forward
and charged straight off the side of the runway
and down a short embankment, rumbling toward the river.

Back in the hold, both Mother and Baba were thrown off their feet by the abrupt surge of power and the ensuing plunge down the embankment.

As she scrabbled for a handhold, Mother called, ‘Scarecrow! What are you doing!’

‘Keeping us alive!’

The Antonov picked up speed, bouncing wildly as it rumbled down the embankment and then—suddenly, crazily—shot off the edge of the riverbank and plunged nose-first into the fast-flowing waters of the river!

The Antonov sent up a massive splash as its belly hit the water. Like most planes it was designed for a water landing, and even with its rear ramp open, it immediately began to float, bobbing like a child’s bath toy.

Then, a few seconds after the great splash settled, the plane began to move, slowly at first, then more quickly. It pivoted on the surface of the river so that now it travelled forward, nose-first, carried downstream by the steady current toward the powerful waterfall that tumbled over the cliffs only six hundred metres away.

In the right-side doorway of the plane, Mother keyed her radio: ‘Remind me how this course of action helps us, boss?’

‘
They need our spheres
,’ Schofield’s voice replied in her earpiece. ‘
We get to the waterfall and hurl them into the ocean.
’

‘And what’re the bad guys gonna do about that?’

The answer to her question came a second later: the two Strela amphibious anti-aircraft vehicles came speeding along the airstrip, racing parallel to the floating Antonov before they veered off the runway, sped down the embankment, and without any loss of speed, leapt off the riverbank and plunged into the water alongside the free-floating plane. Their propellers kicked in and the two amphibious cars started moving in toward the Antonov!

‘Oh, this is just a new level of crazy,’ Mother breathed as she turned and, to her great surprise, found herself looking into the bloodshot eyes of a berserker rushing at her from the rear of the hold, brandishing a knife!

The crazy bastard was gunless—as the Antonov had accelerated off the runway, he and four other berserkers had been close enough to dive onto its rear ramp, some with their AK-47s, some without. This guy had discarded his AK as he’d leapt for the ramp, which was why he now rushed at Mother with a serrated knife and a cry of rage.

Mother parried his knife-hand away, but the madman tumbled into her, throwing her off balance, and he headbutted her hard and she fell backwards, toppling out through the open side doorway—she had to release her G-36 to clutch the doorframe and suddenly she was dangling out the door of the Antonov, dazed and reeling, just above the waves of the river, holding on with one hand.

Her attacker lunged forward, intent on pushing her out, just as Mother swung herself up, drawing her thigh-holstered Beretta M9, and jammed it into the berserker’s mouth and fired.

The man’s head exploded, spraying blood and brains, and he dropped, headless, to the floor while Mother hauled herself back inside.

On the other side of the hold, Baba spun to see Mother get attacked by her berserker—a split second before the walls all around him were hammered with impact sparks: two more berserkers were rushing down his side of the hold, firing their AK-47s as they skirted the jeep and the cement mixer to get to him. Baba fired back with his Kord.

Beside him, Zack and Emma cowered behind the cab of the cement mixer. Bullets whizzed past their faces, impacted against the walls above their heads.

Baba pushed Zack and Emma up onto the cement mixer’s running board. ‘Get inside!’ he yelled.

Zack and Emma didn’t argue. As Baba covered them, they clambered into the cement mixer’s cab, disappearing inside it just as its tub was hit all over by a burst of machine-gun fire, but the tub’s thick walls held and saved their lives.

As for Baba, he kept firing at the two berserkers, his Kord booming loudly. While clearly crazy, these berserkers weren’t totally mindless: in fact, they were cunning little bastards. They mocked him, popping up and firing from behind the jeep, while cackling with high-pitched laughter. It was like doing battle with a pair of demented jesters.

‘Merde!’ Baba growled as one of the berserkers leapt onto the rear seat of the jeep and levelled his AK-47 at him, but Baba adjusted his aim and fired his Kord at one of the rear wheels of the jeep, blasting the handbrake clamp to pieces and the car lurched suddenly, released, and rolled quickly backwards
out the open rear ramp of the Antonov, with the berserker on it!

The jeep vanished out the back of the floating plane, dropping into the water rear-first with a great splash and Baba was facing one less enemy.

While all this was happening in the hold, Schofield peered out through the cockpit’s starboard-side windows. Beside him, Champion and Ivanov were still coming to grips with their unusual predicament.

Schofield saw the two amphibious Strelas enter the water to his right, saw them powering alongside the floating Antonov. Disturbingly, he saw one man on each Strela heft an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher onto his shoulder . . .

‘This is about to get very bad. Here, take this.’ He handed Champion one of the three small Samsonite cases containing the spheres. ‘When we get to the cliffs, throw it as far as you can out to sea.’

‘If we get that far—’ she began to say just as all the forward cockpit windows shattered under heavy gunfire from an unknown direction.

Champion ducked instinctively but then—
whump! whump!
—the boots of the last two berserkers who had boarded the Antonov thumped down onto the bonnet of the plane.

Schofield quickly realised what had happened: after somehow boarding the plane, these two had climbed
up and over
the top of it to take the cockpit.

‘Out! Now!’ he yelled, pushing Champion back through the cockpit door and pulling Ivanov from his flight seat a nanosecond before the whole cockpit was raked with gunfire.

The cockpit’s walls and seats were ripped to shreds.

Unfortunately, so too was Dr Vasily Ivanov.

The Russian scientist had moved a second too late and, still being pulled by Schofield, he was torn apart by the vicious storm of bullets. He exploded all over with bloody wounds and Schofield dived out the door an instant before the storm could sweep over him, too. In a distant corner of his mind, Scarecrow felt a pang of sadness for the Russian scientist: his help had been invaluable but he wouldn’t be seeing his children and grandchildren in Odessa again.

With bullets sizzling all around them, Schofield and Champion came tumbling out of the cockpit into the rear hold.

One round took a chunk out of Schofield’s left shoulder, while another plunged into Champion’s lower back, emerging from her stomach in a gout of blood.

She yelled in pain, doubled over and stumbled.

Schofield caught her as he quickly took in the scene in the hold: the cement mixer; Baba beside it, near the open port-side door, firing at the last nimble berserker, who was peeking around the mixer’s tub; various cables, folded seats and netting; the open rear ramp with daylight and the river beyond it, and lastly, Mother, crouched by the starboard-side door—

—through which an RPG suddenly rocketed in from outside, shooming low over her head before slamming into the cement mixer and exploding!

The cement mixer was thrown through the air . . . straight at Baba.

Baba had nowhere to go—and no time at all to get out of the way. The flying cement mixer cut across Schofield’s view of the big Frenchman and with a deafening crash, smashed into the steel wall where moments before, he had been standing.

‘Jesus Christ . . .’ Schofield breathed.

He and Champion struggled to stay on their feet as the plane rocked with the explosion, when a second RPG fired from the other Strela hit one of the turboprop engines on the Antonov’s right wing and that engine burst apart.

The plane lurched dramatically.

Having lost the weight of one engine on its right side, it tilted sharply to the left, and now with its balance seriously disturbed, water started rushing in through the open rear ramp. It quickly rose to a foot in depth.

‘They’re trying to sink us before we reach the waterfall!’ Schofield called, gripping a handrail as the hold lurched wildly.

The wounded Champion, however, had not been able to find a handhold.

The plane’s dramatic tilt threw her completely off the steps at the fore end of the hold. She landed awkwardly and lost her grip on the Samsonite case in her hand. It went tumbling away into the foot-deep water . . .

. . . where it splashed to a halt right in front of the nimble berserker who had been harrying Baba.