Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (5 page)

The two French agents were now in Leavenworth in a special section reserved for protected inmates. The prisoners at Leavenworth, despite their own crimes, were oddly patriotic when it came to foreigners who tried to kill United States Marines and had not given the two Frenchmen a pleasant welcome.

The second attempt had come six months later.

It had happened on a quiet country road a few miles from Parris Island, as Schofield was driving back there late one night. Another pair of French agents had pulled up alongside his car and abruptly opened fire. A short running gun-battle had followed and it ended with Schofield firing back with his Desert Eagle pistol and killing the gun-toting passenger before ramming the rival car off a bridge, sending the second French assassin plunging into a swamp.

The driver had survived. He was next seen sitting slumped on the front steps of DGSE headquarters in Paris, still covered in mud, handcuffed, with a pink bow tied around his mouth. A message was written in permanent marker on his forehead: ‘This belongs to you.’

Despite a face-to-face meeting between the new American President and his French counterpart on the subject, the French resolutely refused to remove the bounty on Schofield’s head.

And then this assignment had come up.

The Corps needed experienced Marines to test new equipment in extreme climates. It would involve accompanying scientists from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the famous DARPA, and some private contractors to the ends of the Earth—baking deserts, steaming rainforests and the brutal cold of the Arctic—to test prototypes of new weapons, tents, armour and vehicles.

Naturally, it wasn’t the kind of mission that the Corps wanted to waste on top talent, but as far as the brass were concerned it was perfect for Scarecrow: psychologically scarred, possibly unpredictable and the target of a vengeful foreign nation, it would keep him usefully occupied and out of harm’s way.

Schofield didn’t mind the Arctic.

It was quiet and peaceful and at this time of year it was actually quite beautiful. It was always a perfect dawn—the sun lurked just above the horizon, never setting but never rising either, bathing the ice plain in spectacular horizontal light. It was bitingly cold, sure, but still beautiful.

It also helped that he had a good team up there with him.

Eight people and one robot.

Over the last seven weeks, huddled in their camp of silver domed tents, Schofield’s team had got along pretty well—as well as eight human beings living in close proximity in freezing conditions could get along, really.

Having Mother around helped.

She could silence anyone who bitched or moaned with a single withering look. And even then, the only member of the team who’d been even remotely problematic was the senior executive from ArmaCorp Systems, Jeff Hartigan, and getting ‘the Look’ from Mother usually shut him up.

Mother, of course, had insisted on coming along. Not even the Commandant of the Marines Corps dared say no to Mother Newman. After many years of loyal and distinguished service in the Corps, she had her choice of deployment and she went where Scarecrow went.

‘Because I’m his Fairy Godmotherfucker,’ she would say when asked why.

The other two Marines in the group were considerably younger: Corporal Billy ‘the Kid’ Thompson and Lance Corporal Vittorio Puzo, a hulking Italian-American who because of his famous surname quickly got the nickname ‘Mario’.

Scarecrow had a soft spot for the Kid. While not academically gifted—he failed most written exams—what he lacked in smarts, he made up for in a desire to
be
smarter. He was also good-natured, a crack shot and a dab hand at field-stripping and rebuilding almost any kind of weapon.

Mario, on the other hand, was less easy to like.

He was a surly and dour guy from the Engineering Corps who kept largely to himself when they weren’t working. A highly skilled mechanic, he was responsible for maintaining the various vehicles they were testing.

Like Schofield, however, both the Kid and Mario were in the Arctic doing field testing for a reason.

They were also broken.

The Kid had lost the hearing in one ear in a training accident, so he couldn’t go on active deployment. And a little digging on Schofield’s part had revealed that Mario had been implicated in the disappearance of some sidearms and over $20,000 worth of vehicle parts from a Marine lock-up; he hadn’t been formally charged but a cloud had lingered over him and this assignment was seen by some as an unofficial punishment.

As for the four civilian members of the team, as far as Schofield was concerned, two of them were great and two less so.

Zack Weinberg was from DARPA and he was your typical geek genius: he was 29, gangly and thin, and he wore huge glasses that seemed three sizes too big for his head.

A physicist by training, he was at DARPA because of his work in robotics. Hopelessly devoted to
Call of Duty
video games and all things
Star Wars
and
Star Trek
, he was in the Arctic testing several new DARPA inventions, the main one being a small bomb-disposal robot called the BRTE-500, or, as Zack called it, ‘Bertie’.

Bertie was DARPA’s answer to existing battlefield robots like the PackBot, the Talon and the weapons-mounted variant of the Talon called SWORDS.

‘Except Bertie comes with a few extra features,’ Zack said the day he pulled the little robot from its crate. ‘Unlike other bots that require human operators to control them remotely, Bertie is able to operate completely independently. Thanks to an artificial intelligence chip developed by my team at DARPA, he can follow spoken orders, learn, and even assess a situation and make tactical decisions.’

‘He can make tactical decisions?’ Schofield said. To him, the little robot—with its two spindly bomb-disposal arms and its curiously emotive single-lens ‘eye’ mounted on a stalk—looked like a cute toy. It scurried around on four rugged little tyres and, when necessary, extended a set of triangular treads that enabled it to climb up steps and over obstacles.

‘He’s a smart little bot,’ Zack said, ‘and for a weedy little fella, he packs a punch. He was initially designed for bomb disposal but I removed his IED water blaster and lightened his armour plating—replaced all the steel with ultralight titanium. Then I augmented him with some
offensive
capabilities.’

As he said this, Zack attached a gunbarrel to Bertie’s weapons mount . . . and suddenly the little robot took on a wholly different appearance: he looked like Wall-E with a great big gun.

‘Those capabilities include,’ Zack explained, ‘four internal rotator-fed ammunition clips which load a custom-modified lightweight short-barrelled internal-recoil-compensated 5.56mm M249 machine gun; a blowtorch for cutting through fences and razor wire; full digital sat-comms; a high-res camera that can send video images back to base; a first-aid pack, including a diagnostic scanner and defibrillator paddles, both of which Bertie can apply himself; oh, and four of our new MRE ration packs in case the human beings working with him get hungry. And all this in a package that weighs about thirty kilograms, so you can even pick him up and carry him if you really need to get out of Dodge in a hurry.’

Schofield couldn’t help but like Bertie: the little robot followed Zack around the camp like a devoted puppy, albeit a puppy with a machine gun on its back.

Mother, however, was doubtful. ‘I don’t know. How can we know he won’t short-circuit and open fire on us with that cannon?’

‘Bertie can distinguish between friend and foe,’ Zack said. ‘I’ve scanned all our team’s faces into his memory bank with instructions that we are never to be fired upon.’

‘Hello? Didn’t you see the ED-209 in
RoboCop
?’

‘This is the big question about robotic weapons,’ Zack said. ‘But Bertie has operated for three hundred hours without hurting anybody he wasn’t supposed to hurt. We have to trust him sometime. Hey, speaking of which, Bertie, scan Captain Schofield. Facial and infra-red, please.’

The robot scanned Schofield’s face, then beeped.

Its robotic voice said, ‘
Scan complete. Individual identified as Captain Shane M. Schofield, United States Marine Corps. Service identification number 256-3569
.’

Zack said, ‘Store as secondary buddy, please.’

‘
Captain Shane M. Schofield stored as secondary buddy
.’

‘What does that mean?’ Schofield asked.

‘Bertie needs someone to follow. I’m his primary buddy, which is why he follows me, but if something were to happen to me, he needs a secondary buddy which I think should be you.’

‘I’m honoured.’

Schofield liked Zack. On quiet evenings, they played chess and during those matches Zack would happily explain things like space-time, the speed of light and the Big Bang Theory—the TV show
and
the universe-creating event.

On a few occasions, Schofield even played chess against Bertie, with the little robot moving the pieces with its long spindly arm.

Bertie won every time.

The second civilian Schofield got along well with was Emma Dawson, a young meteorologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In her late twenties, Emma was pretty, articulate and tremendously hardworking—she was almost always reading a chart or working away on her laptop. She was in the Arctic measuring the rate at which the sea ice was melting.

Her beauty had not gone unnoticed by the young males in the team. Schofield had seen the Kid and Mario—and young Zack—staring absently at Emma on various occasions. But she rarely looked up from her work, and Schofield wondered if it was the practised skill of an attractive young woman: bury yourself in your work so you don’t have to fend off unwanted advances.

The final two civilian members of the field team kept mainly to themselves.

Jeff Hartigan was a senior executive for ArmaCorp Systems, a weapons maker that produced assault and sniper rifles. ArmaCorp was trying to convince the Marines to buy its latest assault rifle, the MX-18 carbine, but the Corps had insisted on cold-weather testing before they committed.

At 48, Hartigan was the oldest member of the group. He was also perhaps the only one who occupied a position of status back in the real world. As such, he was haughty and aloof and didn’t care about anyone he deemed beneath him, which was pretty much everyone else in the camp—so long as they recorded the results of the carbine’s tests, he didn’t seem to care what they thought of him. Except during testing, he mostly stayed in his tent, well apart from the others, even going so far as to send his personal assistant—an equally aloof junior executive named Chad—to collect his food for him at mealtimes.

Their testing had generally gone well.

The ArmaCorp rifle had performed flawlessly in the ice-cold conditions—making Hartigan even more unbearable—and Bertie whizzed about impervious to all kinds of frost and snow, variously disarming explosives and blowing blocks of ice to pieces with his small but very powerful M249 machine gun.

A new anti-explosive paint-gel made by an Australian company, DSS, worked perfectly in the cold—after the gooey gel was painted onto a large crate, that crate could withstand the most powerful explosive blast, even one from some potent PET plastic explosive, brought along precisely for those tests. Longer-lasting scuba rebreathers and drysuits for cold-water insertions had performed excellently, as had the new Assault Force Delivery Vehicles: some had wondered if the deflating valves on their rubber skirts might freeze in the cold, but they’d held up just fine.

Mother liked the new MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—that they’d been instructed to try. Each MRE came in a small plastic tube the size of a Magic Marker, so they were extremely portable. Each tube held some powdered jelly, a high-energy protein bar and three new water filtration pills which worked brilliantly.

‘The jelly still tastes like shit,’ Mother said, ‘but the water pills are fucking brilliant. Best field water I ever tried and I haven’t got diarrhoea once.’

Zack said, ‘That’s always been an issue with water filtration pills. These ones are chitosan-based and so far the results have been great. Chitosan is a natural polysaccharide that dissolves organically in the body. Did you know it’s also the main ingredient of Celox, the bullet-wound gel?’

Mother held up a hand. ‘Hey. Genius. You lost me at polysaccha-something. I get it. It’s an amazing new substance that will change the way we live.’

‘Something like that,’ Zack said, deflating a little.

Mother was more interested, however, in another device that Zack had been trialling: a new high-tech armoured wristguard.

DARPA had been developing it in the hope that it would become standard issue in the Marines and Army Rangers. Made of light carbon-fibre, the wristguard covered its wearer’s forearm and featured, among other things, a high-resolution LCD screen.

‘This screen is designed to display real-time data—video signals, even satellite imagery—to a soldier in the field,’ Zack explained to Mother as they stood outside their tents one day, testing it.

‘Real-time satellite imagery?’ Wearing the wristguard, Mother peered at its small rectangular screen. Zack leaned over and touched some icons on it. The screen came alive, showing two people in black-and-white seen from directly overhead, standing on a barren white plain beside some hexagonal objects.

‘Okay, now wave,’ Zack said.

Mother waved her left arm.

On the screen, one of the figures waved its left arm.

‘Oh, that is way cool . . .’ Mother said.

‘The wristguard operates like a satellite phone,’ Zack explained. ‘Encrypted, of course. But so long as you can make a connection with the satellite, you can get real-time imagery, data, even voice signals. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve configured it so you can even surf the net.’

Mother threw Zack a grin. ‘You know, Science Boy, you and I are gonna get along just fine.’

Zack beamed.

A few items had been unable to be tested, like an acid-based aerosol ‘anti-ursine agent’—or as Mother called it, ‘polar bear repellent’. While Zack had studiously sprayed it on all their tents, armour and drysuits, it had defied testing since no polar bears had come near their camp during the entire trip (prompting Mother to conclude, ‘Then I guess it works, doesn’t it?’).