Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

At 8:40 A.M., Schofield’s boats came to a small pancake-shaped ice floe floating out in the middle of their lead.

A large white shape lay slumped on it, unmoving.

“ What is that . . . ? ” Mother said over the radio.

Schofield slowed his boat, bringing it in close to the little ice floe. The white shape became clearer.

“It’s a polar bear,” he said.

“ Great, now we can test that stupid bear repellent ,” Mother said. “ Hey Kid, go on. Go over and pat the nice widdle bear. ”

“Not this time, Mother,” Schofield said as his boat came further around the ice floe and he saw the other side of the unmoving bear. “This bear’s deader than disco.”

It certainly was.

The bear’s throat was ripped open, its belly a grisly mess of blood, flesh and sprawling intestines. This polar bear had practically been disemboweled.

Zack grimaced. “Eugh. Nasty.”

The Kid said, “Jesus . . . the thing’s been gutted.”

“But not eaten,” Schofield observed. “That’s not right.”

Emma said, “No, it’s not right at all. The polar bear is an apex predator. The only other animal in these parts that could do something like this is another polar bear. You’re correct: another bear might attack a fellow bear out of starvation or for territorial reasons, but it would almost always eat its fallen rival. Polar bears are the most dangerous bear in the world primarily because they are opportunists; they’ll eat anything they can find, including humans and other bears. But this bear has been slaughtered and then abandoned . Polar bears just don’t do that.”

“Are there any gunshot wounds?” Mother asked.

“Not that I can see.” Schofield stared at the dead bear for a long moment. It was absolutely huge, and its snow-white coat was matted with blood. Who or what could have done this?

It didn’t escape his notice that they were now only about thirty miles from Dragon Island.

“Come on,” he said, turning away. “We’ve got a plane to find.”

He gunned the engine and his sleek assault boat powered away from the remains of the dead polar bear.

THE BERIEV CRASH SITE

THE BERIEV CRASH SITE

4 APRIL, 0900 HOURS

2 HOURS TO DEADLINE

TWENTY MINUTES later, the two assault boats pulled to a halt at a junction of two major leads. The ice walls that bounded the watery junction rose about twenty feet above the boats. After two hours of travel, they were close to the coordinates of the crashed Beriev.

Scarecrow extended a ladder, hooked its curved upper prongs over the lip of the ice-wall and started climbing. His team remained in the boats below him, huddled in their drysuits and parkas, looking very anxious.

Schofield’s head appeared above the flat edge of the ice plain.

The crashed Beriev was right there, barely fifty yards away.

It was tipped over on its left-hand side, its nose pointing southward. Its tail section was completely destroyed, and its left wing had snapped under the weight of the fuselage rolling onto it. Beyond the plane, a vast expanse of ice stretched away to the west, cracked here and there by leads.

Far to the south, Schofield saw Dragon Island for the first time.

It loomed on the horizon, small but visible, a jagged upthrust of mountains on the otherwise perfectly flat horizon. Low clouds hovered above it. It looked dangerous, even from here.

Scarecrow peered warily up at the sky, scanning for surveillance aircraft.

Nothing. Only the purple dawn-like sky and some high-altitude clouds, although to the south, around Dragon, the sky did seem to shimmer somewhat.

He saw something.

A tiny object, circling lazily high above him. It wasn’t a surveillance plane; it was too small. It looked like a large Arctic bird, gliding on the thermals.

Schofield swore. He was completely unprepared for a combat mission and he knew it. He was working with untrained civilians just to make up the numbers and he had almost zero surveillance equipment. He wished he had a simple waveguide radar or even just a parabolic dish to scan the immediate airspace. But he didn’t even have that. Right now, all he had were his eyes and they just weren’t good enough.

“Mother, come on up. Bring Bertie with you. Everyone else, stay in the boats for now.”

He stepped up onto the flat surface of the ice plain, MP-7 submachine gun poised and ready.

A few moments later, Mother joined him. She plonked Bertie on the ground between them and the little robot beeped and spun on his chunky tires.

Mother stood beside Scarecrow, clasping a menacing Heckler & Koch G36A2 assault rifle in her hands.

Most Force Recon NCOs used the standard-issue M4, but Mother preferred the venerable German assault gun, and hers came with all the optional extras: it had a 100-round C-Mag drum magazine, underslung AG36 grenade launcher with the new anti-tank zinc-tipped incendiary grenades, a Zeiss RSA reflex sight and Oerlikon Contraves LLM01 laser light module. With all the additions, it looked like something out of a science-fiction movie.

Scarecrow glanced from his compact MP-7 to her G36. “Could you have attached anything else to that thing?” he asked.

“Quiet, you,” she said. “Weapons options are like good commanders: you love ’em when you’ve got ’em, and you wish you had ’em when you don’t.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Mother scanned the area. “It’s too quiet here.”

“Yeah, it is. Bertie, acquire and identify that object up in the sky, please.”

“ Yes, Captain Schofield .” Bertie’s optical lens tilted skyward.

As the robot did this, Scarecrow and Mother approached the crashed plane, guns raised.

Standing before the Beriev, Schofield pulled down the thermal-vision scope on his helmet.

He saw the crumpled plane in infra-red, saw the strong residual warmth of its intact wing-mounted engine plus two man-shaped blobs in the cockpit, dim but pulsing.

“I got two human signatures in the cockpit,” he said. “Looks like they’re still alive in there—”

Suddenly, Schofield’s earpiece crackled to life.

Ironbark Barker’s voice growled: “ SEAL team in position off the north-east corner of Dragon Island. Commencing underwater insertion via the old submarine dock .”

Ironbark and his team were going in.

Scarecrow returned his attention to the plane and, stepping cautiously forward, arrived at its cracked cockpit windshield. Since the Beriev was rolled on its side, he couldn’t get in via its side doors, so he smashed one of the cockpit windows while Mother covered him, her G36 ready to fire.

Schofield saw two figures slumped in the plane’s flight seats. Still strapped into the pilot’s seat was an older man with a bushy gray mustache and IVANOV stenciled onto his parka. He groaned as Schofield reached in and touched his carotid artery.

“Ivanov. This is the guy who sent out the distress call. He’s alive.” Schofield pulled out a heat-pack from his first-aid pouch and pressed it against Ivanov’s chest. Ivanov immediately groaned.

Mother crawled in and checked the other man, a young Russian private by all appearances. He was pale and pasty-faced, but after a few slaps, he came to with a grunt.

Beside him, Vasily Ivanov also regained his senses. He blurted something in Russian before, seeing the U.S. flags on Schofield’s and Mother’s shoulders, he switched to English: “Who are you!”