Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

Schofield scooped up Bertie while the Kid and the two civilians grabbed him and within seconds he and the robot were in the boat. A moment later, Ivanov was, too.

“Go, go! ” Schofield yelled. “This place is about to get really crowded and this might be our one and only chance to get out of here in one piece!”

That was the understatement of the year.

For in the next moment, several things happened at once:

First, the other two French submersibles surfaced, revealing more armed frogmen on their backs.

But then a Cobra thundered by overhead from the direction of the crashed Beriev, rotors thumping, minigun blazing, strafing the world. The skinny attack chopper’s wave of bullet-impacts traced a line across the water’s surface—a line that cut right across one of the newly surfaced French submersibles, ripping the three frogmen on it to shreds.

That first Cobra was quickly followed by the second AH-1, which swooped into a deadly hover low over the water, right in front of Mother’s boat! It pivoted in the air, leveling its minigun at them.

“Fuck me . . .” Mother breathed.

The only weapon they had that possessed anywhere near enough firepower to threaten the Cobra was the grenade launcher on Mother’s G36 which right now lay at her feet, out of reach, and—

Schofield didn’t stop to think about it.

He quickly snatched up Bertie, held the little robot up in front of him and instead of pulling a trigger—because Bertie didn’t have one—yelled: “Bertie! Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Bertie’s M249 came to stunning life.

Each shot emitted a deep puncture-like whump— whump!-whump!-whump! —yet the recoil was largely contained by Bertie’s internal compensator. The shots hit their mark. They erupted all over the Cobra’s body: cracking its canopy, slamming into its engine housing where it ruptured something, causing a thick plume of black smoke to stream out from the Cobra’s exhaust and the chopper banked wildly away, wounded but not defeated.

Mother yelled, “Scarecrow! What now! Which way do we go?”

That was the question , Schofield thought. In the cacophony of clattering gunfire, booming robots and thumping choppers, he tried to think clearly.

We need to talk to this Russian guy, get some intel and make a decent plan. We don’t have much time but —he recalled the old military maxim— a good plan with less time is better than a bad plan with more time. Maybe we can double back north, regroup a little, and then head for Dragon —

He turned to face the intersection that led back north when a monstrous whooshing noise filled the air and, right in his path, the giant black hull of the French submarine exploded up out of the water, breaching the surface spectacularly.

The bulbous nose of the sub rose a full thirty feet into the air before it slammed back down onto the surface with a colossal splash that sent huge waves rolling out in every direction, causing Schofield’s two low-slung boats to rock wildy.

Schofield’s face fell.

It was completely blocking their path. They couldn’t go north.

Then, with a deafening roar, the V-22 Osprey shoomed overhead, cutting a beeline for the massive French submarine.

It’s going for the more dangerous prey first , Schofield realized. Once it takes out the sub, it can come after us at its leisure.

With its rotors tilted upward, the Osprey did a low banking pass over the sub, in the process dropping two Mark 46 Mod 5A anti-submarine torpedoes from its wing-mounts.

The torpedoes hit the water with twin splashes and immediately zeroed in on the submarine. The Mark 46 is a fine torpedo: reliable, accurate and deadly. Fired from this range, the French sub would have no time to launch any countermeasures and the Mark 46s wouldn’t miss.

Sure enough, a few seconds later, they hit.

It sounded like the end of the universe: two terrific and immense explosions.

The massive French submarine was almost lifted completely out of the water by the blast. A geyser of whitewater sprayed a hundred feet into the air and rained down on the entire area. As the sub bucked skyward, its midsection cracked and folded, wrenched open like a beer can, and as the great sub lunged back down into the foaming water—fatally wounded, its innards literally ripped open—it immediately began to sink.

The rain of spray fell on Schofield’s thunderstruck face.

The scene before him simply defied belief:

The French submarine—smoking and flaming, its bow tilting unnaturally upward—was sinking. Cries and shouts rang out from inside it. And all the while the Osprey hovered over it, pummeling it with relentless gunfire, taking down the sailors who scrambled out of the conning tower, fleeing one form of death only to step into the line of fire of another.

Then there were the two Cobra attack choppers: the wounded, smoking one had backed off a little but the unhurt one was hovering low over the ice-walled intersection, nailing the three frogmen on the third and last French submersible, strafing their defenseless bodies with minigun fire, flinging them into the water, turning the hapless frogmen—killers who had walked into a much bigger firefight—into convulsing fountains of bloody pulp.

“Captain!” a voice called from behind Schofield. “ Captain! ”

Schofield turned.

It was the Russian, Ivanov.

“We can go south from here without having to land on Dragon Island! There are a couple of small islets near the main island we can land on, if only briefly!”

“Good enough for me.” Schofield turned. “Mother—!”

He stopped short.

He saw the wounded Cobra chopper pivoting in the air a short distance away, turning its brutal minigun on the last three French frogmen in the water—the frogmen from the submersible that Mother had run over as it had approached Schofield; only now they were treading water, totally exposed, at the mercy of the smoking Cobra.

And something inside Schofield clicked.

Whoever was flying these Cobras and the Osprey were cold bastards, and even if these French assholes had been coming to kill him, they didn’t deserve to be killed like fish in a barrel. And in the back of his mind he thought that these French troops, if rescued, might even be of some help . . .

And so Schofield scooped up Mother’s G36, shucked its underslung grenade launcher and jammed down on the trigger.

A zinc-tipped anti-tank grenade zoomed out from the launcher and, trailing a dead-straight smoke tail behind it, rocketed inside the Cobra’s already-smoking exhaust and detonated.

The Cobra exploded.

It simply burst outward in a flaming fireball, spraying fragments of metal before it just dropped out of the sky and splashed into the icy Arctic water in front of the stunned French frogmen.

Mother called, “Oh, yeah, now you like those optional extras, don’t you!”

“Quiet, you!” He turned to face Mario and Chad in the other AFDV. “Mario! Chad! Get over here! Help us pick up these frogmen and then let’s get the hell out of here!”

“What are you—?” Mother frowned, but Schofield just yelled, “Do it!”

The two American speedboats came to fast halts beside the three stunned frogmen. They were quickly yanked out of the water: two went into the rear tray of Mario and Chad’s boat, while the third, a big fellow, dropped into Schofield’s rear tray, his wetsuit dripping.

“ Bonjour ,” Schofield said. “Welcome to our nightmare. Mother! South, now! Zack!”

The bespectacled geek looked up, alarmed, clearly not expecting to be called upon. Schofield pointed at the wrist guard on Zack’s left forearm.

“You’re gonna be our guide! Use the satellite imaging! Get us through this maze to the islets north of Dragon!”