Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

Zack looked down at his wrist guard: its display now showed a zoomed-out image of the labyrinth of ice-walled leads in which they found themselves.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. And you’ll have to get it exactly right or we all die,” Schofield said, taking the handlebars from Mother and handing back her G36. “You guide, I’ll drive, Mother will shoot. Let’s do it!”

He gunned the thrusters and the AFDV leapt off the mark, kicking up a tail of spray as it peeled out, closely followed by the second American assault boat.

They sped south, leaving the sinking French submarine behind them, and headed in the direction of Dragon Island.

IT WAS a whole lot quieter back at Schofield’s old camp.

Jeff Hartigan was in his tent revising some of his test notes when he heard the distant sound of an aircraft.

He stepped out of his dome-shaped tent and peered south.

A lone plane appeared above the horizon, approaching.

For a brief moment, Hartigan felt a stab of fear—and wondered if perhaps he’d made a mistake staying at the camp alone—but then the aircraft came closer and he saw that it was an American V-22 Osprey with MARINES painted in large black letters on the side.

He relaxed. He’d been right and Schofield had been wrong. The Pentagon had found some Marines stationed somewhere nearby to come and get them.

Hartigan started waving. The Osprey brought itself into a hover and landed near the camp.

Smiling, he went out to meet it.

SCHOFIELD’S TWO AFDVs shot like bullets through the narrow ice-walled leads.

Guided by Zack, Schofield swung the first low-slung inflatable speedboat left and right—dodging pancake-shaped ice floes and sweeping around corners—trying to put as much distance as possible between them and the Cobra and the Osprey, before the two deadly aircraft finished off the French submarine and came after them.

They’d come a good way south, maybe ten miles, since they’d seen the French sub get torpedoed by the Osprey.

Mother sat behind Schofield, eyes searching the sky, G36 at the ready. In the rear tray sat Emma, the Kid, Ivanov and the big French frogman, who still looked hopelessly confused.

“Take the next left!” Zack yelled over the wind. “Then immediately go right!”

Schofield did so.

As he did, he glimpsed something up ahead between the walls of the lead.

Dragon Island.

The huge island looked completely out of place in the Arctic landscape. While the frozen sea around it was all white, flat and level, Dragon was dark, massive and jagged, a spiking upthrust of black rock that at some point in time millions of years ago had burst up through the pack ice and stayed. With its high snow-covered peaks and sheer cliffs overlooking the ocean, it looked like an imposing natural citadel.

Schofield saw a light on one of the cliff-tops: the uppermost window of a watchtower or lighthouse; it seemed impossibly tiny compared to the scale of the island on which it stood.

In the foreground in front of the island, however, just as Ivanov had said, were a few small islets, low mounds of earth that rose above the ice-field. They were covered in snow and mud and various oddly shaped buildings.

“Nice work, Zack,” Schofield said when he saw them. “You got us here.”

“Don’t stop at the first islet! It’s contaminated!” Ivanov said, coming alongside Schofield. “Go to the second one. Are these boats submersible?”

“Yes, why?” Schofield was surprised that Ivanov might suspect that. The full capabilities of these AFDVs were classified.

“The second islet has a small loading dock that is accessible only by submersible,” Ivanov said. “We might be able to land there unseen.”

Schofield frowned. “Who builds a loading dock that’s only accessible by submersible?”

“It wasn’t built that way,” Ivanov said. “The dock was intentionally destroyed, because of an . . . accident . . . there.”

“An acci—”

A line of minigun rounds cut across their path, ripping up the water in front of their boats and the remaining Cobra roared past overhead.

“They found us!” the Kid yelled.

“Mother!” Schofield called. “Go cyclic!”

“On it!” Mother raised her G36 and returned fire on full auto as they sped down the ice-walled alleyway toward the islets.

She fired hard but her bullets pinged off the Cobra’s armored flanks. She tried firing her grenade launcher as Schofield had done before, but this Cobra’s pilot was ready for that: he released a showering spray of firecracker-like chaff and Mother’s grenades—confused into thinking that they had hit something solid—exploded too early and the Cobra remained unharmed.

It rained fire down on the fleeing, banking speedboats.

Schofield swung left and right, trying to put the ice walls between him and the chopper. He swept around a corner just as it was torn apart by mini-gun fire.

“Kid!” he yelled. “Keep an eye out for the Osprey! They probably split up to search for us and that Cobra will have told him where we are by now—”

With a deafening boom, the Osprey arrived, roaring low above them, its two six-barreled Vulcan cannons blazing.

Chunks of ice and fountains of water kicked up all around the two speedboats as they shot behind another corner.

“Goddamn it!” Mother was still firing her G36 for all she was worth. The Kid joined her, firing with his much smaller MP-7. Even working together, they were nothing near a match for the firepower of the Osprey and the Cobra.

Schofield looked ahead: they were still about a mile away from the first—contaminated—islet.

Too far. They’d be dead in a quarter of a mile.

“Scarecrow . . . !” Mother yelled urgently.

“I know!” They were out of time and he knew it.

Unless . . .

“Mario! Deflate skirts and prepare to submerge! Mother! I need one minute!”

“I can give you maybe thirty seconds, honey buns!”

“Give me whatever you can!”

He started flicking switches as Mother ejected one C-Mag and inserted another and prepared to fire again.

The Osprey swung around behind them. The Cobra dropped into the long alleyway in front of them, guns up, rotor blades blurring, cutting them off.

Shit! Schofield’s mind screamed. Caught in the middle .

Mother saw it, too. “Game over, dudes . . .”

“ Mais non ,” a gruff voice said from behind her, followed by a loud shuckshuck .

Both Mother and Schofield turned to see the big French frogman—in fact, he was huge, easily six-feet-four—heft an absolutely gigantic gun that had been slung across his back, a gun that was nearly eight times heavier than Mother’s G36. It was a Russian-made 6P49 Kord, a brutish belt-fed heavy machine gun that was usually mounted on a tank turret and which fired 12.7mm ammunition. This Kord had been adapted for individual use and hung from two straps over the Frenchman’s impressively broad shoulders.

The burly frogman ripped off his scuba hood, revealing a wild tangle of brown hair and an equally wild beard that reached down to his collarbone. He hoisted the Kord into a firing position and let fucking rip.

A blazing three-foot-long tongue of fire roared out from the big gun’s muzzle, releasing an unimaginable torrent of heavy-bore bullets at the Cobra.

The chopper’s armored flanks and windshield might have been able to resist Mother’s G36 fire but they were no match for the Kord.

The Frenchman’s bullets literally chewed up the helicopter.

Its windshield collapsed in a shower of spraying glass that quickly became intermixed with blood as the pilot behind it was chewed up, too. Then the chopper’s engine was hit and it flashed for a moment before the whole thing exploded under the awesome barrage of fire.