Matthew Reilly: Scarecrow Returns

INCIDENT 7: 3/3

THE TORTURE OF AN AMERICAN OFFICIAL

Shortly after midnight on 3 March, a small group of unidentified men raided the Georgetown home of the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, killed his two bodyguards and kidnapped the ageing Secretary.

The Secretary was found—alive—by two early-morning hikers in Rock Creek Park, bound to a torture device.

He had been waterboarded.

Carved into the skin of his chest was the following symbol:

During his subsequent debriefing, the Secretary exhibited symptoms of severe shock. He continually shouted: “Beware the Army of Thieves! Beware the Army of Thieves!”

CONCLUSIONS

The seven incidents outlined above describe in somewhat grim detail the rise of a new non-state entity calling itself the “Army of Thieves.”

Where it is based and who comprises it are not known.

What is known is this: it is a force of militarily trained individuals that over the last seven months has obtained for itself a considerable supply of weapons, finance and manpower.

It does not, as yet, show any religious or cultural motivations for its aggressive acts. We do not yet know what is driving this rogue “Army.”

But it wants us to notice it.

It has carried out one operation a month, every month, for the last seven months, in accordance with a pattern where the day and the month are the same. Clearly, it wants us to see this pattern, and we should be aware of it, because tomorrow is April 4 . . .

SCARECROW

RETURNS

DRAGON ISLAND BASE

AS SEEN FROM THE AIR

FACING NORTH

PROLOGUE

THE ISLAND OF THE DRAGON

OSTROV ZMEY

ARCTIC OCEAN

4 APRIL, 0500 HOURS

THE PLANE hurtled down the airstrip, chased by furious machine-gun fire, before it lifted off with a stomach-lurching swoop and soared out over the vast expanse of Arctic sea ice that stretched away to the north.

The plane’s pilot, a 60-year-old scientist named Dr. Vasily Ivanov, knew he wouldn’t get far. As he’d lifted off, he’d seen two Strela-1 anti-aircraft vehicles—amphibious jeep-like vehicles that were each mounted with four 9M31 surface-to-air missiles—speeding down the runway behind him, about to take up firing positions.

He had perhaps thirty seconds before they blasted him out of the sky.

Ivanov’s plane was an ugly Beriev Be-12, a genuine 1960s Soviet clunker. Many years ago, as a young recruit in the Soviet Air Defense Force, Ivanov had flown this very kind of plane, before his talents as a physicist had been spotted and he had been reassigned to the Special Weapons Directorate. On one recent occasion when he had sat as a passenger in the freezing hold of this plane, he’d actually thought that the Beriev and he were very similar. They were both ageing workhorses from a bygone era still toiling away: the Beriev was an old forgotten plane used to shuttle old forgotten teams like his to old forgotten bases in the north; Ivanov was just old, his bushy Zhivago-style mustache growing grayer every day.

He also never imagined he’d actually pilot a Beriev again, but his team’s arrival at the island that morning had not gone according to plan.

Ten minutes earlier, after an overnight flight from the mainland, the Beriev had been making a slow circuit over Ostrov Zmey, a remote island in the Arctic Circle.

A medium-sized semimountainous island, Ostrov Zmey—Dragon Island—had once held the highest security classification in the Soviet Union alongside nuclear research bases like Arzamas-16 at Sarov and bio-weapons centers like the Vektor Institute in Koltsovo. Now its massive structures lay dormant, kept alive by rotating skeleton crews like Ivanov’s from the Special Weapons Directorate. Ivanov and the twelve Spetsnaz troops on the Beriev with him had been arriving for their eight-week stint guarding the island.

When they’d arrived, everything had appeared normal.

As winter faded and the Arctic saw the sun for the first time in months, the sea ice around Dragon had started to break up. The vast frozen ocean stretching north to the pole looked like a pane of smoked glass that had been hit with a hammer—a thousand cracks snaked through it in every direction.

Yet the cold still lingered. The complex at Dragon remained covered in a thin layer of frost.

Despite that, it looked magnificent.

The base’s striking central tower still looked futuristic thirty years after it had been built. As tall as a twenty-story building, it looked like a flying saucer mounted on a single massive concrete pillar. Two slender high-spired mini-towers were perched atop the main disc, as was the base’s squat glass-domed command center.

The towering structure gazed out over the entire island like some kind of space-age lighthouse. Looming to the east of it were the two mighty exhaust vents. Where the tower exuded grace and sophistication, the vents expressed nothing except brute strength and power. They were the same shape as the cooling towers one saw at a nuclear power plant but twice the size.

The once-great base bore the usual signs of a skeleton crew: pinpoints of light in various places—offices, guardhouses, on the disc-shaped-tower itself.

It was also a fortress. Well defended by both its construction and the landscape, a small force like Ivanov’s could protect it against any kind of attack. You’d need an army to take Dragon Island.

As his plane had arrived at the island and overflown it, from his seat in the hold Ivanov had seen a steady plume of shimmering gas issuing from the massive exhaust vents, rising into the sky before being blown south. This was odd but not alarming; probably just Kotsky’s team venting excess steam from the geothermal piping.

Upon landing on the island’s airstrip, Ivanov’s team of Spetsnaz guards had disembarked the Beriev and made their way toward the hangar, where Kotsky himself had been standing, waving. Ivanov had lingered behind in the Beriev with a young private he’d ordered to help him carry the new Samovar-6 laser-optic communications gear he’d brought along.

That small delay had saved their lives.

Ivanov’s Spetsnaz team had been halfway across the tarmac, totally exposed, when they had been cut down by a sudden burst of machine-gun fire from a force of unseen assailants who had evidently been lying in wait.

Ivanov had dived into the pilot’s seat and, calling on the skills of his past life, gunned the engines and got the hell out of there—which was how he came to be fleeing Dragon Island.

Ivanov keyed the plane’s radio and shouted in Russian, “Directorate Base! This is Watcher Two—!”

Electronic hash assaulted his ears.

They’d jammed the satellite.

He tried the terrestrial system. No good. Same thing.

Breathing fast, he reached around and grabbed the Samovar radio pack on the seat behind him, the new hardware he’d brought to Dragon Island. It was a laser-optic transmission system that was designed to make secure contact with its satellite not through radio waves but through a direct line-of-sight laser. It had been developed specifically to be immune to the usual jamming techniques.