Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

It looked like a standard M67 frag grenade, only it had an odd silver band painted around it. Whatever kind of grenade it was, it had been thrown up by the incoming force to open the way for a sub-surface entry.

“Grenade!” he yelled. “Take cover!”

Everyone dived behind something: the doorframe, a crate, a barrel. Schofield himself ducked behind the doorway next to the Kid.

The only thing that didn’t take cover was the unfortunate adolescent bear.

The grenade went off.

The grenade’s deafening blast was followed by a wave of superheated silver liquid that came blasting out through the dock’s doorway.

The adolescent bear was hit full-on by the liquid blast, and it started wailing immediately, clutching at its eyes, the shaggy fur on its limbs, face and belly splattered with the hot viscous silver goo.

As the bear shrieked, a sizzling sound caught Schofield’s attention.

The doorframe beside his head was melting . A dollop of silver acid slid slowly down the steel frame, dissolving the frame as it went.

“An acid grenade,” he said to the Kid. “It’s like a frag, only worse. It’s not designed to kill, just to maim and incapacitate, so that we stop to help the wounded—”

It was then that the bear really started wailing, and it was perhaps the most horrific cry Schofield had ever heard.

The silver acid had started eating through the bear’s skin and the poor animal was in absolute agony. Its pelt was peeling off its flesh. Then its belly melted all the way through and its intestines began to ooze out of it, spilling out onto the floor with a foul slopping noise.

Terrified and confused, the shrieking bear scratched at its face with its claws, only to scratch off the skin, revealing bone, tendons and flesh. It was a sickening sight.

The bear fell to its knees.

Boom!

It dropped dead, shot through the head by Shane Schofield. A mercy killing.

“Move, people!” he yelled. “The bad guys will be here in approximately three seconds!”

They arrived in four.

THEY ROSE out of the pool like deadly wraiths.

They wore body-hugging gray-and-white wire-heated wetsuits and looked down the barrels of compact MP5N machine pistols held pressed against their shoulders in expert firing positions.

Schofield couldn’t tell how many of them there were—ten, twelve, maybe fourteen—but having paved the way with the acid grenade, they came up fast and firing.

Bullets shredded the walls.

Schofield and the Kid returned fire, loosing wild shots behind them as they dashed across the first extendable bridge after the others.

“Mother! Give us cover!” Schofield yelled.

Leading the group, Mother stopped on the central platform and raised her G36.

“Baba! Help her!” Veronique Champion called, and the big French commando joined Mother, aiming his massive Kord at the shattered reinforced door behind them.

The first attacker came through the doorway— braaack! —to be torn apart by the combined brutal fire of Mother and Baba. One second, the wetsuit-clad attacker was there, the next he was simply gone.

The civilians hurried past Mother, Baba and Champion, racing out across the second extendable bridge, led by Mario. As they came to the door on the far side—it was surrounded by discarded crates and barrels—the attacking force launched their own machine-gun salvo.

A burst of fire even more powerful than Baba’s and Mother’s came lancing out of the dock’s doorway: heavy machine-gun fire laced with tracers.

It was so strong it compelled everyone—Mother, Baba, Champion, Schofield and the Kid—to take cover. Mother and Baba ducked behind the console on the platform, while Champion stumbled and fell down through the hatch in the platform’s floor, dropping down within its reinforced-glass walls—while bullets smacked off the curved walls, leaving scratch-marks and cracks—before landing clumsily at the base of the platform structure—

—just in time to see another shaggy polar bear come roaring out of one of the darkened cells and leap at her, jaws bared, aiming for the open door in the base of the glass-walled platform—

—Champion quickly slid forward and kicked the glass door in front of her shut, an instant before the bear slammed into the outside of it, causing the transparent door to shudder violently and the bear to fall back onto its ass, dazed and groaning.

Schofield and the Kid had been halfway across the first bridge when the tracer fire had started.

They both dived forward, joining Mother and Baba behind the console on the central platform.

A shout came from Mario over at the southern door:

“Kid! Look out! Above you!”

The Kid looked up—

—just as a blurring white shape dropped from the network of girders supporting the geodesic dome and landed on the second bridge right in front of him.

It was another deranged bear.

During the mayhem, it had clambered across the girders and had now dropped right in their path. It roared at them an instant before its head exploded like a punctured soccer ball, and Schofield and the Kid turned to see Baba holding a massive .44 Magnum pistol extended in his hand.

The headless bear dropped off the bridge and thudded down onto the floor of the pit, blood oozing from its open neck.

“Fucking Hell . . .” the Kid gasped.

Mother snapped around at the bearded Frenchman’s shot. “Goddamn, you are good!”

“ Oui ,” Baba replied.

Schofield quickly took in the situation.

Veronique Champion was ascending the ladder below him.

Mario and the three civilians—Chad, Emma and Zack, plus Bertie—as well as Ivanov and the third French agent, Dubois, were safely in the far doorway, taking cover there behind some crates and barrels.

On the other side of the wide octagonal space, in the doorway to the dock, Schofield saw eight wetsuit-clad attackers gathering in a four-on-four fanning formation—coolly preparing to attack. At their feet, lying just inside the doorway, were two men manning bipod-mounted heavy automatic weapons.

These guys aren’t common thugs , Schofield thought. They’re trained. And they’re planning somethi —

Suddenly, two dark-skinned men firing AK-47s from the hip came charging out from behind the eight others, bursting out from the dock at a mad run, guns blazing in every direction.

Even from where he stood, Schofield could see they had the crazed yellow-red eyes of ganja-weed users. But these two Africans were totally out there: they wore torn wetsuits and bore many tattoos on their necks; their hair was half-shaved and their faces were literally covered in piercings: eyebrow rings, nose rings, lip studs. They shrieked an ululating war cry as they ran in a crazed ducking-and-weaving kind of way.

Schofield’s eyes went wide.

It was a suicide run, designed to take out as many of his people as possible before the two berserk runners were inevitably shot down. It was the exact opposite of the cool calculation Schofield had thought he was seeing. It was also a disconcerting tactic, designed to shock and confuse, and for a moment, it had indeed shocked him.

The two berserkers sprayed the whole laboratory with AK-47 fire as they dashed for the first bridge, bobbing, weaving and screaming.

As they raced out onto the bridge, Schofield raised his pistol and shot the first one in the chest, but he just kept on coming—still shrieking and firing—and it took four more shots until he was snapped backward and dropped off the bridge, his gun still spraying bullets. Mother took five shots to drop the other one.

“Mother fucking crazy bastards . . .” she breathed.