Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

“Retract that first bridge!” Schofield yelled.

Baba scanned the console for the correct switch and punched it.

The first bridge began to retract into the outer wall of the circular pit, creating a fifty-foot-wide chasm between Schofield’s position on the central platform and the dock’s doorway.

“Mother! Take the Kid and your new French friend and go!” He glanced downward. Veronique Champion was almost up the ladder. “I’ll cover you guys, then you cover us when I come over with Ms. Champion!”

With those words, he stood suddenly and lay down a shitload of fire—causing his attackers to take cover—while Mother, the Kid and Baba hustled across the second bridge, firing as they went, and joined the others at the far door.

Champion rejoined Schofield on the central platform, rising up through its hatch.

“Mother! You ready to return the favor?” he called.

“ Gotcha boss ,” Mother’s voice replied in his earpiece.

“Okay, let’s go—” Schofield said to Champion as he broke cover and ran, just as three things happened at once:

First, his enemy’s machine-gunners unleashed a new burst of tracer fire that pinged off the second bridge, sending sparks flying up all around Schofield’s feet.

Second, that volley of sizzling tracer bullets sliced through the air between Schofield and Champion, separating them, forcing Veronique Champion to dive back to the platform.

And third, the second bridge began retreating into the far wall of the pit as Schofield ran across it—it was retracting, its segments reverse-telescoping into each other inches behind his running boots. One of his opponents had found a control panel by the dock’s doorway and had retracted the bridge, isolating the central platform, leaving Champion stranded out on it.

Covered by Mother’s fire and running at full speed, Schofield dived over a crate and tumbled to a halt beside the others at the far door.

“Sexy French Chick is still out there!” Mother shouted above the gunfire.

Schofield spun to see Champion huddled behind the console out on the island-like platform, hopelessly pinned down.

“Leave her!” Mario yelled. “She wanted to kill us before!”

“We don’t leave anybody,” Schofield said. “Dr. Ivanov, what’s behind this door?”

Ivanov said, “A stairway leading up to a structure we called the Stadium.”

“Does it take us toward Dragon Island?”

“There’s a pontoon bridge on the other side of the Stadium that connects this islet to Dragon Island, yes.”

“Then we keep going that way,” Schofield said. “Kid! Mario! You two take the lead, get everyone out of here! Get to this Stadium! Mother, stay with me.”

The others all started up the stairs with the Kid and Mario—except for Baba and Dubois. They stood their ground.

“I will not leave Renard,” Baba said simply.

“I wasn’t going to leave her, either. I’m gonna try to get her out of there right now,” Schofield said.

With Baba and Dubois hovering behind them, Schofield and Mother watched the attacking force pummel the central platform on which Veronique Champion was stranded.

“Mario does have a point,” Mother said to Schofield softly. “She did want to kill us before . . .”

“We need every able-bodied soldier we can get,” Schofield whispered, unholstering his Maghook.

“Oh, here we go . . .” Mother said.

“Just cover me, please.”

Mother sprang up and opened fire as Schofield stood suddenly and aimed his Maghook up at the girders supporting the huge domed roof—

But he caught himself in mid-action and didn’t fire.

For at the exact moment that he rose, Veronique Champion did something similar. In fact, she did exactly the same thing.

She sprang up from her crouched position, and aimed a device very similar to Schofield’s Maghook and fired it up at the overhead girders. Schofield only caught a glimpse of it, but her Maghook-like device was larger than his, bulkier, and the tip of its grappling hook was sharper, like an arrowhead.

It shot upward, its pointed silver tip slicing through the air, a cable wobbling behind it like a tail. With a crisp whack , the sharp hook lodged, three inches deep, right into one of the metal girders and held.

Schofield stared as Champion then sprinted into the open, gripping her device’s gun-like launcher, and leapt out over the pit, into open space, and swung . . . just as he would have done.

She swooped out over the bear-infested pit, a graceful sixty-foot swing—covered by Mother’s fire—before her swing-arc brought her perfectly to the outer platform, where she landed deftly right in front of Schofield.

“Nice move . . .” he said.

“Thank you,” Champion said. With the flick of a switch, she reeled in her “Maghook” and within seconds, they were away, dashing through the doorway after the others.

As they fled, neither Schofield nor Champion noticed the closed-circuit TV cameras surveying the lab from above.

Those cameras had caught everything, including clear shots of both their faces.

From his position inside the loading dock, the commander of the small enemy force also watched them go.

His name was Wilhelm Mauser, but everyone who knew him called him “Bad Willy.” Technically, he was a German citizen, and once upon a time he had been a sergeant in the German Army. But an unhealthy taste for young girls that became apparent during a multi-national peacekeeping mission in Africa had seen him dishonorably discharged. It was also the source of his nickname.

Bad Willy smiled.

“Thresher Team, this is Bad Willy,” he said into his throat mike. “Just flushed them out of the Bear Lab. They’re coming right to you.”

“ Copy that, Willy. We’re ready and waiting in the Stadium .”

OVERHEAD VIEW

SIDE VIEW

THE “STADIUM” ON BEAR ISLET

EVERYBODY GOT all their fingers and toes?” Schofield asked as he hurried up a long dark flight of stairs, moving past the members of his little team.

They all nodded.

“What do we do now?” the Kid asked.

“No choice,” Schofield said. “Either we keep going forward or we die trying—”

Gunfire cut him off. A volley of bullets slammed into the stairs at the bottom of the passageway.

“Come on.”

He led them onward.

Schofield emerged from the stairway inside a squat, cube-shaped building that seemed to burrow into Bear Islet’s mountainous core. It contained a few drab offices and a wider open-plan space, long abandoned.

“These were the offices for the scientists who worked on this islet,” Ivanov said.

Schofield’s eyes never stopped roving.

The building seemed to straddle a narrow waist-like section of the islet. Schofield saw daylight through a bank of windows at the far, southern, end. Their only option was to keep going that way.

“Mother, Kid. I need you two to hold the stairway behind us for as long as you can. We’re going south.”

“Roger that, Scarecrow.”

He ran southward, came to the bank of windows and looked out through them.

“Good God . . .” he breathed.

Beside him, Veronique Champion also stopped short. “What is this place?”

They were looking out over a vast oval-shaped crater bounded by sheer hundred-foot-high rocky walls. There was a network of trenches cut into the near half, a watchtower in the middle and a semi-frozen lake at the far end. A covered walkway extended out across the space, half-buried in the earth before it delved below the lake to finally emerge at another cube-shaped building at the opposite end of the crater, a twin of the one they were standing in. Atop that building stood a second watchtower, gazing out over the crater.