Matthew Reilly: Scarecrow Returns

Ivanov thunked the high-tech radio on the dashboard, pointed its laser sighter up at the sky and turned it on.

“Directorate Base, this is Watcher Two! Come in!” he yelled.

A few moments later, he got a reply.

“Watcher Two, this is Directorate Base. Encryption protocols for the Samovar-6 system are not yet fully operational. This transmission could be detected—”

“Never mind that! Someone’s at Dragon! They were waiting for us and attacked my team as soon as they disembarked from the plane! Shot them all to bits on the tarmac! I managed to take off and am now being fired upon—”

As he said this, Ivanov once again saw the gaseous plume rising from the island’s massive vents and his blood went cold.

Mother of God , he thought.

“Base,” he said. “Perform a UV-4 scan of the atmosphere above Dragon. I think whoever’s there has started up the atmospheric device.”

“They did what . . .”

“I can see a vapor plume rising from the towers.”

“Good Lord . . .”

Ivanov made to say more, but suddenly the Beriev was hit from behind by a 9M31 surface-to-air missile fired by one of the Strelas. The entire tail section of the old plane disintegrated in an instant and the plane plunged out of the sky.

A few seconds later, the Beriev hit the sea ice and nothing more was heard from Vasily Ivanov.

His distress call to the Russian Army’s Signals Directorate, however, was heard by one other listener.

A KH-12 “Improved Crystal” spy satellite operated by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.

The message was downloaded and decoded by an automated system according to standard protocols—intercepts of Russian military signals were picked up all the time—but when the keywords DRAGON, UV-4 SCAN and ATMOSPHERIC DEVICE were all found in the same transmission, the message was immediately forwarded to the highest levels of the Pentagon.

THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, D.C.

3 APRIL, 1645 HOURS (45 MINUTES LATER)

0545 (4 APRIL) AT DRAGON

NEVER MIND that! Someone’s at Dragon!”

Vasily Ivanov’s voice rang out in the wide subterranean room. As Ivanov spoke in Russian, a U.S. Army linguist translated his words into English.

The President of the United States and his Crisis Response Team listened in cold silence.

“They were waiting for us and attacked my team as soon as they disembarked from the plane! Shot them all to bits on the tarmac!”

The CRT was composed of generals and flag officers from the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force, the President’s National Security Advisor and senior personnel from the NRO, CIA and DIA. The only woman in the room was the representative of the DIA, Deputy Director Alicia Gordon.

“I managed to take off and am now being fired upon—”

Manning the digital playback console was a young analyst from the National Reconnaissance Office named Lucas Bowling.

“Base. Perform a UV-4 scan of the atmosphere above Dragon. I think whoever’s there has started up the atmospheric device.”

Bowling turned off the recording.

“What’s a UV-4 scan, and have we done it yet?” asked the Army general. The President’s National Security Advisor, a former four-star Marine Corps general named Donald Harris, answered. “UV-4 is a region of the light spectrum invisible to the human eye, the fourth grade of the ultra-violet spectrum.”

“I’ve got the scan here, sir,” Bowling said, glancing at the President. “But if I may, before I show it to you, it would be helpful to take you back a bit. After we received this intercept, the NRO rescanned all our satellite images of the upper Arctic over the past two months using UV-4 overlays. This is a composite image of scans taken by six multi-spectrum IMINT reconnaissance satellites depicting the upper northern hemisphere in the UV-4 spectrum as it appeared six weeks ago.”

A satellite scan appeared on the screen:

It showed the northern hemisphere as seen from above the North Pole. One could see the Arctic Sea and the larger island chains of Svalbard, Franz Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya; then Europe, Russia, China, Japan, the North Pacific and finally the United States and Canada.

It was only barely noticeable, but streaming out from a tiny island not far from the pole was a dense black plume of dark smoke-like matter. In reality, the plume was transparent, but through a UV filter it appeared black.

The plume originated at a dot marked “Dragon Island.”

Bowling narrated. “As I said, this image is six weeks old. It depicts a small plume of gaseous matter emanating from an old Soviet weapons laboratory complex in the Arctic known as Ostrov Zmey, or Dragon Island.”

“Looks like that ash cloud that shut down air travel a while back, from that volcano in Iceland,” the Army man said.

Bowling said, “The atmospheric dispersal is very similar, but not the cloud itself. That ash cloud was composed of dust-sized particles of volcanic rock. This cloud is an ultra-fine gas seeded into the lower and middle atmospheres.

“It’s so fine that to the untrained observer looking at it with the naked eye, it would look like a shimmering heat haze. But, as you can see, it is clearly visible in the ultra-violet spectrum. This is because it is a compound derived from triethylborane, or TEB. Soviet scientists experimented extensively with TEB and its derivatives back in the 1970s and 1980s.”

“What is this TEB? It’s not an airborne poison, is it?” the Navy admiral asked.

“No, it’s not a poison. It’s worse than that,” Air Force said. “TEB is a highly combustible explosive mixture usually stored in a solid state. Basically, it’s rocket fuel. We use it ourselves. TEB is a pyrophoric composition that has been employed as the solid-state fuel in ramjet engines like that on the SR-71 Blackbird. When mixed with triethylaluminum, it’s used to ignite the engines of the Saturn V rocket.”

“It’s one of the most combustible substances known to man,” the National Security Advisor said to the President. “It burns bright, hot and big.”

He turned to face the people from the DIA and CIA. “But I understood that liquid-state TEB and its variants were stable when stored in hexane solution and I thought the Russians keep it in hexane tanks.”

“They do,” the DIA deputy director said. “At bases just like Dragon. Only Dragon is different. It’s special. If our intelligence is correct, during the ’80s that place was a goddamn house of horrors—a classified facility where Soviet scientists were allowed to do whatever they wanted. And they got up to some seriously messed-up stuff. Experimental electromagnetic weapons, flesh-eating bugs, molecular acids, explosive plasmas, special nuclear weapons, hypertoxic poisons.

“During the last few years of the Cold War, among other things, Dragon was the epicenter of Soviet research into caustic Venusian atmospheric gases, gases which are highly toxic and which the Soviets brought back to Earth on two of their Venera probes. It’s believed that they managed to mix some of the more deadly Venusian gases with TEB.

“Apparently, the Soviets wanted to create a skin-melting acid rain similar to that found in the atmosphere of Venus and loose it upon America. You create a gas cloud of TEB infused with an exotic Venusian gas, send the mixture up into the jet stream over the Pacific and, given the right weather conditions, a skin-searing superhot acid rain falls on America.