Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

But Schofield’s cover fire wasn’t enough. As they all changed direction, the terrified Chad was hit in the back by a line of bullets and his chest burst with bloody exit wounds and he fell into the water beside the intersection of the two bridges. He was dead before he hit the surface.

Zack and Emma paused wide-eyed beside his body, but Champion pushed them on. “He’s dead! You can’t help him! Allez! Allez! ”

Schofield also glanced silently at Chad’s floating corpse as he hurried past.

Mother came alongside him as he did so. “These assholes aren’t stupid, Scarecrow!”

“No, they’re not.”

Once they were all across the shorter bridge and on the islet, huddled inside a small abandoned guardhouse there, Schofield tossed a grenade behind them onto the pontoon bridge and it detonated. The near-end of the bridge blew apart, so that it now had a gaping void in it. No one would be following them that way.

But they still hadn’t made it to Dragon and now the Army of Thieves knew exactly where they were.

“What do we do now?” Mother said, breathless. Beside her, Emma had started sobbing and Zack looked horrified.

“Emma, Zack,” Schofield said sharply, making them look up. “I’m sorry, but we can’t grieve now. We knew this was going to be bad and we knew people might get shot. Trust me, Chad’s in a better place now. He doesn’t have to go through any more of this.”

Schofield turned to gaze southward, across this new islet at Dragon Island. His eyes fell on the cable car station at the southern tip of the islet.

A steeply sloping cable rose up from the station, soaring out over the waters of the bay to meet a much larger terminal that hung off Dragon Island, off the summit of the nearest cliff. Made of grim gray concrete, the cable car terminal looked about as inviting as a World War II gun emplacement. But it was their only choice now.

“We just lost any element of surprise we ever had,” he said, “and since we don’t have the advantage of numbers, all we have left is speed. So we go in fast and we go in hard, and we absolutely do not stop.”

KEEP MOVING, keep moving,” Schofield urged, hustling everybody along an asphalt road that led up to the large warehouse-sized building that occupied the central section of Acid Islet.

They entered the building and a vast space met them: a huge hall the size of a football field.

A single grated super-catwalk suspended from the ceiling ran down the length of the space, hanging above two dozen menacing-looking industrial vats. Minor catwalks branched off the main one and from them ladders reached down to the floor where the vats lay.

Each vat was round with steel walls, about the size and shape of an aboveground backyard swimming pool. Some bore pressurized lids on them, while others were open to the air, revealing their strange contents: liquids of various putrid colors—off-green, off-brown, off-yellow—some frozen, others not. A couple of them bubbled. A tangle of pipes and valves linked some of the vats. Suspended from chains above one of the vats was a man-sized cage with semi-melted bars.

“The acid laboratory,” Ivanov said as they moved. “We experimented with acids for use in chemical weapons, grenades and, well, torture.”

“Torture?” Mother asked.

“Trust me, when you are lowered into an acid bath and you start to see your own skin boil, you will tell your questioner everything he wants to know,” Ivanov said grimly.

“Charming,” Schofield said, pushing them along. “Keep moving.”

He glanced downward as he said this, and as he did, he glimpsed a thick lead door down on the lowest level, partially obscured by the minor catwalks. It looked like a walk-in safe at a bank, but the big nuclear symbol on it, accompanied by a warning in Russian, gave away its true character: radioactive material storage.

“Don’t stop.” He pushed everyone along. “We gotta get to that cable car.”

A few minutes later, they emerged from the acid warehouse and raced up a short road that ended at the cable car station.

Dragon Island loomed before them, impossibly huge, protected by its mighty cliffs, the only method of access: the long swooping cable that joined the cable car station to the terminal hanging off the cliff.

As Schofield arrived at the cable car station, he saw it waiting there, sitting by the platform, suspended from the cable: a long bus-sized cable car.

“It’s very likely our enemy will have men waiting at the other end of this cable,” Champion said. “Like those gantry elevators, this is an obvious entry point.”

“And easily defended,” Mother added.

“I know,” Schofield said, “which is why I think we should go in all guns blazing.”

It took a few tries and some tinkering from Mario, but after a couple of minutes the cable car’s engine came to life.

Shortly after that, with a labored mechanical groan, it rumbled out from the station on Acid Islet and began its ascent to Dragon Island.

It took two minutes to make the 300-yard climb—two tense, interminable minutes. It moved upward at a steady pace.

And the whole time it was being observed.

By the ten Army of Thieves men waiting in the upper terminal.

“Thermal scan is in,” one of those Thieves said. He stood at the very end of the terminal’s platform, practically at the edge of the cliff itself, holding an infra-red scanner pointed at the rising cable car. “There’s nobody in it . . .”

The commanding officer of this group of Thieves frowned darkly. His callsign was “White Tip.”

“They might be using thermal blankets to hide their heat signatures. Gentlemen, ready your weapons. When it comes in, shoot the shit out of it.”

The cable car entered the upper terminal, its multi-wheeled overhead unit creeping along the cable.

White Tip and his terminal team were waiting for it, guns raised, safeties off. One man wore a flamethrowing unit clipped to a chest-harness. Its pilot flame flickered, ready.

Thunk!

The cable car shunted to a halt. Its doors began to slide open . . .

White Tip’s unit prepared to fire . . .

The doors slid fully open . . .

And at first White Tip and his men saw no one.

Because they were looking too high.

By the time they lowered their gazes, it was too late.

Bertie opened fire.

Bertie razed the terminal, firing on full auto in a perfect sixty-degree arc.

White Tip and his men didn’t stand a chance. They were cut down where they stood, torn to pieces by the little robot’s devastating fire. They dropped like marionettes that had had their strings cut.

Once all the Thieves up in the terminal were down, Bertie rolled out of the cable car and took up a defensive position in the landward doorway of the terminal. As he stood guard there, Schofield recalled the cable car and it headed back down to Acid Islet.

They now had four minutes—two for the cable car to return to Acid Islet and two for it to make the journey back up to the terminal on Dragon.

ALARMS BEGAN to sound all over Dragon Island. Sirens came to life.

The two crane-operated drawbridges giving access to the main disc-shaped tower began to rise, sealing off the building. On the helipad, the crews of the two Ospreys ran for their planes.

Bertie’s camera lens saw and heard it all, including the two Russian Army trucks filled with men that came speeding out from over by the eastern lighthouse, coming toward the cable car terminal.

While he waited for the cable car down on Acid Islet, Schofield had a look at Emma’s leg wound: the bullet had taken a nick out of her thigh. Schofield patched it up. He also wrapped a gauze bandage around his own shot left little finger, splinting it to the finger next to it.