Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

The tanker truck, with Mother and Baba crouched on top of it and a gushing trail of diesel spilling out behind it, thundered out of the garage and sped in a dead-straight line toward the circular chasm containing the main tower.

The Army men raised their guns, but Mother and Baba sprayed them with a deadly burst and half of them fell. The others took cover—and so didn’t see some of Schofield’s other people scamper out of the garage on foot.

It didn’t matter. The tanker truck had seized the Army men’s attention completely.

Chiefly, this was because its path was very unusual.

For it wasn’t heading toward either of the two crane-bridges that granted one access across the moat to the tower.

No.

It was speeding in a dead-straight line—not on any road, but over open ground—a line that ran directly from the cable car terminal to the tower, a line that would end at the sharp concrete edge of the moat.

“What the hell are they doing?” one of the Army men breathed.

The Lord of Anarchy was watching the speeding tanker truck from his command center on the tower.

“What the hell is he doing?” he said.

The tanker truck picked up speed as it rushed toward the edge of the moat.

It was only twenty yards from the moat and still accelerating when the remaining Osprey thundered by overhead, cannons blazing.

Sizzling rounds strafed the ground all around the speeding truck, raking the dirt behind it, igniting the leaking trail of diesel fuel there.

The line of diesel fuel burst to life, erupting as an elongated wall of flames behind the speeding truck!

Schofield saw it in his side mirror. “As if this wasn’t crazy enough,” he muttered as he kept driving toward the edge of the moat. “Mother! Baba! You ready?”

“Ready up front!” Mother called back.

“Ready at rear!” Baba shouted.

“Please God, this better work . . .” Schofield whispered before he floored it completely and the tanker truck rushed toward the edge of the moat and flew off it into empty, open air.

WHEELS SPINNING, the tanker truck shot off the outer edge of the circular chasm and soared out into space; a small concrete gutter on the rim of the moat kicked its nose upward as it did so.

As the truck’s tires left the ground, Baba fired both of his Magneteux’s two grappling hooks back at the concrete rim of the moat. With loud twin thunks! the two drill-bit-tipped hooks plunged deep into the concrete and held. Their cables—unspooling rapidly—stretched back to Baba on the truck and he quickly looped the Magneteux’s launcher under the tanker truck’s steel ladder.

At the same time, crouched at the forward end of the truck’s roof, Mother waited. Waited . . . waited . . . and waited . . . for the truck’s flight to get them as far out into the void as possible. Then, as the truck’s nose dropped, she fired the two hooks from the Magneteux that she held—Champion’s—only Mother fired her pair of hooks at the disc-shaped tower in front of the flying truck.

Her French-made grappling hooks soared out into the air, trailing their cables, and slammed into the thick concrete flank of the disc, just above the windows of the disc’s middle level. Then, just as Baba had done, Mother looped her launcher around the steel-rung ladder that ran along the top of the truck’s tank and held on as tightly as she could, waiting for the jolt.

When it came, it was stomach-dropping.

The truck, sailing out through the air, came to a sudden, lurching, swinging halt.

The combined effect of the two coordinated launchings was remarkable: the truck didn’t fall into the great moat.

Instead, as it began to drop in its natural arc, the four cables—two in front, two at the rear—went taut, and like a rope bridge hanging across a mountain gorge, the truck now hung suspended from the four cables out in the middle of the chasm !

It looked totally bizarre.

A one-and-a-half-ton fuel truck hanging into the middle of the void, like a fly caught in a spider’s web, suspended by the four cables between the outer rim of the moat and the colossal tower, hanging a dizzying 200 feet above the concrete base of the moat, with the tiny figures of Baba and Mother on its back and . . .

. . . without missing a beat, Shane Schofield emerged from the cab of the truck and, moving fast, attached Champion’s motorized ascender to one of the cables stretching up to the disc-shaped tower.

The ascender whizzed him up the cable at tremendous speed, and in a few seconds he arrived at the windows of the second level of the disc—where with his spare hand he raised his Desert Eagle pistol and blasted the windows to shit.

They shattered and he used the momentum of the motorized ascender to swing in through them.

And suddenly he was inside.

He checked his watch.

10:57.

Three minutes to go.

He dashed into the tower.

In an attempt to cut off access to the tower structure, the Lord of Anarchy had raised his two crane-bridges—but now, as Schofield had hoped, that order would work against him.

Now the bulk of the Lord’s men would not be able to get across onto the tower until those bridges were lowered back into place again; for most of his Army was on the outer rim of the moat in a conventional defensive deployment.

Lowering the two bridges would take time—maybe a minute—and that meant sixty precious seconds that Schofield could use to get past the much smaller force of Army men on the tower itself, and get to the shorter spire and the lab inside it containing the spheres.

He sprinted as fast as he could.

THE INTERIOR of the disc-shaped tower was like a 1980s office: beige carpet and brown faux-wood desks, but unlike the other areas of the island Schofield had seen, it was clean and well kept. It was also empty, a ghost town.

Schofield raced through it, firing his Desert Eagle left and right as he did so, not at any enemy troops but at the surveillance cameras he saw mounted near the ceiling. They exploded in sprays of sparks as he rushed by.

He dashed past abandoned desks and workbenches before he came to an elevator situated—he guessed—directly underneath the shorter spire. He crouched by the elevator doors and lay something on the floor beside them, flicking switches.

Time check.

10:59 became 11:00.

The spheres were ready for use.

He was now officially operating on borrowed time.

Gripping his Desert Eagle in one hand, he drew his MP-7 with the other. Then he hit the call button and raised both guns.

The Lord of Anarchy stared at the tanker truck hanging from the four cables, bridging the moat.

“Now that’s inventive,” he said.

Beside him, Typhon was less controlled. He yelled into a radio: “Tower Team! We have an intruder in the building and he’s coming toward you! He’s going for the spheres! Get out of there and take the spheres with you!”

A surprised voice replied: “ Sir, the spheres only just reached operating temperature a few seconds ago. We’re opening the reheater unit now and it’ll take at least a couple of min— ”

Typhon scowled. “Then tell your guards to cover the elevator. I’m sending reinforcements.”

He turned to a small six-man Army team stationed inside the command center. “Get to that tower now!”

As Typhon raged, the Lord of Anarchy called up a CCTV screen that displayed the interior of the elevator that serviced the shorter spire’s lab.

On that screen, in silent black-and-white, he saw the elevator’s doors open and saw Shane Schofield enter it. Then he saw Schofield aim his MP-7 directly up at him and fire.

The image cut to hash.

The laboratory at the summit of the shorter spire was a circular space with windows facing every direction. It had a commanding view of Dragon Island, blocked only by the gray concrete column of the taller spire that stood a short way to the east. In the lab’s center was a compact structure that contained a kitchen, a toilet, a closet, a little bunkroom with two cots and the elevator: the only point of access to the lab.