Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

Inside the lab were two Army of Thieves technicians—men who had been selected for this task because of their engineering backgrounds—and the Russian scientist who had allowed the Army of Thieves onto Dragon Island, Igor Kotsky.

Kotsky was a big lump of a man, overweight and pear-shaped, with a hunched, stooping stance, combed-over thinning hair and venal eyes. He often perspired greatly, which he did now.

The three men stood before a large incubating chamber. The chamber housed the six uranium spheres and had just completed its twelve-hour priming cycle.

With the techs was a small guard team of three Army troops. These men were regular Army of Thieves men who had thought guarding the lab was an easy assignment. They’d spent the last few hours lounging around, smoking.

Now, at Typhon’s command, they leapt to their feet and aimed their guns at the elevator as ping! it arrived.

In the tower’s command center the Lord of Anarchy gazed at Shane Schofield’s military record. It appeared on a screen beside a CCTV image of the men gathered in the sphere lab, waiting tensely.

The Lord of Anarchy spoke to the picture of Schofield on the screen: “Captain. Even if you get the spheres, how will you get them off this tower, let alone off this island?”

In the shorter spire’s lab, the elevator doors opened.

The waiting Army guards opened fire. The walls of the little elevator were shredded with bullet holes, a wave of fire that no human being could possibly survive.

They stopped firing.

The smoke cleared. The elevator was empty.

There was no one in it—

Then a floor hatch in the elevator popped open and Shane Schofield emerged from it, MP-7 firing.

The three guards fell, and within seconds Schofield was standing in the doorway of the elevator with the dead men at his feet and his guns pointed at the horrified figures of Igor Kotsky and the two Army of Thieves technicians.

“Step away from the priming unit,” he commanded.

Schofield hurried to the incubating chamber, holstering one of his guns. It opened with a hiss and he beheld the six gleaming spheres, sitting in two neat rows of three. They were deep maroon in color, the color of blood, with gleaming polished sides; and they really were small, the size of golf balls.

They looked perfect. Perfect and potent.

Schofield didn’t care for that. He just started grabbing them and stuffing them into three small purpose-built Samsonite cases sitting nearby; cases that the two Army of Thieves technicians had themselves been about to place the spheres into. The cases were specially designed to carry two spheres each in snug velvet-lined recesses.

Schofield clipped two of the small cases to his weapons belt and carried the third in his spare hand.

He looked at Kotsky and the terrified technicians as he raised a small handheld remote.

“You might want to hold on to something.” He thumbed the switch on the remote.

There was movement all around the tower now.

The two crane-bridges that gave access to it touched down and Army men hurried across them in large numbers, racing toward the shorter spire.

One Osprey banked around the mighty tower, sweeping in toward the tanker truck that hung suspended across the moat, while the other one—the one Baba had hammered with his Kord earlier—had limped back to the helipad where it now sat, its wounded engine still belching thick black smoke.

On the tanker truck, Mother and Baba were making their own hurried escape plans.

Baba attached his own ascender to one of the cables leading back up to the outer rim just as gunfire from the Osprey started raining down in them.

“Do you think your man made it?” he shouted to Mother.

She glanced up at the shorter spire. “We’ll find out in a couple of seconds! Go!”

Gripping the ascender, Baba whizzed up the cable, while Mother opened fire on the Osprey with her G36.

Admirable as her effort was, her bullets sparked ineffectually off the gunship and the big Osprey swooped into a hover right in front of her, its cannons rotating into position to return fire.

Mother’s jaw dropped. “Oh, fuck me, I’m dead . . .”

Baba reached the rim of the massive moat, where Zack and Emma met him, driving the second truck from the garage, the cement mixer. Veronique Champion arrived a few seconds later, skidding to a halt in a newly stolen jeep.

They saw the Osprey facing off against Mother down below them.

Baba said, “Do not watch. This will not be pretty.”

WITHOUT WARNING, there came a mighty explosion.

At first it was difficult to tell where it had come from. It hadn’t come from the summit of the shorter spire. Nor had it come from anywhere near the Osprey and Mother, the crane-bridges or the rim of the moat.

No, it erupted—a sudden powerful blast—from the base of the short spire, from the point where it rose from the disc-shaped body of the tower, from the point where Schofield had planted a wad of PET plastic explosive beside the elevator earlier.

The fireball sent a cloud of concrete blasting out from the northern side of the spire’s base, carving a great chunk out of it . . .

. . . causing the whole short spire to topple like a slow-falling tree.

It was an absolutely incredible sight.

The spire—with the glass-enclosed lab at its summit—seemed to fall in horrifying slow motion, tipping from its destroyed base, falling northward.

It finished its terrible fall with a bone-crunching, earth-shuddering impact, a colossal crash of concrete on concrete: the spire’s long slender body crashing down against the flat upper surface of the main disc.

The spire’s glass-enclosed lab smashed down against the very edge of the disc—not far from the cables holding up Mother’s tanker truck—every single one of its windows shattering with the mighty impact, sending glass spraying out in every direction.

A cloud of concrete dust flew up around the whole mess, and when it cleared, the spire could be seen lying on its side, looking like a dead snake: its once-straight-and-vertical column now broken and horizontal; its glass lab was wrecked beyond repair, resting crumpled on its side.

As he gazed out at it through the dome of his command center, the Lord of Anarchy found it hard to believe that anyone inside the lab could have survived such a fall.

Unless they had been prepared for it , he thought.

And there he was.

A tiny figure came hurrying out of the shattered side-turned lab, carrying some small black cases, and running for the cables holding up the tanker truck.

Shane Schofield.

Of course, it hadn’t exactly been easy for Schofield.

After depositing the six spheres into the three little Samsonite cases, Schofield had raced around to the southern side of the lab, to the elevator’s doors. On the way, he’d grabbed the two mattresses from the cots in the bunkroom and laid them vertically against the elevator’s door. Then he’d pressed himself against the mattresses and held on tight as the cluster of PET explosives he’d placed at the base of the spire went off.

The explosives detonated and the spire fell northward and he rode it all the way down on its southern side. When the lab hit the disc and every window in it shattered as one, Schofield’s body slammed against the two mattresses which lay flat against the now-horizontal elevator door, softening the blow, sort of. Shards of glass had rained down all over his body but luckily nothing bigger than that hit him.

He was shaken and dazed, which was more than the two techs could say. They’d been crushed under the falling lab. The fate of the Russian traitor, Kotsky, had been worse. He’d been flung by the force of the fall clear out of the lab and Schofield had last seen him flying through the windows, screaming all the way to his death at the bottom of the concrete moat.