Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

Schofield didn’t care.

He couldn’t stop. He had to keep moving.

He hustled out of the destroyed lab, covered in concrete dust, heading out into the Arctic chill once again.

As for Mother, the spectacular fall of the shorter spire had saved her life.

It came crashing down just above the hovering Osprey, causing the Osprey’s pilot, Hammerhead, to take evasive action and bank away from it. Concrete dust billowed out all around Mother and the Osprey, obscuring the air around both of them for a few precious moments.

Mother heard the Osprey’s rotors roaring as it banked around her. It would be back in a few seconds—

A sudden thump made her turn, and she saw Scarecrow standing on the roof beside her, with two Samsonite cases clipped to his gun-belt and a third in his hand. He’d just whizzed down a cable from the edge of the disc using his ascender as a descender.

Mother yelled, “Christ, this is the craziest snatch’n’grab I’ve ever seen!”

“It’s desperation over style, Mother.” He hurried over to the tail end of the suspended tanker truck, to the two cables that rose up from it to the rim of the massive moat.

“But did you have to destroy everything?” she shouted.

“I haven’t destroyed everything yet. Hurry up, this isn’t over! This way!”

He reached for the Magneteux at the rear of the truck.

“But you didn’t bring the ascender!” Mother shouted.

“We’re not using the ascender this time! Hold on to me!”

Mother knew not to argue. She just looped her arms around Scarecrow’s waist and held tight. As she did so, the dust cloud parted and she saw the Osprey materialize behind them, hovering in the void, guns poised.

“Scarecrow!”

“Just hang on!” With his other hand, Schofield grabbed the French Magneteux that Baba had looped around the rung ladder of the truck and—

—pressed the unspool switch.

The French Maghook unspooled a fraction and the result was instantaneous: it came free of the tanker’s rear ladder.

Which meant the tanker truck was now no longer suspended between the rim and the tower, and Schofield and Mother swooped away from the tower, swinging northward on that Magneteux’s cables—while the tanker truck, still dangling from the other pair of cables attached to the main tower, swung southward, where it smashed into the right wing of the hovering Osprey!

The Osprey rocked in midair, like a boxer recoiling from a punch. The swinging truck had shattered its starboard wing, and it dropped out of the sky, wheeling out of control before crashing down against the bottom of the moat, where it exploded spectacularly.

For their part, Schofield’s and Mother’s swing ended with them slamming at speed into the outer wall of the concrete moat. They bounced off the wall, but somehow managed to hang on.

Schofield then reeled in the Magneteux and they whizzed up the side of the chasm, where Zack, Emma, Champion and Baba awaited them in the cement mixer and the stolen jeep.

“ Alors! ” Baba exclaimed. “This is my kind of mission!”

“Holy fucking shit, dude,” Zack said, surveying the destruction all around them.

Schofield didn’t stop moving. He climbed into the back of the jeep with Baba and threw the Magneteux to Champion, saying: “Drive! We’re not out of this yet. We have to get to the coast and throw these spheres into the sea.”

“Why can’t we just throw them into the bay from the cable car terminal?” Zack asked.

“Water’s too shallow there. They could find the spheres easily with divers. We need to dispose of them in deeper water—”

Gunfire cut him off.

Four troop trucks filled with Army men were hurtling toward them from both crane-bridges.

Schofield yelled, “Mother! Take the wheel of that cement mixer and lead the way! You’re our blocker! Get us to the airstrip! Hopefully Ivanov has found us a plane!”

They sped off the mark, heading for the runway.

DRAGON ISLAND’S airstrip was situated on a plain of lower ground to the west of the main complex.

Getting to it meant driving down a steep asphalt road that swept around the north-western side of the crater containing the main tower.

With four Army trucks behind them, Schofield’s two vehicles—the cement mixer and the jeep—raced down the steep slope at reckless speed. Gunmen on the various towers they passed fired at them, their bullets strafing the road all around the fleeing vehicles. A couple of the mixer’s tires were hit and punctured and it began to slip and slide wildly as it sped down the narrow cliff-side road.

A couple of Army of Thieves men in jeeps tried to cut them off by parking their jeeps across the roadway, but Mother drove the cement mixer like a rampaging NFL blocker: she just plowed straight through the roadblocks, the heavy cement mixer smashing the jeeps out of the way, sending one flying off the edge of the road and crunching the other one against the rocky cliff on the inner side.

More Army of Thieves troops joined the chase. Five, six, then seven trucks containing armed men now pursued the two fleeing vehicles. Schofield and Baba fired back at them while Champion drove hard. Bullets flew every which way. A stray one hit a jerry can full of gasoline mounted on the back of the jeep and it caught fire.

Schofield ducked away from the spraying blaze and keyed his radio. “Dr. Ivanov! We’ve got the spheres but we also have an entire army on our tail! Our vehicles have taken heavy fire and I don’t think they’ll make it to the coast! Do you have a plane ready?”

“ Yes, Captain! ” Ivanov’s voice replied. “ I am in an Antonov-12 in the first hangar. ”

“Get it out onto the runway!” Schofield yelled.

“ What about the Strelas? They shot me down the last time I tried to flee this place! ”

“We don’t need to get away! We just need to get to the end of the runway so we can dispose of these spheres and you did manage to do that last time! And if we’re in a plane, we might just escape, too!”

“ Okay . . . ”

Thirty seconds later, the shot-up cement mixer and the flaming jeep swept off the steep cliff-side road and sped out onto the runway, just as a huge prop-driven cargo plane rumbled out of the first hangar there, propellers whirring.

It was an Antonov An-12, a medium-sized transport plane capable of carrying 45,000 pounds of payload in its rear hold, either vehicles or ninety fully armed troops. Born in the 1950s, it was a dependable warhorse, the Soviet equivalent of the C-130 Hercules, and it was known for its distinctive nose: the An-12 had a glass nose-cone from which a spotter could look out.

The big plane pivoted, pointing its glass nose westward. The long black runway stretched away from it for a mile in that direction, ending at some high cliffs. Running along the runway’s left-hand side, parallel to it, was a wide free-flowing river fed by snowmelt from the mountains of Dragon Island. It, too, ended at the high cliffs, tipping over them in a spectacular 300-foot waterfall.

Also at the end of the runway, however, speeding full-tilt in an effort to get into a position to fire on the plane before it lifted off, were the same two Strela-1 amphibious anti-aircraft vehicles that had shot down Ivanov’s Beriev seven hours earlier. And they still had their deadly surface-to-air missile pods on their backs.

As the Antonov came fully around, its rear ramp lowered and Schofield’s two vehicles sped into it, Mother’s cement mixer first and then the flaming jeep.

“We’re in!” Schofield yelled into his radio as he kicked the flaming jerry can off the back of his jeep. “Go! Go!”