Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

The Lord of Anarchy’s face appeared on the screen, smiling.

“ Hello, Captain. I thought we should do this face-to-face. ”

“Do what?”

“ I want to show you something. This. ”

On the screen, the Lord of Anarchy lifted something up into the frame.

Schofield’s blood turned to ice.

It was a red-uranium sphere, another one, a seventh one. The Lord of Anarchy held it between his thumb and forefinger.

Schofield’s face fell. The Lord of Anarchy saw this and he grinned malevolently.

“ You see, Captain. I don’t need your spheres at all. ”

Schofield’s mind was racing, trying to put all this into some kind of order, and suddenly it all made sense: that extra sphere had come from the emergency bunker Ivanov had mentioned before, the one buried deep beneath the main tower, the bunker that the Russian traitor, Kotsky, couldn’t know about . . . but which the Lord of Anarchy evidently did know of.

On the screen, the Lord seemed to peer intently at Schofield, trying to read his reaction to this.

“ It occurs to me, Captain, that you and I are very much alike. We will do anything to achieve our goals. You will risk your life to save the world, while I will do the same to destroy it. We are both passionate about what we desire. It’s just that we each desire the opposite of what the other does. Which is why I will take so much pleasure in letting you see this. I will see the world go up in flames. You will see your own failure. ”

With those words, the Lord of Anarchy stepped away from his camera . . .

. . . to reveal that he was not inside his command center anymore but rather outside , standing in front of a sixteen-wheeled missile launcher: a classic snub-nosed semi-trailer-sized “transporter erector launcher” that bore a single Russian SS-23 intermediate-range ballistic missile on its back.

The Lord of Anarchy handed his red-uranium sphere to a pair of subordinates, who placed it into an insertion capsule which was then slotted inside a waiting warhead. The warhead was attached to the missile and the missile was slowly aimed skyward.

Schofield could only watch helplessly as all this happened. There was nothing he could do—

Wait .

He keyed his own radio: “Kid? Mario? You anywhere near the missile battery yet?”

The Kid’s voice came in. “ We just arrived at the bridge leading to it, as ordered. But that bridge is guarded like Fort Knox. They got men all over it. We can’t get to the battery. Why? ”

“Because they’re already there and they’re about to launch,” Schofield said sadly. “They have an extra sphere and they’re going to fire it right now.”

He bowed his head.

Now there really was nothing he could do but watch the end of the world.

“ Oh, Captain, ” the Lord of Anarchy said suddenly in his ear, “ keep an eye out for berserkers. ”

A sudden spray of bullets pummeled the outside of the Antonov. Down in the hold, Baba and Mother fired back, cutting down another three berserkers.

Champion came alongside Schofield in the cockpit, stared at the screen. “SS-23,” she said. “Medium-range ballistic missile, capable of striking a target perhaps 250 to 300 miles away. The Soviets claimed they discontinued building them under the INF Treaty of 1987.”

They could see at least four more transporter erector launchers parked behind the one on the screen, each with an SS-23 on its back.

“Looks like they ended up here,” Schofield said. “This island is the graveyard of the Cold War.”

The missile’s slow rise stopped.

It was vertical.

Ready for launch.

Ready to ignite the atmosphere and there was not a damn thing Schofield could do about it.

The Lord of Anarchy turned to the camera. “ Witness your failure, Captain. Witness the end of the world as we know it. Launch the missile. ”

A switch was thrown and the SS-23’s thrusters burst to life, spewing flames and a billowing cloud of smoke. It rose into the air.

Schofield looked away from the screen and up into the southern sky.

Lancing up into the atmosphere, a tail of thick smoke extending out behind it, was the missile carrying the uranium sphere.

It rose rapidly and in a few moments it was a tiny speck high above the southern horizon, a speck that in a few seconds would change the face of the planet.

Schofield stared at it helplessly as the Lord of Anarchy said in his ear, “ Detonate .”

ABLINDING FLASH lit up the southern sky.

What followed was a sight the likes of which neither Schofield nor Champion had ever seen in their lives.

A dazzling, incandescent, white-hot body of air expanded laterally from the point where they had last seen the SS-23 missile. The blast flame expanded with shocking speed, at an exponential rate. And in a single, horrifying instant, the entire sky to the south of Dragon Island went from pale blue to flaming yellow-white.

The atmosphere had been ignited.

The Earth was on fire.

THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, D.C.

SAME TIME

In the Situation Room, an Army tech manning a satellite console turned sharply.

“Sir!” he called to the Army general in the Crisis Response Team, “I have a missile launch from Dragon Island!”

The President strode over and saw a real-time overhead satellite image of Dragon Island and the Arctic Ocean surrounding it.

“They’re igniting the gas cloud,” DIA Deputy Director Gordon said. “Our efforts have failed . . .”

No sooner had she said this than, on the monitor, a section of the ocean to the south of Dragon Island flared suddenly with blazing white light.

The tech said, “Missile detonation detected . . .”

The President stared at the image, horror-struck. “God help us.”

FOURTH PHASE

INCINERATION

DRAGON ISLAND

4 APRIL, 1120 HOURS

T PLUS 20 MINUTES AFTER DEADLINE

Every Harlot was a Virgin once.

—WILLIAM BLAKE

TO THE ACCUSER WHO IS THE GOD OF THIS WORLD

IF SOMEONE were looking down on the Earth from space, Schofield figured, they would have seen a blinding flash from up near the North Pole, and then they would have seen the extending yellow-white inferno advancing around the globe in a spiral of fiery devastation—

At that thought, Schofield whipped up his wrist guard and flicked on its satellite imagery, bringing up his own real-time overhead view of Dragon Island and the Arctic Circle.

On the black-and-white screen, he saw the atmospheric inferno.

It reached outward from Dragon Island like the claw of some mythical creature, reaching southward before curving eastward, following the course of the jet stream.

Schofield felt ill. He was literally watching the end of the—

And then suddenly the expanding wave of devastation and destruction stopped.

Abruptly and without warning, as if it had come up against an invisible wall in the atmosphere.

Schofield frowned. “What the hell . . . ?”

By his crude reckoning, the roaring atmospheric fire had only gone about six hundred miles before it hit the invisible wall and stopped.

Then he heard the Lord of Anarchy’s voice, only it wasn’t directed at him: “ What the fuck just happened?! ”