Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

Schofield clenched his teeth. He still had a job to do: he had to dispose of the spheres.

With Champion draped over his shoulder, he sloshed over to the netting on the port side of the hold and started climbing it, heading for the open port-side door eight feet above him.

With every foot he climbed, the churning water at his boots chased him, rising higher, moving faster.

The water overtook his boots, then his knees, then his waist.

Schofield reached the door, and positioned himself to the side of its little waterfall. He looped some netting around Champion’s left arm to hold her in place, which freed up both his hands, and he opened one of his small Samsonite cases to reveal its two gleaming red-uranium spheres. He couldn’t just throw the case out; like many such containers, it was very likely buoyant.

He grabbed one of the spheres—it was small and heavy, a deep polished maroon—and tossed it out the doorway. It fell away into the ocean, sinking quickly.

He did the same with the second sphere. It disappeared forever, too.

Two down. Two to go.

Schofield discarded the first Samsonite case and lifted the second one.

Beside him, Champion groaned something that sounded like a warning and he turned and found himself looking at point-blank range into the demented face of a berserker!

The man had come from the cockpit, having somehow survived the fall and he came bursting across the foaming water screaming with rage, his teeth bared, his hands clawing at Schofield.

Schofield hit him with the second case.

The blow broke the berserker’s nose and the crazed attacker’s face sprayed blood and he went flying backward, out into the water inside the hold.

Schofield gripped the netting by the door, tensing himself for a second attack but it didn’t come because right then the wide square opening at the upper end of the hold went under the surface of the ocean and his whole world went to shit.

An unimaginable torrent of sea water came gushing into the hold from above.

Several thousand gallons dropped on top of Schofield, Champion and the berserker in an instant.

Schofield managed to cling to the hold’s side netting, and he pressed his body over Champion’s so she wasn’t ripped away from it. The berserker was less fortunate: out in the center of the hold, he was forced under by the torrent of downward-rushing sea water.

The hold filled with water in an instant and the whole plane now went under—the Antonov had became the hollow tube of metal that Schofield had foreseen.

The plane “soared” down through the underwater haze, seemingly gliding on its outstretched wings, heading for the bottom 1,000 feet below.

Inside its hold, the curved walls groaned loudly as the pressure from outside increased. Long before it hit the bottom, its fuselage would crumple catastrophically inward, its ribbed metal skeleton unable to resist the pressure of the ocean.

Holding his breath, Schofield grabbed something from Champion’s weapons belt: one of her compact scuba rebreathers that offered five minutes of air and jammed it in his mouth.

When he had air in his own lungs, he grabbed a second mini-rebreather and stuck it in Champion’s mouth, enabling her to breathe underwater, too.

Then he set about finishing what he had to do: hovering in the now totally flooded hold, he opened the second Samsonite case and tossed its two uranium spheres out the open side door. They sank into the void, disappearing forever.

Once that was done, he reached up and untied something tethered to the hold’s wall beside Champion’s head.

He grabbed Champion and, gripping her tightly, made to pull the rip cord on the object, only for someone to suddenly grab his boot!

It was the berserker. The fucker just wouldn’t die! And now he was stopping Schofield getting out of here.

The walls groaned. The skeleton of the plane creaked.

In seconds, the whole thing would implode and this maniac was stopping them getting out!

Schofield kicked at the berserker, but he couldn’t get him to release his grip.

Fuck it , Schofield thought. This might do it .

He yanked on the rip cord of the object he’d taken from the wall.

That object was a life raft.

As soon as Schofield pulled its rip-cord, it inflated and shot up out of the hold like a bullet, wrenching Schofield free of the berserker’s grip and he and Champion went whipping up out of the opening at the rear end of the sinking Antonov, yanked upward by the air in the fast-inflating raft.

The raft shoom ed upward, trailing bubbles, with Schofield hanging from it by one outstretched arm, gripping Champion in his spare hand.

Seconds after they blasted out of the plane, it crumpled like a tin can, surrendering to the ocean’s brutal pressure and the berserker inside it was crushed to nothing. The tangled wreck kept sinking, disappearing into the haze.

Aware of the effects of rising too fast through water, Schofield and Champion exhaled all the way up, until at last, the raft broke the surface.

The waterfall and Dragon’s cliffs rose behind them. Sheer and covered in snow and ice, they would be impossible to scale.

In the other direction, to the west, was an expanse of sea ice, shot through with ten-foot-deep leads.

Schofield quickly pushed Champion up into the raft—she tried as best she could to help but the wound reaching through her back to her stomach was clearly very painful. He climbed in after her and started paddling for the shelter of the nearest lead before any of their enemies arrived at the cliffs and saw them.

Within moments, they were in the shelter of the leads, and once there, Champion spat out her mouthpiece, fell back against the bow and closed her eyes, drifting out of consciousness.

Above her, Schofield swore.

His team was in complete disarray: Ivanov was dead, Baba too; the Kid and Mario were still at large, but now totally on their own; Mother, Zack and Emma had got away with the last two spheres, but Schofield knew that the Army of Thieves would already be hunting them. And lastly there was Champion and him: she had a gut wound—if it didn’t kill her, it would at least immobilize her—while his left hand and shoulder bore bullet wounds.

He had lived to fight another day, only now—battered, bruised and wounded—he was a long, long way from the fight.

CRYSTAL CITY, VIRGINIA 2230 HOURS (1130 HOURS AT DRAGON)

DAVE FAIRFAX ushered Marianne Retter into his apartment in Crystal City and slammed the door shut behind them, breathless.

They’d come straight here by train from the Pentagon, where they had just escaped from a group of men posing as a VIP transport team. Dave’s place in Crystal City was pretty close to the Pentagon, just one Metro stop and a reasonable walk away.

“Okay, you are now officially a very important person,” Dave gasped. “That was just brazen. A straight-out kidnapping at the Pentagon’s front doors.”

“Who were those guys?” Marianne asked.

“Don’t know,” Dave said. “But they knew who you were and where you were going and they didn’t want you to get there. We gotta hurry. If they can identify me, we can’t stay here for long. But if we’re gonna keep investigating this matter, I need a computer with some serious software on it . . .”

Dave unlocked a drawer and pulled his home laptop from it. He flipped the computer open, threw on an earpiece and started typing quickly.

“They didn’t look foreign,” Retter said to herself, her voice analytical. “And their accents were flawless; outfits, too. Could they have been American ? And while brazen, sure, they made a small mistake that most people wouldn’t have picked up. But it was a mistake of speed—they could fake everything else, ID tags, cars, but they had to get to me before they could source a car with the right wheels, which means the decision to snatch me was made in a hurry—”