Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

“But why would this Calderon guy want to create a rogue army?” Dave said.

“That, Mr. Fairfax, is not the question. Calderon is old-school CIA. The real question is: why would the CIA want to create a rogue army?”

“Maybe asking that question is the reason why they just tried to abduct you outside the Pentagon.”

“Indeed.” Retter nodded at the screen. “So what’s this document, then, this one Calderon wrote about Dragon Island in 1984 called ‘Possible Locations: Geographical Options for Operation Dragonslayer’? I haven’t seen it.” She gave Dave a look. “I didn’t have the clearance. What’s ‘Operation Dragonslayer’?”

“Let’s find out.” Dave clicked on it and typed in a few very illegal passwords.

A warning screen appeared, declaring the document you are about to open is location protected.

“What’s that mean?” Retter said.

“It means, once we open it, this computer and its location will be digitally tagged by the owner of the document. They’ll know we opened it and they’ll know where from. If we want to read this, we have to read it fast and then move. You still game?”

“I want to know. You?”

“Hell, yeah,” Dave said. He clicked open document.

A new window opened. Immediately, a blinking time-coded box appeared in the top-right corner of the screen, warning: document opening recorded. sending user identification.

Dave ignored it. He scanned the document quickly.

It was a PDF of an old typewritten document, date-stamped August 1984 and headed:

OPERATION “DRAGONSLAYER”

ANALYSIS AND OPERATION CONCEPT BY

MARIUS CALDERON

AUGUST 1, 1984

It was short, just three pages long.

And in the café of that bookstore in suburban Virginia, with their computer’s digital signature being sent who-knew-where, Dave Fairfax and Marianne Retter read it.

When they were done, they both looked at each other in horror.

“Oh, fuck . . .” Dave breathed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. No wonder the CIA tried to snatch you. We are in so much trouble.”

Dave went to switch off his laptop’s Wi-Fi link—he could keep the computer, he could just never link it to the Internet again, otherwise they could keep following him from place to place.

But he stopped himself short.

There was one more thing he needed to do.

So he did it: he sent the document he had just read off into cyberspace.

“Cut the connection, flyboy. We have to go,” Retter said.

Dave cut it and they bolted from the bookstore.

DRAGON ISLAND 4 APRIL, 1135 HOURS

THE LORD of Anarchy—a man known in other circles as Marius Calderon—arrived at the end of the runway, where he was met by Typhon and Big Jesus.

Surrounded by the men of the Army of Thieves, the three of them looked down at the spot where the Antonov had disappeared under the ocean’s surface.

“Schofield took four of the spheres over the waterfall with him,” Typhon reported. “But before the plane went over the waterfall, three of his people were spotted leaving the plane with a case containing two spheres—they landed on the southern side of the river, but one of our Strelas blocked them from reaching the cliffs.”

“They’re on foot?”

“They are now, yes.”

“And they still have the spheres?”

“So far as we can tell. I just sent Bad Willy and his team across the river in a couple of Strelas to pursue them.”

The Lord of Anarchy gazed at the river: it snaked back up into the mountainous southern half of Dragon. There was a small quarry-mine in there, some dirt roads, but otherwise few places where someone could hide.

“Hunt them down, kill them, and bring me those spheres,” he said. “We have time but not an endless amount of it.”

“We also found this,” Big Jesus said, stepping aside as two of his men threw a limp figure to the ground at the Lord of Anarchy’s feet.

The big, bearded and soaking wet form of Baba lay before the Lord of Anarchy.

His captors couldn’t know it, but when the cement-mixing truck had been hurled across the hold toward him, Baba had thrown himself out the side door of the Antonov an instant before the cement mixer had slammed against the wall.

“He washed up on the shore a few minutes ago,” Big Jesus said. “A French commando, in league with the others.”

The Lord of Anarchy stared at the slumped figure of Baba.

“This is most fortuitous,” he said. “He will be of use to us in our hunt for his companions. We will torture him and broadcast his cries to his companions on the island. Few can tolerate the wails of a friend being tortured and as you are well aware, Big Jesus, I have forgotten more about torture than most men will ever know. Take him to the gasworks.”

MOTHER CHARGED through the undergrowth at the base of the mountain, pushing ice-encrusted branches out of the way, hustling across the slope. Zack and Emma hurried along behind her, Zack carrying the compact Samsonite case with the spheres in it.

“Mother!” he called forward as he ran. “What do we do!”

Mother was trying to figure that out.

“I’m working on it!” she said between panting breaths. “Usually I got the Scarecrow around to think for me! He does the thinking and I do the shooting. It’s not often I have to think for myself.”

She kept running, her mind whirring. She kept hearing Schofield’s last words to her: “ You’re on your own this time .”

So she asked herself, What would Scarecrow do?

“Okay,” she said. “First, we gotta stay off the road. They can’t drive a truck through brushland. Second, we either find a way to the coast—which doesn’t look likely—or we find somewhere to hide these spheres.”

“You can’t hide them on land,” Zack said. “They might be small and their radioactivity minor, but they are still radioactive. Even if you buried them in the dirt, they could still be found with a Geiger counter.”

Mother said, “Then we hide with them, while staying as mobile as possible. If we can stay out of sight for long enough, maybe the cavalry will arrive before these bastards find us.”

Emma said, “When we were looking at the map before, I remember seeing a quarry or a mine in this part of the island. Some kind of rare granite—”

As she said this, they crested a low rise and beheld a wide open-cut quarry before them, its sheer, square walls carved deep into the base of a small mountain.

Sloping ramps of hard-packed earth zigzagged their way into the great pit, while a network of steel ladders provided access from ramp to ramp; long-abandoned mining trucks stood like ghostly mechanical statues at various places on the ramps, rusted solid. Two very basic buildings provided a pair of entrances to the mine system.

Mother stopped for a moment, her eyes narrowing. She whispered to herself: “All right, you stupid grunt, think . What would Scarecrow do?”

And it hit her. “I know what he’d do. Okay, lovebirds. Listen up.”

Minutes later, a pursuing Strela from the Army of Thieves pulled to a halt on the crest overlooking the quarry—just in time to see Mother, moving backward, gun up, disappear inside one of the entrances to the mine.

“They’re going inside the mine,” the pursuit group’s leader, the Caucasian officer known as Mako, said into his radio.

Typhon’s voice came over the line. “ There are only two entrances. Secure them, then go in and kill them all. ”

“Roger that,” Mako said. “This won’t take long.”