Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

The two of them crowded around the single earpiece and listened in on the Army of Thieves’ commentary of Shane Schofield’s escape down the river:

“— just drove the fucking plane into the river! —”

“— Get the Strelas in there! —”

“— Something just came out the back —”

“— Three of them are on that cement mixer. Get them! They’ve got two spheres! —”

“— Get those fucking spheres —”

Shortly after, the plane had gone over the waterfall and after that, they heard a few transmissions about something happening over at the quarry and then nothing; radio silence.

And so now here they were, alone, Mario and the Kid, looking out over Dragon Island’s missile battery. They might have been too late to stop the first launch, but they wouldn’t let another one happen.

The battery was basically a high, flat-topped rocky mount attached to the rest of the base by a long thin bridge that spanned a gorge. The top of the rocky mount had been leveled, and on it sat half a dozen semi-trailer-like “transporter erector launchers” with missiles on their backs.

The Kid gazed at the missile battery. “I think we can get there unnoticed if we rope down this side of the bridge, hopscotch along the base of the gorge and then use Maghooks to get up the other side.”

Mario shook his head. “Jesus Christ, don’t you see? We’re fucked. Scarecrow’s dead and soon the others will be, too.”

“We keep fighting anyway,” the Kid said firmly. “We have to. Now come on. We got a battery to blow up.”

He scurried off.

Mario scowled. “Not everybody’s a hero, Kid,” he muttered.

They made it across just as the Kid had planned, traversing the gorge and then slithering up onto the flat top of the rocky mount via their Maghooks, before rolling under one of the transporter erector launchers unseen.

Almost unseen.

A lone surveillance camera had caught them in its sights.

Returning to his command center, the Lord of Anarchy watched silently as the two Marines crab-crawled up onto the mount.

He picked up his microphone.

The Kid lay tensed underneath the launcher, panting.

“Okay. Gimme your grenades,” he said to Mario.

Not very enthusiastically, Mario reached for a pouch on his webbing containing some grenades when a voice spoke in his ear: “ Hello, Lance Corporal Puzo. Lance Corporal Vittorio Puzo from the state of New Jersey. I see you there on the missile battery, lying on the ground underneath one of my launchers. ”

Mario started. He glanced at the Kid, who showed no sign of hearing anything. Then he realized: the voice had come through his Army of Thieves earpiece.

“ He can’t hear me, Vittorio. Only you can. And it’s probably better that way, given the offer I’m about to make to you. ”

Mario froze.

“Dude, give me the grenades,” the Kid urged.

Mario held up his hand, as if he was afraid of a sentry nearby, when he was actually listening to the voice in his ear.

“ I am the Lord of Anarchy, Vittorio, the commander of the Army of Thieves. I am your enemy, but this needn’t be so. ”

“Mario . . .” the Kid hissed.

Mario handed him four grenades—but kept listening.

“Go on,” he said aloud.

“Huh?” the Kid said, but let it slide.

“ I can see what you have been ordered to do, Vittorio: destroy my missiles, thereby preventing me from launching the spheres into the gas cloud. Come now, Vittorio. You know the world. Seriously. Do you think these are the only missile launchers I have at my disposal? ”

Mario frowned. This had occurred to him. As soon as they blew up these launchers, they’d become hunted men straightaway. And that would be a useless suicidal gesture if there were other launchers elsewhere.

“ Vittorio. Look at the situation. If you blow those launchers, my men will come over there in large numbers and kill you. ”

The Kid frowned at Mario, saw that he was mentally far away, listening to something. “Hey, man, what the hell are you doing?”

Mario waved him off.

“ Of course, I have other launchers, Vittorio. So your death will be a futile and stupid sacrifice, a sad waste of your life. But I know you, Vittorio. I’ve got your file here in front of me. You aren’t stupid. Your uncle Salvatore in Jersey would tell you that this is the time to cut a deal. ”

“What are you offering?” Mario said roughly.

The Kid came over. “I said, what the hell—”

The Lord of Anarchy said, “ If you kill young Corporal Thompson right now and refrain from destroying my launchers, not only will I let you live, I will give you safe passage from this island when this is all over, a mansion in Chile, as many women as you desire, and four million U.S. dollars to live out the rest of your days in substantial luxury. ”

Close enough now, the Kid realized what Mario was doing, and he looked at Mario in shock.

“What the fuck, man—?”

Mario answered him by drawing his Marine-issued M9 pistol and firing it at point-blank range into the Kid’s forehead.

Blam!

The Kid snapped violently backward and dropped to the ground.

Mario stood up and walked away, not even trying to conceal himself from the nearby Army of Thieves men.

THE OLD whaling village sat in a canyon that delved into the cliffs of the north-western coast of Dragon Island. There was only one way to get to it from the island’s main complex: a fenceless one-lane road that ran steeply down one wall of the triangular canyon.

The village itself was a cluster of 19th-century shacks, slaughterhouses, water tanks, gangways and jetties. Chains, hooks and pulleys hung everywhere. The dry cold of the Arctic had preserved it all perfectly, although every piece of wood was pale and faded and every surface was covered in an undisturbed layer of frost.

Schofield and Champion swam, SEAL-style, across the hundred yards of flat open sea from the ice field to the cliffs, careful not to cause ripples that a sentry might see; to assist the wounded Champion, Schofield had clipped his combat webbing to her weapons belt, so that he pulled her along as he swam.

They reached the base of the cliffs about two hundred yards west of the deserted village. From there, they clung to the base of the cliffs and came to the first jetty.

Of course, there would be sentries here, Schofield figured. It was one of only a few points of land-access to the island. The question was where they would be.

Neither Schofield nor Champion saw any such sentry and as they slid out of the water and up onto a frost-covered boat-ramp, they thought they had arrived undetected.

But that wasn’t the case. From the moment they had reached the base of the cliffs, they had been watched the entire time.

Only not by human eyes.

Unaware of this, Schofield and Champion crept through the snow-covered village, slipping quickly from corner to corner.

As they arrived at the inner edge of the village, Schofield saw the sentry team.

They’d taken the easy option.

They’d set themselves up as a roadblock a short way up the steep one-lane road that led out of the canyon. Someone might penetrate the village from the ocean side—and hide within its collection of structures—but if those intruders were to get onto the island proper, they had to negotiate the bottleneck that was the road.

Two jeeps and one motorcycle with a sidecar were parked across the road, blocking it. On them, six Army of Thieves men in bulky Marine parkas variously smoked, talked or paced, AK-47s slung loosely over their shoulders.

“Okay,” Champion whispered, “how do you propose to get past them?”