Matthew Reilly: Scarecrow Returns

The President’s face set itself in a fixed grimace. “I asked the French President to cancel that bounty and you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Monsieur, I will accede to your demands on finance, trade, on Afghanistan, even on Iran, but I will not belay that order. That man killed French soldiers, destroyed a French submarine and sank a French aircraft carrier. The Republic of France will not rest until he is dead.’”

The President shook his head. “Call this Scarecrow. Send him in behind that SEAL team with the same orders: sabotage, disable, destroy. Tell him to do whatever he can to stop this madness.”

FIRST PHASE

THE CALL TO ARMS

DRAGON ISLAND

4 APRIL, 0830 HOURS

The U.S.-Soviet “Cold War” will go down in history as the most prolonged period of military madness ever seen. Weapons of extraordinarily destructive capability were built, to the extent that if a war were ever fought, there would have been no world left for the winner to live in.

—RICHARD WAINWRIGHT, THE COLD WAR (LONDON; ORION, 2001)

ARCTIC ICE FIELD

4 APRIL, 0830 HOURS

2 HOURS 30 MINUTES TO DEADLINE

THE TWO assault boats sped down the narrow ice-walled canal.

They skimmed along at thirty miles an hour, thanks to their state-of-the-art pumpjet engines and bullet-shaped hulls, both of which had been designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And while the lead boat tore a fierce wake through the still waters of the alleyway, its engine barely made a sound.

The boats were prototype AFDVs—Assault Force Delivery Vehicles—small and fast craft intended to deliver American troops to hostile shores quickly and silently. They looked a little like Zodiacs, only these boats were sleeker, with ultra-thin inflatable rims that rode close to the waterline. Not yet in active service, they were still in the testing phase.

Seated on the motorcycle-like saddle of the first boat was Captain Shane M. Schofield, USMC.

In his mid-thirties, Schofield was about five-ten, with a rugged creased face and black hair. He usually wore his hair cut short and his chin clean-shaven, but after seven weeks in the Arctic, his hair was longer and he had a healthy stubble around his jaw. Schofield had striking blue eyes and would probably have been considered handsome were it not for the pair of hideous scars that cut down vertically over them, one for each eye. The scars were the source of his operational nickname: Scarecrow.

They were wounds from a previous mission gone wrong, from a time when Schofield had been a pilot in the Marine Corps’ Air Wing. Shot down over enemy territory, he’d been captured and tortured, during which his eyes had been slashed with a razor blade. Surgery had saved his sight, but he had not been allowed to fly again, so he had retrained as a line animal, ultimately rising through the officer ranks of the Corps to command an elite Force Reconnaissance unit.

Today, as usual, Schofield kept his damaged eyes concealed behind a pair of wraparound silver anti-flash glasses: military-grade Oakley Ballistics. The lower half of his face was wrapped in a scarf, Jesse James–style, to ward off the snow-flecked wind that assailed his face as he drove.

In the first assault boat’s compact rear tray behind Schofield sat three passengers—one young Marine and two civilian members of his testing team.

The second boat was being driven by Schofield’s second-in-command and loyal friend, Gunnery Sergeant Gena Newman, call sign ‘Mother.’

At six-feet-two, with a fully shaven head and a burly, imposing physique, her call sign was not indicative of any special maternal instincts. It was short for Motherfucker. Her assault boat held two passengers in its rear tray: another Marine and one more civilian contractor.

It had been just over two hours since Schofield and his test team had received an emergency transmission from Washington, informing them of the situation at Dragon Island. They had also received a bundle of digital documents over a secure data feed.

These included an MPEG of the Russian President’s conversation with the mystery man holding the island and claiming to be the leader of a group calling itself the Army of Thieves; a DIA report by someone named Retter that mentioned seven incidents involving this Army of Thieves; a map of Dragon; and the coordinates of the downed Beriev Be-12 that had called in the crisis.

They also received a brief document titled “Operation of Atmospheric Weapon” outlining the component parts of the device on Dragon Island: the two massive vents that spewed the gas, six small red-uranium spheres and the missiles that fired the spheres into the gas cloud. Broadly speaking, if they could destroy or sabotage any one of those three elements—before the spheres were primed to operating temperature—they could stop the operation of the weapon.

Scarecrow was unimpressed: given that the vents had been belching gas for six weeks, that really only left the last two options. Although as he thought about it some more, perhaps there was one other way—

But then he was informed that a SEAL team on a nearby Los Angeles ,–class submarine, the USS Miami , had already been dispatched to take the island by force.

Looking at his map of the island, Schofield didn’t like their chances.

Dragon Island was a natural fortress. Its shores were made up almost entirely of 300-foot-high cliffs, and in the only two places where the land came down to the water’s edge—a long-abandoned 19th-century whaling village and a submarine dock—there were all manner of fences, walls, gun emplacements and watchtowers. There was a third access point: three small islets nestled in and around the bay on Dragon’s northern coast, but that route was so easily guarded against as to be useless.

In short, Dragon Island was perfect for a defending force and hell for an offensive one. Even a relatively small garrison could hold off a large attacking army for weeks.

It was just as he was thinking about the SEAL incursion that a secure ULF signal came in from the USS Miami . It had already started powering toward Dragon and would get there a good hour before Schofield and his people could.

A short and very one-sided exchange followed with the SEAL commander, a gruff but experienced specialist named Ira “Ironbark” Barker.

“Just sit back, Scarecrow. We’ll take care of this,” Ironbark had said.

“If you just wait an hour, we can catch up and go in with you,” Schofield said. “I mean, we don’t even know how many men are on that isla—”

“I ain’t waiting and my boys sure as hell don’t need your help,” Ironbark said. “I’ve seen this sort of shit before. No amount of gun-toting thugs can match a fully-trained SEAL team. So I’m gonna say this once and once only: Stay out of our way, Scarecrow . We are going to that island and we are going to shoot everything in sight. I don’t want you and your nerds stumbling in there afterward and getting in the way. Besides, who have you got with you anyway, a couple of Marines and some geeks from the science fair?”