Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

As he turned to move, Schofield saw Zack crouching a short distance away. He was bent over the remains of Bertie.

Schofield came over.

Bertie lay on the floor, horrifically mutilated. His entire lower half—his wheels and motor—had been blown apart by the grenade blast. It was now a tangled mess. His upper half was still intact and his internal battery was evidently still working, too: both his cannon and his stalk-mounted lens kept roving around, searching bravely for enemies even though he could no longer move.

“How is he?” Schofield asked.

“He wants to keep fighting, but he isn’t going anywhere anymore.”

Schofield looked down at the little robot. “That little guy brought me back from the dead. He stays with me.”

Schofield quickly grabbed an object off the nearby corpse of an Army of Thieves man. Then he picked up Bertie—what was left of him—and did something that made Zack smile.

“Hey, nice . . .” Zack said.

Last of all, Schofield went over to Mobutu’s body and took his Maghook back. When he had it, he nodded at the exit door. “This way.”

They all hurried for the door.

Mother and Baba were at the rear of the group. They crouched to grab an AK-47 each from a couple of dead Thieves, plus some spare clips and also an earpiece radio each.

As she hurried after Schofield, Mother looked back at the carnage behind them: nearly forty bloody corpses.

“Mental note,” she said softly to Baba. “Never ever make the Scarecrow angry.”

FLANKED BY Mother, Baba and Zack, Schofield blew the lock on the exterior door of the gasworks and peered outside—in time to see Calderon, flanked by Big Jesus and a half-dozen men, striding off toward the missile battery.

A short distance ahead of them was Typhon, carrying the Samsonite case with the spheres in it. He was about to cross the high bridge that gave access to the missile battery.

Without warning, Calderon turned and saw Scarecrow and, at his shout, his men opened fire on Schofield and his people, trying to keep them at bay long enough for Typhon to get to the missile battery with the spheres.

Schofield immediately saw that he was too late.

He couldn’t overcome Calderon’s men and stop Typhon.

“Damn it,” he said. “There’s no way we can—”

He cut himself off as he saw the tiny figure in the distance, seemingly sitting at the far end of the high bridge that Typhon was now in the process of crossing, a figure Schofield recognized.

He never finished his sentence, for it was at that exact moment that the explosion came and the missile battery blew sky high.

THE ENTIRE missile battery went up in a great billowing fireball, right in front of Typhon.

A rolling series of explosions went off as, one after the other, the six transport erector launchers on the flat-topped rocky mount blew apart, their gas tanks rupturing, the missiles on their backs either shattering to pieces or being flung off the mount by the force of the blasts.

The only explanation Schofield had for the blast was the tiny figure he’d glimpsed sitting at the end of the road bridge.

It had been the Kid, just sitting there on the roadway. The blast, when it went off, had consumed him and now he was nowhere to be seen.

Schofield recalled seeing Mario earlier, before his torture. Betraying his team and siding with Calderon, Schofield had been told that Mario had shot the Kid in the head.

Schofield couldn’t know for sure, but he suspected that Mario—more mechanic than rifleman and a low-level hoodlum to boot—had made the mistake of many a criminal thug: he had shot the Kid in the forehead and walked away.

The thing was, contrary to popular belief, a forehead shot is the most unlikely head shot to kill someone. Through millennia of evolution, the bone of the forehead, the brain’s primary protective barrier, is the thickest and strongest part of the human skull. Experienced criminal killers always fire two shots into the back of the head, where the skull is much softer: the so-called execution-style killing. Snipers will aim for the temple or, if they can, the eye. But with a shot to the forehead, if the victim can get to a hospital in a reasonable time, the wound is actually very survivable.

The Kid had evidently survived.

Long enough to complete his mission, if slowly.

Schofield pictured him, bleeding from the forehead and moving with difficulty, planting his grenades around the missile site, placing them on gas tanks for maximum effect and then when it was done, slumping on his ass on the roadway, waiting for the end to come.

It had come in spectacular fashion.

When Marius Calderon saw his missile battery go up in flames, his mouth fell open.

He shook the shock away. He hadn’t come this far without contingency plans and he still had a few of those.

“Big Jesus!” he yelled, handing the burly Thief one of the spheres. “Get to the train! Roll it out and use its mobile missile launcher to ignite the atmosphere! Typhon! Come with me!”

“Yes, sir!” Big Jesus hurried back toward the gasworks, unslinging the Kord, accompanied by six other Thieves, their AK-47s raking Schofield’s door, keeping him and his people pinned down inside.

But they didn’t try to enter the gasworks. Big Jesus and his team ran right past the door—pummeling it with gunfire—and hurried around the northern corner of the gasworks.

They were heading for the railway platform’s outer entrance.

After they were gone, Schofield cracked open his door and saw Calderon.

The CIA man was leaping into a jeep—with Typhon, Mario and the other sphere. He sped off in the opposite direction, heading along the road that led around the disc tower toward the runway on the other side.

“Now where is he going?” Mother said.

“He’s hedging his bets,” Schofield said. “He sent those assholes to the train to fire off a sphere on a carriage-mounted missile. If they succeed, he wins. But if they fail, he still has one sphere left, and if he has another plane he can use—”

“He does,” Zack said. “In one of the hangars. Emma and I were hiding in it when we were caught. It looked just like the one you drove off the waterfall. Had a whole lot of stuff in the hold, all covered up.”

“Did it now?” Schofield paused, thinking. “I’m guessing that apart from the missiles on that train, he’s all out of missiles. The only other choice he has left is flying that last sphere directly into the gas cloud and releasing it like a bomb. What the—”

As he said this, Schofield had been peering out through the doorway, watching Calderon’s jeep.

To his surprise, the jeep skidded to a halt beside the cable car terminal overlooking the islets to the north. Typhon leapt out of the jeep and ran inside, appearing a minute later on the roof of the terminal.

Schofield watched him intently. “No . . . no way . . .”

On the roof of the terminal, partially hidden behind a low wall, Typhon crouched for a few seconds and then rose holding something in his hands: a compact and very modern black satellite dish.

The curved dish was square in shape and made of a metal mesh.

Typhon didn’t waste any time. Moments later, he appeared on the ground level again, leapt back into Calderon’s jeep and the jeep sped off.

Schofield’s eyes narrowed.

His mind was whirring now, connecting dots. Things were moving way too quickly, and he was struggling to keep everything clear in his head, when suddenly he saw it, saw it all.

“I think I just figured out what Calderon’s exit strategy is,” he said.