Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

“I thought you already figured that out? It’s his second plane,” Mother said.

“No, the exit strategy for his entire plan , a secret CIA plan that’s been in operation for over twenty years,” Schofield said. “It’s his final exit strategy, one that leaves no trace of the Army of Thieves and thus no witnesses.”

Schofield gritted his teeth, looked around for a nearby vehicle, and spotted one, a jeep. “I have to stop him taking off in that plane or else this whole island and everyone on it is history.”

“What!” Mother said.

“Are you serious?” Baba said.

“Trust me. There’s no time to explain. Right now, I need you two to take care of that train. Do whatever you have to do to stop them launching a missile from it. I’ll take Zack and go after Calderon and his plane. Zack—”

He turned.

Zack was nowhere to be seen.

He was gone.

“Now where the hell did he go?” Mother said.

Schofield gazed back into the gasworks and thought of Emma. “I have an idea, but that’s Zack’s fight. I wish we could help him, but if we don’t stop Calderon now, a whole lot more people will die. Now go. You take the train. I’ll take the plane.”

And with those words, they split up—Mother and Baba dashed back inside the gasworks, heading for the railway platform, while Schofield leapt onto the nearby jeep and gunned it off the mark, speeding as fast as he could in the direction of the runway in a last desperate attempt to stop Marius Calderon.

ZACK CREPT silently across the bottom level of the gasworks, wending his way through the maze of industrial-sized piping. He passed hissing valves and vats of steaming liquids. On the sides of all the vats were warning labels written in Russian. The only text he recognized was on one huge vat marked TEB followed by a warning in bold red letters.

He was following Bad Willy.

As he’d stood with Schofield, Mother and Baba at the exit door, he had glanced back inside the gasworks—and glimpsed Willy, with Emma, down on the bottom level.

During the mayhem of Schofield’s resurrection, Zack had hit the ground and covered his head with his hands. He hadn’t seen where Bad Willy had gone with Emma.

But now he knew.

When Schofield and Bertie had started firing, Bad Willy must have dived with Emma—his hard-earned prize—down a nearby ladder and hidden with her down on the lower level.

Now, as soon as he’d seen them in the gasworks, Zack had taken off after them, not even bothering to tell Schofield and the others where he was going. Nothing they could have said would have stopped him anyway. They could save the world, but it would mean nothing to Zack if Emma was defiled by Bad Willy before then.

And so he’d grabbed a pistol from beside the corpse of an Army of Thieves man and hurried down to the lower level and commenced his pursuit.

Mother and Baba raced through a different section of the gasworks, the uppermost level, heading for the massive train parked at the railway siding on the northern side of the vast space.

As she ran, Mother saw the megatrain start to move. Big Jesus and his sixman team were all over it, AKs in hand.

The train was only five cars long, but each car was huge, oversized in the extreme. There was an armored locomotive at each end, then a double-level cargo carriage—capable of conveying jeeps, trucks and other large loads— then in the middle, a long flatbed car on which sat two huge SS-23 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, currently lying horizontally side by side on big hydraulic risers.

“The Russians built many train-launched missile systems,” Baba said as he ran. “But the train needs to be stationary in order to fire the missile, otherwise it will misfire.”

Mother said, “So they need to drive the train out of this building and then stop it to fire the missile?”

“Correct.”

Mother pursed her lips again. “Think, Mother. What would Scarecrow do?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” she said as it hit her. “He wouldn’t let them stop the train. He’d keep it moving . Come on, Baba. We gotta get aboard, seize control of the lead locomotive and keep that train moving.”

Schofield sped along in his stolen jeep, skirting the massive moat surrounding the disc tower, heading toward the runway.

With him was Bertie, but in a most unusual configuration—the configuration that had made Zack smile.

Bertie was mounted on Schofield’s back, clipped securely to it by virtue of the flamethrower harness Schofield had taken from the dead Army of Thieves man in the gasworks. The harness’s four main carabiner clips—usually used to hold a tank on the user’s back—had clipped perfectly to points on Bertie’s metal exoskeleton so that now he sat on Schofield’s back, piggyback-style.

Bertie’s stalk-mounted eye looked out eagerly over Schofield’s right shoulder, panning left and right, while his M249 cannon poked out over Schofield’s left shoulder.

Schofield drove hard.

He saw Calderon’s jeep heading around the wide circular moat, making for the steep roadway that led to the runway.

There hadn’t been time to tell the others about the significance of Calderon’s short stop at the cable car terminal.

The satellite dish that Typhon had grabbed was the uplink—the satellite uplink keeping Dragon Island safe from Russian and American nuclear missile strikes.

When he had first arrived on Dragon via that very same cable car terminal, Schofield had scanned the area for the uplink in the hope of disabling or destroying it, but it had been hidden, as it turned out, right above his head.

Typhon’s recent snatching of the uplink, however, had terrible ramifications.

Calderon and his key lieutenant were getting away from Dragon Island, leaving their fake terrorist army behind. Presumably, the Army of Thieves believed he would come back for them once the sky was alight.

But he wouldn’t be coming back at all, Schofield realized.

No. Watching from his escape plane, as soon as his men on the train launched their missile—or if he got away and ignited the sky with his sphere—Calderon would then simply switch off the uplink.

Russian Missile Command, still monitoring Dragon with their own satellites, would immediately detect that the defensive uplink was down and, enraged at Calderon’s previous reversal of one of their nuclear missiles, immediately fire a nuke on Dragon.

Calderon would destroy China, while he would get away with his small leadership group, and his fake terrorist Army would be annihilated by the Russian nuclear missile. The world would be irrevocably changed, the blame would be laid on the mysterious terrorist group and Calderon would make a clean getaway, unconnected to any of it.

Mission accomplished.

Which was why Schofield had to stop Calderon’s plane. If he could keep Calderon on Dragon Island, Calderon wouldn’t switch off the uplink, as it would mean condemning himself to death—

Gunfire hit Scarecrow’s jeep.

Schofield spun to see an Army of Thieves troop truck thundering along behind him, with men hanging off it, firing.

“Bertie! Take them out!”

“ Yes, Captain Schofield. ”

As Schofield kept looking forward, driving hard, weaving and swerving, Bertie swiveled both his eye and his cannon around and loosed two booming shots.

The first shot hit the truck’s grille, puncturing the radiator, causing it to release a hissing plume of steam; the second hit its front left tire, causing the truck to wobble, then fishtail, then skid out of control before it tumbled onto its side, spilling men everywhere.

Schofield smiled grimly. While deafening, it was like having eyes—and a gun—in the back of your head.