Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

The massive machine gun blazed to life, razing the advancing horde of Thieves with an absolute torrent of sizzling bullets.

They dropped everywhere—shot to pieces or simply hurled off the moving train—but there were just too many of them for Baba to take out alone and a few managed to get off some shots that found their target: first a glancing blow to Baba’s left arm, then more substantial hits to the torso and shoulders.

One, two, then three shots hit his body, but still he kept firing.

Mother watched in admiration, wonder and despair.

The train kept rushing across the plain.

It was the fourth shot that felled Baba.

He dropped to his knees, yet still managed to get off some more shots from the Kord.

Then a bullet struck him square in the chest and he dropped to the roof of the locomotive and Mother, still on the nose section, wounded and unable to go to his aid, shouted, “No!” just as the train shot into darkness, into the tunnel that led to the submarine dock.

Baba had done what he’d set out to do.

He’d bought them enough time to get to the dock.

Now it was too late to stop the train.

The megatrain thundered through the short tunnel, picking up speed as it shot down the slope, still with a dozen Thieves on its back.

It emerged with a roar inside the wide hall that was the submarine dock where—now speeding totally out of control—it exploded straight through the guardrail separating the end of the track from the water in the dock. The lead locomotive’s pointed snowplow smashed through the wooden guardrail, blasting it into a thousand matchsticks, before the whole train just poured off the end of the track, diving— driving —into the water, one carriage after the other disappearing into the sea like a huge slithering snake. Its missile car vanished under the surface, having never been able to fire its deadly cargo.

As the locomotive had shot off the end of the tracks, Mother—still on the nose—had seen, of all things, the Okhotsk , half-sunk in the water, right next to her, a final bizarre sight for a truly bizarre day. Shot, exhausted and despairing at Baba’s heroic sacrifice, Mother felt the locomotive around her drop through the air.

A second later, it hit the water.

Her battle with the Army of Thieves had been fought and although she wouldn’t come out of it alive, she would at least die knowing that she had beaten the motherfuckers.

The megatrain dived into the water and sank into the darkness, never to be seen again.

WHILE MOTHER, Baba and the megatrain were heading for a watery grave, Schofield was speeding across Dragon Island’s north-western plain in his jeep, angling toward the runway, now chased by two Army trucks and one motorcycle with a sidecar. Harnessed onto his back, Bertie fired back at them, while Schofield did the same, driving one-handed and firing back with his Steyr TMP.

Ducking bullets, Schofield crested a hill and suddenly beheld the runway, where he saw Calderon’s second plane—an Antonov-12, just like the first one—emerge from its hangar, wheel around on the taxiway and start rumbling down the runway, accelerating to takeoff speed.

Schofield swung his jeep onto a converging course with the plane, a course that would finish at the very end of the runway.

His plan was a desperate one: he intended to drive his jeep in front of the plane, crippling its landing gear and stopping it from taking off. There was no other option: if Calderon got away, he—

A sudden volley shattered his windshield and Schofield spun to see the enemy motorcycle—with a gun-toting passenger in its sidecar—pull alongside him.

Schofield brought up his TMP but it just clicked, empty. Fortunately, at the same time, Bertie swung around and with two blistering shots nailed both the rider and the passenger and the motorbike went tumbling away, end over end.

Schofield chucked the TMP and gunned the jeep. It swung in parallel to the runway, hurtling along at almost seventy miles an hour, just ahead of the rolling Antonov.

But then the Antonov surged forward . . . powering up to takeoff speed, accelerating dramatically . . .

Schofield’s jeep bounced up onto the runway, speeding as fast it could go.

The Antonov-12 thundered down the tarmac, picking up speed. Soon it would overtake the jeep and lift off, after which it would ignite the sky, while Dragon Island and everyone left on it would be destroyed by an angry Russian missile strike.

As he sped along, Schofield glanced forward and saw the end of the runway rapidly approaching. It was dangerously close, with nothing beyond it but sheer cliffs dropping down to the ocean.

I have to get in front of that plane . . .

He made to yank left on his steering wheel when suddenly, with a roar, the Antonov came alongside his jeep, its forward wheels lifting slowly from the runway . . .

He was too late.

No!

The plane lifted off with only twenty yards of runway to spare.

The sight of the Antonov-12 lifting off from Dragon Island’s western runway would have been pretty impressive in and of itself, but its liftoff that day was special in one other way.

Had anyone been watching it from afar, they would have seen the plane soar magnificently into the air with a little jeep speeding along beside it, trying valiantly to keep up. But as the plane took to the air, the keen observer would also have seen the man driving the jeep fire something up at the departing plane: a device with a trailing cable.

Speeding along in the jeep with the wind assaulting his face and the roar of the Antonov assailing his ears, Schofield stood and fired his Magneteux’s grappling hook up at the departing plane.

The Magneteux’s arrow-like head lodged in the plane’s fuselage up near its nose and as the Antonov lifted off, Schofield was yanked up into the air with it, clinging to the Magneteux’s cable.

As he was swept up into the air, hanging from the rising plane, his jeep went flying off the end of the runway, over the cliff, dropping in a great soaring arc into the ocean far below.

THE ANTONOV soared skyward at a steep angle, with Shane Schofield dangling from it by his Magneteux’s cable.

Schofield had already done the math in his head: the gap in the gas cloud would be perhaps fifty miles wide, so the Antonov would reach it in less than ten minutes. Once there, Calderon would drop a warhead into it and ignite the gas cloud.

Schofield reeled in his cable and whizzed up it, arriving near the nose of the Antonov, which, like the other one, featured a glass spotter’s dome.

Schofield swung up under the glass dome, unholstered his SIG and fired it into the glass.

He ran out of bullets after two shots, but they did enough. The dome shattered and he discarded the gun, swung himself up and clambered inside.

With freezing wind whistling all around him, Schofield stepped up into the Antonov’s forward nose area—

—to find Mario standing before him, his M9 pistol aimed at Schofield’s head. Calderon and Typhon were nowhere to be seen. They must have been up in the cockpit directly above the nose-cone. In the hold beyond Mario, Schofield saw a large object hidden underneath a tarpaulin and at the very back of the hold, near its closed ramp, the jeep Calderon had driven from the gasworks to get to the plane.

“Mario . . .” Schofield said, his hands spread wide. He had discarded the empty SIG when he’d climbed up through the shattered glass dome, so he was now gunless.

“I made my choice, Scarecrow!” Mario yelled over the wind. “And that means only one of us can go home!”

“You’re a two-bit hood, Mario, unworthy of the name Marine . . .”