Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

At least twenty members of the Army of Thieves had been gathered by the airstrip’s hangars when the plane had come roaring in and landed.

They immediately leapt into jeeps and charged after it, to see if their boss was on board.

Schofield leapt out of the Antonov—

13:10 . . . 13:09 . . . 13:08 . . .

—and saw it.

Saw the motorcycle-and-sidecar lying askew on the northern side of the runway, the one whose rider and gun-toting partner Bertie had shot earlier. Their dead bodies still lay beside it.

Schofield ran over to the bike-and-sidecar, lifted it upright and kick-started it. It roared to life.

He peeled out, kicking up a spray of dirt behind him.

12:30 . . . 12:29 . . . 12:28 . . .

He couldn’t believe what he was doing.

He was going back into Dragon Island—doomed Dragon Island, inhabited by a leaderless throng of Thieves—with only twelve minutes left to save his friends.

SCHOFIELD GUNNED his motorbike up the hill that lay between Dragon Island’s runway and its abandoned whaling village—the same hill he’d hurtled down half an hour earlier.

11:00 . . . 10:59 . . . 10:58 . . .

He glanced back at the runway and saw four jeeps filled with Thieves arrive at his plane; saw them swarm inside it.

They emerged shortly after, looking confused and bewildered. One of them saw Schofield speeding away, pointed and opened fire. Two jeeps took off in pursuit.

Schofield reached the fork in the road at the top of the hill and swung left, heading for the whaling village as his timer passed through ten minutes.

10:00 . . . 9:59 . . . 9:58 . . .

A minute later, he came to the roadblock guarding the whaling village, the same one where Typhon had outwitted him earlier.

A single Army of Thieves jeep was still parked sideways there, but the men who had been manning it lay dead: shot by Bertie in the smoke-grenade haze that Champion had provided for him.

Schofield raced past the roadblock and skidded to a halt in front of the frost-covered village.

He leapt off the bike, gun up. “Renard!” he called.

Movement to his left—

—a shaggy polar bear flashed between a pair of sheds and went bounding away.

Blam! Blam!

Gunshots.

From within the village, from the direction the bear had gone.

Schofield ran that way.

He rounded a corner just as— Blam! Blam! Blam! —more gunshots rang out and he saw Veronique Champion, sitting in a corner with her back to the wall, her last remaining gun, her tiny Ruger LCP pocket pistol, extended and firing at a shaggy white bear!

That bear dropped, punctured all over with bullet wounds—and in a fleeting instant, Schofield saw three more dead bears lying in the snow beside it, and in that instant, he saw what Champion had been dealing with in his absence: holding off a steady supply of polar bears with a very small-caliber gun.

The newly arrived bear roared as it bounded toward Champion and she fired at it, too, but after one more shot, the little Ruger went dry and she looked up in horror as the bear, furious and deranged, charged at her unhindered.

Schofield fired both his pistols and the bear went sprawling headfirst into the snow, hit squarely in the back of the head, and it slid up against Champion’s feet, its tongue lolling, its brains oozing out from a huge exit wound.

Champion looked up and saw Schofield and exhaled with deep relief.

He hurried over, quickly lifted her in his arms and carried her back to the motorbike.

As he carried her, Champion found herself looking directly at Bertie, peeping over Schofield’s shoulder.

“ Hello ,” Bertie’s electronic voice said pleasantly.

“’Allo,” she replied.

“Looks like we got here just in time,” Schofield said, sliding her into the bike’s sidecar.

“I still can’t believe you came back at all. ”

Schofield checked his watch.

8:01 . . . 8:00 . . . 7:59 . . .

“In eight minutes, this island is going to be wiped off the face of the Earth by a Russian nuclear missile,” he said. “And my philosophy is simple: when it comes to my teammates, I don’t leave anyone behind.”

He gunned the motorbike. “Hang on.”

They zoomed up the hill, away from the whaling village, back up into Dragon Island.

Sixty seconds later, they arrived at the fork in the road at the top of the hill. From there they could see all the main features of Dragon Island: the airstrip, the disc-shaped tower, the northern bay.

7:01 . . . 7:00 . . . 6:59 . . .

Schofield stopped the bike, his eyes focused on the runway—

“Oh, no . . .”

He saw the Antonov, surrounded by cheering members of the Army of Thieves, being pushed slowly toward the cliff at the end of the runway!

The plane tipped off the runway and began to roll down the short embankment separating the airstrip from the cliff-edge. Then the Antonov tumbled over the cliff and fell out of sight.

The Thieves all around it cheered.

Schofield swallowed, his eyes wide. Of all the things that might have happened, he hadn’t expected that. But then, the Army of Thieves had no idea of the thermonuclear strike only six minutes away.

“What?” Champion said. “What?”

“That plane was our escape,” Schofield said flatly. “We are now officially stuck here.”

SCHOFIELD STARED out at the spot where his Antonov had disappeared over the cliff, stunned.

Champion said, “There must be another way out of this. Another plane or helicopter, or maybe some kind of bunker we can hide in—”

Gunfire sizzled over their heads from the two Army of Thieves jeeps that had just arrived from the runway.

It roused Schofield from his reverie and he snapped around to face Champion, something in his eyes. “A bunker, yes . . . a nuclear bunker.”

Champion said, “Ivanov said there was a special bunker-like laboratory buried under the main disc—”

“No. Not that one. We’d never reach it in time anyway. I saw another one. Earlier. But where was it . . . ?”

More bullets whistled past them.

Champion ducked. “Can you think as we ride!”

“Right,” Schofield gunned the bike away with renewed intensity, fleeing from the jeeps.

A few seconds later, he turned to Champion. “I just remembered where it is.”

6:00 . . . 5:59 . . . 5:58 . . .

Schofield’s bike-and-sidecar skidded to a halt in front of the cable car terminal.

Schofield carried Champion toward the terminal’s side garage, the door of which was suddenly hurled open from within by Zack and Emma. As requested, they’d gone to the place where Baba had released diesel fuel earlier.

Zack ushered them inside. “What’s going on?”

5:10 . . . 5:09 . . . 5:08 . . .

Schofield hurried past him, still carrying Champion. “When they saw the uplink had been turned off, Russia fired a nuclear missile at this island. It’s five minutes away.”

Zack went pale. “Five minutes? What can we possibly do in five—?”

“We get to a nuclear bunker.” Schofield raced through the garage and entered the terminal proper. He hurried over to the cable car and looked up at its cable stretching all the way down to Acid Islet.

He recalled seeing the thick lead door in the hall on Acid Islet earlier, the one down on the bottom level with a nuclear symbol and a warning sign in Cyrillic on it. At the time, he’d thought it was a chamber for nuclear storage, but it wasn’t: it was a nuclear bunker.

Of course, Dragon Island would have several fallout bunkers on it. It was a first-strike Cold War target. And placing a bunker under Acid Islet made sense: the islet was already partially protected by the cliffs of the bay, plus the sea water separating it from Dragon Island would act as an extra buffer against the concussion wave from any nuclear explosion.