Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

“Farewell, Mother,” he said softly. “You were my loyal, loyal friend. I wish I could’ve been with you at the end. I’ll miss you.”

When the Seawolf eventually arrived, it stayed under the surface of the icy waters of the bay.

The main island was a charred wasteland, a black apocalyptic hellscape.

Although partially sheltered from the primary blast, the hall on Acid Islet was now a skeleton of its former self: every single one of its many glass windows had been shattered and its roof had been wrenched away by the concussion wave. Its many vats and tanks now lay open to the sky.

Three crew members left the Seawolf in full biohazard suits. They carried a trunk with four more protective suits in it and a stretcher.

It took a while, but eventually everyone was transferred to the Seawolf in the biohazard suits. Once aboard, they would be quarantined in a radiation-proof chamber, scrubbed down and continually checked for residual radiation.

Schofield entered the Seawolf last, carrying the broken Bertie in one hand. In front of him walked Zack and Emma, and in front of them, two crewmen carried Champion on the stretcher. During the wait in the bunker, Schofield had cleaned and redressed her stomach wound several times, but now she needed proper medical attention.

On the way to the quarantine chamber, Champion was diverted into the sub’s specially equipped infirmary—a sealed-off medical area specifically designed to treat crew members affected by a radiation leak in the sub’s nuclear reactor. There she would be treated by the sub’s medical officer, also in a biohazard suit.

As he handed Champion over to the medical officer, Schofield heard a muffled shouting coming from inside the sealed-off medical area. It sounded like, “Hey! Scarecrow!”

He peered inside—and saw Mother sitting up on a bed, yelling and waving at him.

“Yeah, you! You big sexy hunk of hero stuff!” She grinned broadly. “You fucking-A did it! You are the man ! The fucking man! ”

In a bed to her left, attached to a bunch of tubes and drips, and currently in a deep coma, was Baba. Beside him, a heart-rate monitor pulsed weakly; he was alive, barely.

Despite his fatigue, Schofield couldn’t help but smile. Next to him, Zack’s jaw just dropped.

Schofield said to Mother, “I tried to call you on the radio but got no response. What happened on the train? How did you get away from the blast?”

Mother grinned. “I did what you would’ve done: I drove that train at full fucking speed into the submarine dock’s pool! The firefight was brutal and my French buddy here got shot up bad—but he held them off long enough to get us over the line. Anyway, just as the train shot into the water, I grabbed Baba and dived off the top of the locomotive, and while it went under, we landed with a splash right beside the bow of that freighter, where I’d seen a little Russian submersible.

“We were both wounded—him worse than me—so I just dragged him across into that submersible and climbed inside it, to get somewhere dry where I could check his wounds.”

Schofield looked at the still figure of Baba in the bed beside her. He had about six body wounds, including one right in the center of his chest. Chest wounds were usually fatal unless you had some kind of hemostatic, or blood-clotting, agent like Celox gel or a QuikClot sponge—and Schofield knew that Mother and Baba hadn’t had either of those.

“How on earth did you patch him up and stop him bleeding out?”

Mother grinned again and jerked her chin at Zack. “It was all thanks to him , actually. You may find this hard to believe, Boss, but sometimes I do actually pay attention to technobabble. One day back at camp, before all this started, Zack was telling me about our new MRE ration packs. He said the water-filtration pills in them were chitosan-based and that chitosan is the key ingredient of Celox gel. Now, those MREs also have a crap-tasting jelly in them, and jelly is just gelatin. I figured, well, if I mixed the filtration pills with water and the jelly, I might end up with a gooey gel vaguely like Celox. So I pulled out my MRE and did exactly that. It produced a nice thick gel which I applied to his major wound. It formed a decent clot, not a perfect one, but one that was good enough to seal and contain the wound. The submersible had a first-aid kit with some bandages in it, and I used them to cover it all up. Not sure how much longer it would’ve lasted, but it kept him alive long enough till we got picked up.”

Schofield shook his head. “You made a clotting gel from the ingredients of your ration pack. You sound like—”

“I know!” Mother said. “I’m fucking MacGyver!”

“You sure are. Wait a second. How did you get away, then? I tried to call you on the radio.”

Mother said, “I heard you on the radio but my microphone got shot off during the shoot-out on the train and Baba’s musta fallen off at some point, probably when we landed in the water; we did land pretty hard. Anyway, I could hear you but I couldn’t transmit. You said we had to get off the island, pronto, so I figured some kind of serious boom-time was coming. So I fired up that submersible and drove it as deep as possible, to put as much water between us and Dragon as I could. The Mir worked fine but its radio was a half-broken piece of shit. I only managed to attract this sub’s attention by pinging constantly on the active sonar.”

Schofield nodded at Baba. “How is he?”

“He’s still critical. They put him in an induced coma. The doc doesn’t know if he’ll pull through.”

Schofield said, “I gotta go to quarantine and get scrubbed. I’ll talk to you later.”

As he said this, Veronique Champion was placed on the bed to Mother’s right.

Schofield said to Champion, “I’ll come back to check on you, too.”

Champion nodded. “Thank you . . . again.”

Mother saw this exchange and threw a wide suggestive grin at Schofield. She raised her eyebrows. “Take your time, Scarecrow. I got some girl-talk to do with my new French chickadee here.”

OUTER BALTIMORE

24 SEPTEMBER, 1650 HOURS (FIVE MONTHS LATER)

SHANE SCHOFIELD sat in the basement office of a little townhouse in the suburbs of Baltimore.

Oddly, he wore his full dress uniform: white peaked cap, fitted blue coat with medals, gold belt buckle and pale-blue trousers with red piping. His attire looked far too formal for the little basement office, but then when he was done here, he was going to the White House.

Across from him, behind her desk, sat Brooke Ulacco, his plain-looking, plain-spoken, sixty-bucks-an-hour suburban psychologist.

It was nearing the end of the day, and Schofield had just spent the afternoon recounting his experiences at Dragon Island, including his torture at the hands of Marius Calderon.

Until that day, he hadn’t been allowed to talk to Ulacco about his mission to Dragon—as it involved CIA matters, he’d been informed by his superiors that her existing TS/SCI clearance was not high enough. He’d insisted that they get her the appropriate clearance, so he could tell her everything. It had taken a few months and even more background checks but Ulacco had passed and a SAP—or Special Access Program—addendum was attached to her existing Top Secret clearance. For Schofield it was well worth the wait to be able to tell her everything.

When he had finished recounting his story, Ulacco nodded slowly.

“So, how’d you do it?” she asked.

“What?”

“How did you keep your head together? This Calderon guy tortured you both physically and mentally. He taunted you about your father and about Gant’s death and then, so far as you knew, he killed your closest friend, Mother, in front of you with rats in a goddamn box. As your therapist, I would have serious problems with someone doing this to you. So. How did you do it?”