Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow

An absolute storm of bullets hammered the ground all around the speeding LAV as it wended its way toward the cave entrance, covered by an overhead artillery barrage of its own.

This was the Allies' fifth attempt to get troops into the cave system—a converted Soviet mine known to be harbouring Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, Hassan Zawahiri, and about two hundred heavily-armed Al-Qaeda terrorists.

More than a year after the Taliban regime had been ousted from Kabul—and even though a far more public war had since been waged and won against Saddam Hussein in Iraq—Operation Enduring Freedom still raged in the darkest places of Afghanistan: the caves.

For the final annihilation of Al-Qaeda could not be achieved until all the terrorist caves had been cleared, and that involved a kind of warfare not suitable for viewing on CNN or Fox. A down-and-dirty variety of fighting. Hand-to-hand, man-on-man cave-hunting.

And then just this week, US and UK forces had found this cave

system far in the north of the country, straddling the Afghan-Tajikistan border—the most important terrorist cave base in Afghanistan.

It was the core of the Al-Qaeda network.

An abandoned Soviet coalmine once known as the Karpalov Mine, it had been converted by Osama bin Laden's construction company into a labyrinthine network of hiding caves: caverns in which terrorists lived and worked and in which they'd stored a veritable arsenal of weapons.

It also came with an extra defence mechanism.

It was a methane trap.

Coal gives off methane—a highly flammable gas—and methane levels of 5% are explosive. One spark and it all goes up. And while the inner sections of the abandoned mine were supplied with fresh air from chimney-like vents, its outer extremities were filled with methane.

In other words: invading soldiers couldn't use guns until they arrived at the core of the mine.

One thing was certain: the terrorists who had withdrawn to this cave system were not going to give up without a fight. Like Kunduz the previous year and the bloodbath at Mazar-e-Sharif, this was going to be a fight to the death.

It was Al-Qaeda's last stand.

The mine's entrance was a reinforced concrete archway wide enough for large trucks to pass through.

The sharply-sloping mountainside above it was pockmarked with dozens of tiny snipers' nests, from which the terrorists covered the wide expanse of open ground in front of the entrance.

And somewhere up in the tangle of mountain peaks covering the mine were the openings to two air vents—twin 10-metre-wide shafts that rose like chimneys from the bottom of the mine, allowing fresh air into it. The terrorists had long ago covered the tops of these vents with camouflaged lids, so that they were invisible to spy planes.

Those vents were Gant's objective.

Capture a vent from inside the mine, blow its lid from below, and then send up a targeting laser that would be picked up by an overflying C-130 bomber, giving it a bull's-eye that it wouldn't miss.

The only thing left to do then was to get the hell out of the mine before a devastating 21,000-pound Massive Ordnance Air Burst (more commonly known as MOAB, the Mother Of All Bombs) was dropped down the chimney.

The first three attempts that morning to storm the tunnel system had been successful.

In each attempt, a pair of LAV-25s—eight-wheeled Light Armoured Vehicles—filled with Marines and SAS troopers had survived the hail of bullets and entered the cave.

The fourth attempt, however, had been a disaster. It had ended with a terrible cross-fire of Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades—known to many as 'LAV-Killers'—slamming into the two inrushing vehicles, killing all the men inside them.

Gant's was the fifth attempt, and it had entailed sending two high-speed decoy buggies into the gauntlet first, to attract the enemy's fire, after which Gant's two eight-wheelers had zeroed in on the cave entrance under cover of mortar fire targeted at the enemy's emplacements. It had worked.

The speeding decoy buggies caught all manner of shit—automatic gunfire, RPGs that smashed into the ground all around them—while Gant's LAV-25 had burst forth from cover, closely followed by a second eight-wheeled beast.

The mountainside above the cave entrance had erupted in mortar impacts while the two LAVs had shot across the open plain before whipping into the entrance of the cave system, disappearing into darkness, out of the rain of gunfire and into a whole new kind of hell.

Elizabeth 'Fox' Gant was 29 years old and a newly-minted First Lieutenant, fresh from Officer Candidate School.

Now, it wasn't often that a brand-new lieutenant was given command of a prized Recon Unit, let alone a stand-alone one, but Gant was something special.

Compact, blonde and fitter than many triathletes, she was a natural leader. Behind her sky-blue eyes lay a razor-sharp mind. Plus she already had two years' experience in a Recon Unit as an NCO.

She also, it was said in whispers, had friends in high places.

Some said that her rapid rise to Recon command had been the result of a recommendation from no less than the President of the United States himself. It had something to do, they said, with an incident at the US Air Force's most secret base, Area 7, during which Gant had shown her worth in the presence of the President himself. But that was conjecture.

The greatest recommendation, in the end, had come from a highly-respected Marine Gunnery Sergeant named Gena 'Mother' Newman who had vouched for Gant in the best possible way: if Gant were put in command of a Recon Unit, Mother had said, then she herself would act as Gant's Team Chief.

At six-feet-two, with a fully-shaven head, one artificial leg and some of the most ruthless skills in the killing trade, Mother's word was gold. Her nickname said it all. It was short for 'Motherfucker'.

And so Gant took command of Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit 9 one month before it shipped out for Afghanistan.

There was one other thing about Libby Gant worth noting.

For almost a year now, she had been the girlfriend of Captain Shane M. Schofield.

Schofield's newly acquired Yak-141 shot through the air at close to

Mach 2.

It had been nearly five hours since his battle at Krask-8, and now, spread out before him and Book II, were the formidable Hindu Kush mountains.

And somewhere in them was Libby Gant—Potential Hostage No. 1 for anyone wanting Schofield's head.

Their Yak was almost out of gas. A quick pit-stop at an abandoned Soviet airfield in rural Kazakhstan had allowed them to refuel, but now they were running low on fuel again. They needed .to find Gant soon.

Since he didn't trust anyone in Alaska any more, Schofield tuned his plane's radio to a very obscure US satellite frequency—the frequency of the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

After his identity had been verified, he asked to be put through to the Pentagon, to David Fairfax in the Cypher and Cryptanalysis

Department.

'This is Fairfax,' a young male voice came in over his earpiece.

'Mr Fairfax, this is Shane Schofield.'

'Hey, Captain Schofield. Nice to hear from you. So, what have you destroyed today?'

'I've flooded a Typhoon-class submarine, levelled a building, and launched a ballistic missile to destroy a maintenance facility.'

'Slow day, huh.'

'Mr Fairfax, I need your help.'

'Sure:

Schofield and Fairfax had formed an unlikely alliance once

before, during the incident at Area 7. Both had received (classified) medals for their bravery and afterwards had become good friends.

Now, as he and Book II blasted over the mountains of Tajikistan in the Yak-141, Schofield could picture Fairfax—sitting at his computer in an underground room at the Pentagon, dressed in a Mooks T-shirt, jeans, glasses and Nikes, munching on a Mars Bar and looking pretty much like Harry Potter as a graduate student. A code-cracking genius of a graduate student.