Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow

'Whoa. Fast belt . . .' Mother said.

'Come on!' Gant yelled as she dashed behind the Al-Qaeda

barricade.

She burst into open space—the high-ceilinged area underneath the air vents. It did look like a cathedral here. Dim white light from electric lamps partially illuminated the area.

She also saw the reason why the Al-Qaeda terrorists had bolted from the safety of their barricade.

A team of maybe 15 black-clad commandos—dark wraiths wearing green-eyed night-vision goggles and motorcross-style Oakley anti-flash glasses—was fanning out from a small tunnel located behind the Al-Qaeda barricade, tucked into the north-eastern corner of the cavern.

It was, however, the weapons in their hands that seized Gant's attention. The weapons which had unleashed hell on the Al-Qaeda troops.

These new soldiers were equipped with MetalStorm Ml00 assault rifles. A variety of rail gun, the MetalStorm range of weapons do not use conventional moving parts to fire their bullets. Rather, they employ rapid-sequential electric shocks to trigger each round, and as such, are able to fire at the unbelievable rate of 10,000 rounds per minute. It amounts to a literal storm of metal, hence the name.

The MetalStorm guns of this new force of men were equipped with ghostly green laser-sighting devices—so in her mind, until she found out their real name, Gant just labelled them 'the Black-Green Force'.

One thing about them was truly odd. This Black-Green Force didn't seem to care about her at all. They were pursuing the fleeing terrorists.

In the midst of all this confusion, Gant slid to the dusty ground underneath the left-hand air vent and started erecting a vertical mortar launcher.

When the launcher was ready, she yelled, 'Clear!' and hit the trigger. With an explosive whump!, a mortar round shot up into the air vent, disappearing up it at rocket speed before . . .

. . . BOOM!!!!

Six hundred metres above them, the mortar round hit the camouflaged lid that capped the air vent, blasting it to smithereens. Debris rained down the vent, smacking to the ground, at the same time as a shaft of natural grey light flooded into the cavern from above.

When the rain of debris had cleared, Gant stepped forward again, and surrounded by her team, erected a new device, a much smaller one: a compact laser-emitting diode.

She flicked a switch.

Immediately, a brilliant red laser beam shot up into the vent from the diode, disappearing up the chimney, shooting into the sky.

'All units, this is Fox,' Gant said into her radio mike. 'If you're

still alive, pay attention. The laser is set. Repeat, the laser is set. According to mission parameters, the bombers will be here in ten minutes! I don't care what else is happening in here, let's clear out of this mine, people!'

At the Marine compound outside the mine, a communications officer abruptly sat up straight at his console.

'Colonel! We just picked up a targeting laser coming from inside the mine! It's Gant's beam. They did it.'

Colonel Walker stepped forward. 'Call the C-130s, tell them they have a laser. And get evac crews to that mine entrance to pick up our people as they come out. In ten minutes that mine is going to be history and we can't wait for any stragglers.'

Gant and Mother and the two Marines with them turned together.

They were still behind the Al-Qaeda barricade and now they had

to get back to the Allied one and then beyond it to the sloping entry

shaft.

They didn't get more than a few yards.

No sooner had they started moving than they saw a stand-off taking place just in front of the Al-Qaeda barricade, at the edge of no-man's-land.

Four Al-Qaeda holy warriors stood surrounded by a six-man squad of the Black-Green Force, caught in the beams of their MetalStorm rifles.

Gant watched from behind the barricade.

The Black-Green Force's squad leader stepped forward, pulled down his ski-mask to reveal a male model's square jaw and handsome blue-eyed features. He addressed the terrorists. 'You're Zawahiri? Hassan Zawahiri . . .'

One of the Al-Qaeda men raised his chin defiantly.

'7 am Zawahiri,' he said. 'And you cannot kill me.'

'Why not?' the Black-Green squad leader said.

'Because Allah is my protector,' Zawahiri said evenly. 'Do you not know? I am His chosen warrior. I am His Chosen One.' The terrorist's voice began to rise. 'Ask the Russians. Of the captured mujahideen, I alone survived the Soviets' experiments in the dungeons of their Tajik gulag. Ask the Americans! I alone survived their cruise missile attacks after the African embassy bombings!' Now he started shouting. 'Ask the Mossad! They know! I alone have survived over a dozen of their assassination attempts! No man born of this earth can kill me! I am the One. I am God's messenger. I am invincibleV

'You,' the squad leader said, 'are wrong.'

He fired a burst from his MetalStorm rifle into Zawahiri's chest. The terrorist was hurled backwards, his torso torn to mush, his body all but cut in half.

Then the handsome squad leader stepped forward and did the most gruesome thing of all.

He stood over Zawahiri's corpse, drew a machete from behind his back, and with one clean blow, sliced Zawahiri's head from his shoulders.

Gant's eyes went wide.

Mother's mouth opened.

They watched in horror as the Black-Green commando then grabbed Zawahiri's severed head and casually placed it in a white medical box.

Mother breathed: 'What kind of fucked-up shit is going on here?'

'I don't know,' Gant said. 'But we're not gonna find out now. We have to get out of this place.'

They turned—

—just in time to see a crowd of about thirty Al-Qaeda terrorists stampeding toward them—toward the conveyor belt, screaming, shouting, their empty machine-guns useless—pursued by more Black-Green commandos.

Gant opened fire—smacked down four terrorists.

Mother did too—took down four more.

The other two Marines in Gant's team were crash-tackled where they stood, trampled by the stampeding crowd.

'There are too many of them!' Gant yelled to Mother. She dived left, out of the way.

For her part, Mother stepped back onto the boxes leading up to the conveyor belt, firing hard, before she was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the terrorists and was herself flung backwards onto the speeding conveyor belt in their midst.

The Black-Green men who had killed Zawahiri seemed amused by the sight of the Al-Qaeda warriors fleeing desperately onto the

conveyor belt.

One of them strode over to the conveyor belt's control console

and hit a fat yellow button.

A mechanical roar filled the cavern, and from her position on the dusty floor, Gant spun to see its source.

Over by the Allied barricade, at the far end of the conveyor belt, a giant rock crusher had been turned on. It was composed simply of a pair of massive rollers that were each covered in hundreds of conical rock-crushing 'teeth'.

Gant gasped as she saw the Al-Qaeda terrorists now jumping for their lives off the speeding conveyor belt. She watched for Mother to jump, too, but it never happened.

Gant didn't see anyone resembling Mother leap off.

Shit.

Mother was still on the conveyor belt, rushing headlong toward

the rock crusher.

Mother was indeed still on the belt—shooting down its length toward the rotating jaws of the rock crusher sixty yards away. The problem was she was wrestling with two Al-Qaeda terrorists

as she went.

While the other Al-Qaeda troops had decided to leap off the conveyor belt, these two had decided to die in the rock crusher . . . and they were going to take Mother with them.

The conveyor belt rushed down the length of the cavern, racing toward the rock crusher at about thirty kilometres an hour—eight metres per second.