Matthew Reilly: Scarecrow

'Check for their locators,' he said. 'We have to find out where those D-boys are.'

Clark tapped away at his keyboard, bringing up some computer maps of Krask-8.

One map showed the complex from a side-view:

Two clusters of blinking red dots could be seen: one set on the ground floor of the office tower and a second set inside the massive maintenance shed.

The two Delta teams.

But something was wrong with this image.

None of the blinking dots was moving.

All of them were ominously still.

Schofield felt a chill on the back of his neck.

'Bull,' he said softly, 'take Whip, Tommy and Hastings. Check out the office tower. I'll take Book II, Clark and Rooster and secure the maintenance building.'

'Roger that, Scarecrow.'

The Scout rushed down a narrow deserted street, passing underneath concrete walkways, blasting through the mounds of snow that lay everywhere.

It skidded to a halt outside the gargantuan maintenance warehouse, right in front of a small personnel door.

The rear hatch of the Scout was flung open and immediately

Schofield and three snow-camouflaged Marines leapt out of it and bolted for the door.

No sooner were they out than the Scout peeled away, heading for the glass office tower next door.

Schofield entered the maintenance building gun-first.

He carried a Heckler & Koch MP-7, the successor to the old MP-5. The MP-7 was a short-barrelled machine pistol, compact but powerful. In addition to the MP-7, Schofield carried a Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol, a K-Bar knife and, in a holster on his back, an Armalite MH-12 Maghook—a magnetic grappling hook that was fired from a double-gripped gun-like launcher.

In addition to his standard kit, for this mission Schofield carried some extra firepower—six high-powered Thermite-Amatol demolition charges. Each handheld charge had the explosive ability to level an entire building.

Schofield and his team hurried down a short corridor lined with offices, came to a door at its end.

They stopped.

Listened.

No sound.

Schofield cracked open the door—and caught a glimpse of wide-open space, immense wide-open space . . .

He pushed the door wider.

'Jesus . . .'

The work area of the maintenance warehouse stretched away from him like an enormous hangar bay, its cracked-glass roof revealing the grey Siberian sky.

Only this was no ordinary hangar bay.

Nor was it any ordinary old 'maintenance shed' for a penal colony.

Taking up nearly three-quarters of the floorspace of this massive interior space was a gigantic— gigantic— rectangular concrete pit in the floor.

And mounted at Schofield's end of the pit, raised off the floor on a series of concrete blocks, was a 200-metre-long submarine.

It looked awesome.

Like a giant on its throne, surrounded by a complex array of structures that belonged to people of a vastly smaller size.

And all of it covered in a crust of ice and snow.

Cranes and catwalks criss-crossed over the top of the sub, while thin horizontal walkways connected it to the concrete floor of the shed. A single vertiginous gangway joined the three-storey-high conning tower of the submarine to an upper balcony level.

Blinking away the strangeness of the sight, Schofield's mind processed this new information.

First, he recognised the submarine.

It was a Typhoon.

The Typhoon class of submarines had been the jewel in the crown of the USSR's ocean-going nuclear arsenal. Despite the fact that only six had ever been built, the long-nosed ballistic missile subs had been made famous in novels and Hollywood movies. But while the Typhoons looked sexy, they had been terribly unreliable, requiring constant upgrades and maintenance. They remain the largest submarines ever built by man.

This one, Schofield saw, had been having work done to its forward torpedo bays when Krask-8 had been abandoned—the outer hull around the Typhoon's bow torpedo tubes lay ripped open, taken apart plate-by-plate.

How a Typhoon-class sub came to be inside a maintenance shed two miles inland from the Arctic Ocean was another question.

A question that was answered by the remainder of the maintenance building.

Beyond the Typhoon's enormous dry-dock—indeed, cutting the dry-dock off from the rest of the pit—Schofield saw a large vertical plate-steel sea gate.

And beyond the sea gate was water.

A wide rectangular indoor expanse of partially-frozen water, held out from the dry-dock by the dam-like sea gate.

Schofield guessed that beneath that pool of water lay some kind of underground cave system that stretched all the way to the coast—allowing submarines to come into Krask-8 for repairs, away from the prying eyes of American spy satellites.

It all became clear.

Krask-8—two miles inland from the Arctic coast, listed on maps as a forced-labour facility—was a top-secret Soviet submarine repair facility.

Schofield, however, didn't have time to ponder that issue, because it was then that he saw the bodies.

They lay over by the edge of the dry-dock pit: four bodies, all dressed in US Army snow fatigues, body armour and . . .

... all shot to hell.

Blood covered everything. It was splashed across faces, splattered over chests, spread out across the floor.

'Motherfucker,' Clark breathed.

'Christ, man, these were friggin' D-boys,' Corporal Ricky 'Rooster' Murphy said. Like Schofield—and maybe in imitation of him—Rooster wore silver anti-flash glasses.

Schofield remained silent.

The uniforms on the corpses, he saw, had been customised: some of the men had removed their right-hand shoulderplates, others had cut off the sleeves of their snow gear at the elbows.

Customised uniforms: the signature of Delta.

Two more bodies lay down in the pit itself—30 feet below floor level—also shot to shit.

Hundreds of ejected shell casings lay in a wide circle around the scene. Fire from the Delta men. By the look of it, Schofield saw, the D-boys had been firing in nearly every direction when they'd gone down . . .

Whispered voices.

'How many in total?'

'Just the four in here. Blue Team reports four more in the office tower.'

'So which one is Schofield?'

'The one in the silver glasses.' 'Snipers ready. On my mark.'

One of the bodies caught Schofield's attention.

He froze.

He hadn't seen it at first, because the body's upper half had been hanging over the edge of the dry-dock pit, but now he saw it clearly.

Alone among the six dead bodies, this man's head had been cut off

Schofield grimaced at the sight.

It was absolutely disgusting.

Ragged threads of flesh hung from the corpse's open neck; the twin pipes of the oesophagus and the windpipe lay exposed to the open air.

'Mother of God,' Book II breathed, coming up alongside Schofield. 'What the hell happened here?'

As the four tiny figures of Schofield and his Marines examined the death scene down on the floor of the dry-dock hall, no fewer than twenty pairs of eyes watched them.

The watchers were arrayed around the hall, at key strategic points—men dressed in identical snow fatigues but carrying a variety of weapons.

They watched in tense silence, waiting for their commander to give the kill signal.

Schofield crouched beside the headless body and examined it.

D-boys didn't wear ID tags or patches, but he didn't need to see a tag or a patch to know who this was. He could tell by the physique alone.

It was Specialist Dean McCabe, one of the Delta team leaders.

Schofield glanced around the immediate area. McCabe's head was nowhere in sight. Schofield frowned at that. The Delta man's head had not only been cut off, it had been taken —