Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow

The Department of Defense inspection team assessed the damage quickly, aided by agents from the ISS and FBI.

They also took a call from a secondary team checking out Axon's Pacific plant in Guam. A similar massacre, it seemed, had happened there as well.

When this news came in, one of the D.O.D. men got on the phone, dialling a secure line at the White House.

'It's bad,' he said. 'In Norfolk: we have fifteen dead—nine engineers, six security staff. Enemy casualties: five terrorists, all dead. Forensics indicate that the bodies have been decomposing for about eight days. Actual time of death is impossible to tell. Same story in Guam, except only one terrorist was killed there.

'All the terrorists here have been identified by the FBI as known members of Global Jihad—including one pretty big fish, a guy named Shoab Riis. But sir, the worst thing is this: there must have been more terrorists involved. Three of the Kormoran supertankers are missing from the Norfolk plant, and two more from the Guam facility . . . and all of them are armed with Chameleon missiles.'

AIRSPACE ABOVE THE FRENCH COAST 26 OCTOBER, 1540 HOURS LOCAL TIME(0940 HOURS E.S.T USA)

The Black Raven rocketed down the French coastline heading toward the Forteresse de Valois.

'So, Rufus,' Mother said, 'there's something I've got to know. What's the story with your boss? I mean, what's an honest grunt like you doing with a murderous bastard like this Knight guy?'

In the front seat of the Sukhoi, Rufus tilted his head.

'Captain Knight ain't a bad man,' he said in his drawling Southern accent. 'And definitely not as bad as everyone says he is. Sure, he can kill a man cold—and believe me, I seen him do it— but he weren't born that way. He was made that way. He ain't no saint, for sure, but he isn't an evil man. And he's always looked after me.'

'Right. . .' Mother said. She was worried about this bounty hunter who was supposedly protecting Schofield.

'So what about all that stuff in his file then? How he betrayed his Delta unit in the Sudan, warned Al-Qaeda of the attack and let his own guys walk into a trap. Thirteen men, wasn't it? All killed because of him.'

Rufus nodded sadly.

'Yeah, I seen that file, too,' he said, 'and let me tell you, all that stuff about Sudan, it's horseshit. I know because I was there. Captain Knight never betrayed no-one. And he sure as hell never left thirteen men to die.'

'He never left them there?' Mother asked.

'No ma'am,' Rufus said, 'Knight killed those cocksuckers himself.'

'I was a chopper pilot back then,' Rufus said, 'with the NightStalkers, flying D-boys like Knight in on black ops. We were doing night raids into Sudan, taking out terrorist training camps after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in '98. We were flying out of Yemen, skimming into Sudan from across the Red Sea.

'I got to know Knight at the base in Aden. He was kinda quiet, kept to himself most of the time. He read books, you know, thick ones, with no pictures. And he was always writing letters to his young wife back home.

'He was different to most of the guys in my unit, the chopper pilots. They weren't so nice to me. See, I'm kinda smart, but in my own way—I can do maths and physics easy as pie, and because of that I can fly a plane or a helicopter better than any man alive. Thing is, I ain't so good in social environments. Sometimes I just don't get the humour in jokes, especially dirty ones. That kinda thing.

'And the other NightStalker pilots, well, they liked to joke with me—like sending one of the hospital nurses over to my table in the mess hall to talk all sexy with me. Or putting me down for briefings that I wasn't meant to attend. Stuff like that. Instead of calling me Rufus, they called me "Doofus".

'Then some of the Rangers at the base started calling me that, too. I hated it. But Captain Knight, he never called me that. Never once. He always called me by my name.

'Anyway, one time, he was walking past my dorm just after some of them pilot bastards had taken all my bedside books while I was sleeping and switched 'em with some dirty magazines. They was all laughing at me when Captain Knight asked what was going on.

'A pilot named Harry Hartley told him to fuck off, mind his own business. Knight just stood there in the doorway, dead still. Again Hartley told him to beat it. Knight didn't move. So Hartley approached him angrily and took a swing at him. Knight dropped

the asshole using only his legs, then he pressed a knee to Hartley's throat and said that my pilot skills were very much his business and that I was to be left alone ... or else he'd come back.

'No-one ever played a joke on me again.'

Mother said, 'So what happened with the thirteen soldiers who died in Sudan then?'

'When he went out on a mission,' Rufus said, 'Knight often worked alone. Delta guys are allowed to do that, run solo. One man acting alone can often do more damage than an entire platoon.

'Anyway, one night, he's in Port Sudan, staking out an old warehouse. Place is a ghost town, deserted, run-down to all hell. Which is why Al-Qaeda had a training camp there, inside a big old warehouse.

'So Knight gets inside the warehouse and waits. That night, there's a big meeting there but this ain't your usual backstreets-of-Sudan meeting between Al-Qaeda buyers and Russian arms dealers. No, it's fucking Bin Laden himself and three CIA spooks, and they're talking about the Embassy bombings.

'Knight sends a silent digital signal out, giving his location, calling for back-up, and indicating that OBL himself is there. He offers to liquidate OBL, but command tells him to stand down. They're sending a Delta hit team in on his signal.

'The Delta team is sent from Aden, sixteen men in a Black Hawk, flown by me. Of course, by the time we get to the warehouse in Port Sudan, Bin Laden is gone.

'We meet Knight at the rendezvous point on the coast—an abandoned lighthouse. He's pissed as hell. The leader of the Delta hit squad is a punk named Brandeis, Captain Wade Brandeis. He tells Knight that something bigger is at stake here. Something way over Knight's head.

'Knight turns on his heel, heads for the chopper in disgust. Then, behind him, that fucker Brandeis just nods to two of his guys and says, "The chopper pilot, too. He can't go back after seeing this." And so these Delta assholes raise their MP-5s at Knight's back and at me in my chopper.

'There was no time for me to shout, but I didn't have to. Knight

had heard 'em move. He told me later that he heard the sound of their sleeves brushing against their body armour—the sound of someone raising a gun.

'A second before they fired, Knight dashed forward and tackled me into my own helicopter's hold. The Delta guys rushed us, silenced guns blazin' away, hammering the chopper. But Knight is moving too fast. He pushes me out the other side of the chopper, yanks me across a patch of open ground and into the lighthouse.

'You wouldn't believe what happened inside that lighthouse after that. The Delta team came in after us, the whole Delta hit team. Sixteen men. Only three came out.

'Knight killed nine Delta commandos inside that lighthouse before Brandeis and two other guys cut their losses and headed outside. Then, knowing that Knight was still inside fighting with four of his own men, Brandeis planted a Thermite-Amatol demolition charge at the front door.

'Don't know if you've ever seen a Thermite charge go off before, but they are mighty big blasters. Well, that charge went off and that old lighthouse fell like a big old California redwood. The whole area shook like an earthquake when it hit the ground.

'When the dust settled, there was nothing left— nothing —just a pile of rubble. Nobody inside could have survived. Not us. Not the four Delta guys Brandeis had left in there.