Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow

you, assholes.'

Then he jammed his finger down on the trigger.

The launcher fired, sending its Palladium-tipped RPG rocketing into the upper reaches of the hangar, a dead-straight smoke-trail extending through the air behind it.

The Palladium charge smashed through the fan in the right-hand exhaust vent and disappeared inside it, heading downward, searching for heat.

No sooner was it away than Mother floored the jeep, wheeling it around in a tight circle before disappearing into the tunnel-like ascension ramp that allowed vehicle access from the hangar to the upper flight deck.

Round and round the jeep went, rising upwards.

As it circled higher, tyres squealing, there came an awesome muffled boom from deep within the bowels of the aircraft carrier.

The Palladium charge had hit its target.

Schofield hit his stopwatch: 00:01 . . . 00:02 . . .

In the air above the Richelieu, the Black Raven was still engaged in the dogfight of its life with the four French Rafale fighters.

It banked hard, screaming through the air, and took one of the Rafales out with its last remaining missile.

But then Rufus heard a shrill beeeeeeeeep from his console.

'They've fully hacked our countermeasure frequency!' he called.

'We just lost missile shield completely!'

At that moment, another of the Rafales got on their tail and the two planes roared over the ocean together, the Rafale trailing the Sukhoi, blazing away at it with orange tracers.

As the Raven rushed forward, Knight swung around in his revolving gunner's chair and opened fire on the trailing plane with the Raven's underslung revolving gun, raking the French fighter's cockpit with a withering rain of fire, shattering its canopy, ripping the pilot to bits, causing his plane to plough into the sea with a jarring explosive splash.

'Boss!' Rufus called suddenly. 'I need guns forward! Now!'

Knight spun. What he hadn't seen was that this trailing Rafale had been driving the Raven toward . . . the other two French fighters!

The two waiting Rafales launched one missile each—

—twin fingers of smoke lanced into the air, arcing in towards the Black Raven's nose—

—but Rufus rolled the sleek black plane, flying it on its side just as he engaged his custom-fitted—and very rare— secondary coun-termeasures: a system known as 'Plasma Stealth' that enveloped the entire aircraft in a cloud of ionised gas particles.

The two missiles went berserk, splitting in a V-shape to avoid the ion cloud around the Sukhoi, and the Raven bisected them at blinding speed—leaving one missile to ditch wildly into the sea and the other to wheel around in the sky.

But the Raven was still on a collision course with the two incoming Rafales.

Knight swung forward, opened fire—and destroyed the left-hand wing of one Rafale a moment before the Raven overshot the two French fighters with a deafening roar.

There was only one Rafale left now, but not for long. A moment after it passed Knight's plane, the last French Rafale was hit by its own missile—the one that had gone rogue after being assailed by the Sukhoi's Plasma Stealth mechanism.

Knight and Rufus turned to see the final explosion, but as they

did so, there came another noise from across the waves—a deep ominous boom from within the aircraft carrier.

'Faster, Mother. Faster,' Schofield eyed his stopwatch:

00:09 . . .

00:10...

The jeep shot up the circular ramp, kicking up sparks against the ramp's close steel walls.

Abruptly, the entire carrier banked sharply, turning to port, tilting the whole world thirty degrees.

'Keep going!' Schofield yelled.

The first-stage blast of the Palladium charge had knocked out the Richelieu's hydrogen recombiners: that was the ominous boom.

Which meant that uncontrolled hydrogen was now building inside the carrier's cooling towers at an exponential rate. In exactly 30 seconds the second stage of the palladium charge would detonate, igniting the hydrogen and bringing about aircraft carrier Armageddon.

00:11

00:12

The jeep burst out from the ascension ramp into sunlight, bounced to a halt.

There was pandemonium on the flight deck.

Smoking planes, charred anti-aircraft guns, dead sailors. One Rafale fighter—nose down, its front wheels destroyed—blocked the Richelieu's No. 2 take-off runway. The fighter must have been just about to take off when the Black Raven had hit it with a missile.

Schofield saw it instantly.

'Mother! Head for that broken fighter!'

'That thing ain't gonna fly, Scarecrow! Not even for you!' Mother yelled.

00:15

00:16

Amid the chaos, the jeep skidded to a halt beside the destroyed

Rafale fighter. Mother was right. With its nose down and its front wheels crumpled, it wasn't going anywhere.

00:17

00:18

'I don't want the plane,' Schofield said. 'I want this.'

He jumped out of the jeep, reached down and grabbed the catapult hook that lay on the runway in front of the destroyed plane. The small, trapezoidal catapult hook had formerly been attached to the front wheels of the plane. Normally you would attach it to the steam-driven catapult mechanism that ran for the length of the flight deck in order to get your plane to take-off speed in the space of 90 metres.

Schofield, however, wedged the catapult hook crudely under the front axle of his jeep and then clipped the other end of the hook to the deck catapult.

00:19

00:20

'Oh, you cannot be serious . . .' Mother said, eyeing the empty runway in front of their jeep—a runway that simply stopped at the bow horizon of the ship. The catapult's rails stretched away for the length of the flight deck like a pair of railway tracks heading toward a cliff edge.

00:21

00:22

Schofield jumped back into the jeep beside Mother.

'Put her into neutral and buckle up!' he said.

00:23

00:24

Mother snatched up her seatbelt, clicked it on. Schofield did the same.

00:25

Then he drew his MP-7 and levelled it at the nearby catapult controls, long since abandoned during the Black Raven's attack . . .

00:26

. . . and fired.

00:27 Ping!

The bullet slammed into the launch lever, triggering the catapult. And the jeep shot off the mark at a speed that no humble jeep had ever gone before.

Ninety metres in 2.2 seconds.

Schofield and Mother were thrust into their seats, felt their eyeballs ram into the backs of their sockets.

The jeep shot down the runway at unbelievable speed.

The deck blurred with motion.

The jeep's front tyres blew out after fifty metres.

But it still kept rocketing forward—like a cannonball out of a cannon—propelled by the tremendous force of the catapult.

Truth be told, they weren't travelling as fast as a fighter jet on take-off, since a fighter is also propelled by its own thrusters.

But Schofield didn't want to fly.

He just wanted to get off this aircraft carrier before she—

Blew.

The jeep hit the edge of the runway . . . and shoomed straight off it . . . blasting out into the sky . . . nose up, wheels spinning . . . just as the entire aircraft carrier behind it shattered spontaneously.

There was no fire.

No billowing clouds.

There was just a mighty, mighty BANG! as every exterior steel wall of the aircraft carrier instantaneously expanded outward—pushed out by the tremendous pressure of ignited hydrogen—bursting at the seams like the Incredible Hulk busting out of his clothes.

A starburst of a billion rivets was thrown high into the sky.