DRAGON ISLAND
AND NORTHERN SURROUNDS

 

ARCTIC ICE FIELD 4 APRIL, 0830 HOURS 2 HOURS 30 MINUTES TO DEADLINE

The two assault boats sped down the narrow ice-walled canal.

They skimmed along at fifty kilometres an hour, thanks to their state-of-the-art pumpjet engines and bullet-shaped hulls, both of which had been designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And while the lead boat tore a fierce wake through the still waters of the alleyway, its engine barely made a sound.

The boats were prototype AFDVs—Assault Force Delivery Vehicles—small and fast craft intended to deliver American troops to hostile shores quickly and silently. They looked a little like Zodiacs, only these boats were sleeker, with ultrathin inflatable rims that rode close to the waterline. Not yet in active service, they were still in the testing phase.

Seated on the motorcycle-like saddle of the first boat was Captain Shane M. Schofield, USMC.

In his mid-thirties, Schofield was about five-ten, with a rugged creased face and black hair. He usually wore his hair cut short and his chin clean-shaven, but after seven weeks in the Arctic, his hair was longer and he had a healthy stubble around his jaw. Schofield had striking blue eyes and would probably have been considered handsome were it not for the pair of hideous scars that cut down vertically over them, one for each eye. The scars were the source of his operational nickname: Scarecrow.

They were wounds from a previous mission-gone-wrong, from a time when Schofield had been a pilot in the Marine Corps’ Air Wing. Shot down over enemy territory, he’d been captured and tortured, during which his eyes had been slashed with a razor blade. Surgery had saved his sight, but he had not been allowed to fly again, so he had retrained as a line animal, ultimately rising through the officer ranks of the Corps to command an elite Force Reconnaissance unit.

Today, as usual, Schofield kept his damaged eyes concealed behind a pair of wraparound silver anti-flash glasses: military-grade Oakley Ballistics. The lower half of his face was wrapped in a scarf, Jesse James–style, to ward off the snow-flecked wind that assailed his face as he drove.

In the first assault boat’s compact rear tray behind Schofield sat three passengers—one young Marine and two civilian members of his testing team.

The second boat was being driven by Schofield’s second-in-command and loyal friend, Gunnery Sergeant Gena Newman, call-sign Mother.

At six-foot-two, with a fully-shaven head and a burly imposing physique, her call-sign was not indicative of any special maternal instincts. It was short for Motherfucker. Her assault boat held two passengers in its rear tray: another Marine and one more civilian contractor.

It had been just over two hours since Schofield and his test team had received an emergency transmission from Washington, informing them of the situation at Dragon Island. They had also received a bundle of digital documents over a secure data feed.

These included an mpeg of the Russian President’s conversation with the mystery man holding the island and claiming to be the leader of a group calling itself the Army of Thieves; a DIA report by someone named Retter that mentioned seven incidents involving this Army of Thieves; a map of Dragon; and the co-ordinates of the downed Beriev that had called in the crisis.

They also received a brief document titled ‘Operation of Atmospheric Weapon’ outlining the component parts of the device on Dragon Island: the two massive vents that spewed the gas, six small red uranium spheres, and the missiles that fired the spheres into the gas cloud. Broadly speaking, if they could destroy or sabotage any one of those three elements—before the spheres were primed to operating temperature—they could stop the operation of the weapon.

Scarecrow was unimpressed: given that the vents had been belching gas for six weeks, that really only left the last two options. Although as he thought about it some more, perhaps there was one other way—

But then he was informed that a SEAL team on a nearby Los Angeles–class submarine, the USS Miami, had already been dispatched to take the island by force.

Looking at his map of the island, Schofield didn’t like their chances.

Dragon Island was a natural fortress. Its shores were made up almost entirely of three-hundred-foot-high cliffs, and in the only two places where the land came down to the water’s edge—a long-abandoned 19th-century whaling village and a submarine dock—there were all manner of fences, walls, gun emplacements and watchtowers. There was a third access point: three small islets nestled in and around the bay on Dragon’s northern coast, but that route was so easily guarded against as to be useless.

In short, Dragon Island was perfect for a defending force and hell for an offensive one. Even a relatively small garrison could hold out a large attacking army for weeks.

It was just as he was thinking about the SEAL incursion that a secure ULF signal came in from the USS Miami. It had already started powering toward Dragon and would get there a good hour before Schofield and his people could.

A short and very one-sided exchange followed with the SEAL commander, a gruff but experienced specialist named Ira ‘Ironbark’ Barker.

‘Just sit back, Scarecrow. We’ll take care of this,’ Ironbark had said.

‘If you just wait an hour, we can catch up and go in with you,’ Schofield said. ‘I mean, we don’t even know how many men are on that isla—’

‘I ain’t waiting and my boys sure as hell don’t need your help,’ Ironbark said. ‘I’ve seen this sort of shit before. No amount of gun-toting thugs can match a fully-trained SEAL team. So I’m gonna say this once and once only: stay out of our way, Scarecrow. We are going to that island and we are going to shoot everything in sight. I don’t want you and your nerds stumbling in there afterward and getting in the way. Besides, who have you got with you anyway, a couple of Marines and some geeks from the science fair?’

‘I have seven people. Four Marines, including me, and three civilians.’

‘Which means you’ll be about as helpful as a fart in an elevator. Jesus, civilians. Why don’t you leave saving the world to the experts and stay in your heated tents.’

‘What about the plane, then?’ Schofield asked pointedly. ‘The Beriev that started all this? Shouldn’t you check that out before you go in? The pilot might still be alive, he might also have some better intel on disabling the device—’

‘Fuck the plane and fuck the pilot. I already have the layout of the island and I know enough to disable the weapon. That pilot can’t help me.’

‘Well, I’m going to check him out.’

‘Fine. Do that. I don’t care. I’ve heard about you, Scarecrow. Heard you got initiative, which to me means you’re unpredictable. And I don’t like unpredictable. Do what you want, just stay out of my way or else you might get shot. Understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘Ironbark, out.’ The line went dead.

And that was how Schofield and his little team came to be zooming south through a maze of ice-walled canals, heading for the site of Vasily Ivanov’s crashed Beriev Be-12.

 

SEVEN WEEKS IN AN ARCTIC CAMP MARCH–APRIL

How Shane Schofield—a former commander of a crack Force Reconnaissance Unit—came to be in the Arctic with a small team of scientists was a story all by itself.

Over the years, he and Mother had gone through a lot together: a mission in Antarctica during which they had defended a remote US ice station from French and British special forces units; that business concerning the former President at a secret base in the Utah desert called Area 7; and, of course, the bounty hunt in which a group called Majestic-12 had put an $18.6 million price on Schofield’s head.

It was during that last incident that Schofield’s girlfriend, Lieutenant Elizabeth ‘Fox’ Gant, had been captured and brutally executed, for no reason other than to taunt Schofield. And although Schofield had ultimately prevailed in that mission, it had been at tremendous cost.

Some people in authority believed that the matter had taken him to the limit of psychological endurance and even broken him. There were rumours that at one point in the mission he’d tried to take his own life. Even Mother had wondered if he’d ever be the same again.

But after four months of mourning that was labelled stress leave, he’d gone to his superiors at Marine Headquarters in the Naval Annexe Building in Arlington and announced that he was ready to get back to work.

Given the concerns about his mental state—and the wariness some Marines had about working with him—he was at first assigned to a teaching position at the Marine Corps’ recruit training facility at Parris Island in South Carolina.

For such an experienced and decorated warrior, the appointment was seen by many as an insult, but it had actually been a good fit.

As the former commander of a Force Recon unit, the new recruits at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island had hung on his every word. And Schofield had turned out to be an excellent teacher: generous with his knowledge, uncommonly patient, and always willing to stay late to work with a recruit who wasn’t quite getting it. His students adored him.

That said, everyone at Marine HQ knew it was bullshit. It was just that no-one wanted to rush Scarecrow back into active service. (Although there were rumours that as a damaged and therefore expendable leader, he had been sent on a particularly bloody mission to an island in the Pacific Ocean called Hell Island. But no-one could verify these rumours and Schofield himself would not be drawn on them.)

And then came the first French assassination attempt.

They were waiting for him one Sunday night outside a restaurant in Beaufort as he emerged from dinner with his grandfather: a pair of DGSE agents looking to bag the French military’s five-million-euro floating bounty on the Scarecrow.

Schofield had spotted them lurking across the street, had seen them follow him and his grandfather to the nearby parking structure. Upon entering the parking lot’s stairwell, he’d quickly doubled back, disarmed and disabled them both.

The two French agents were now in Leavenworth in a special section reserved for protected inmates. The prisoners at Leavenworth, despite their own crimes, were oddly patriotic when it came to foreigners who tried to kill United States Marines and had not given the two Frenchmen a pleasant welcome.

The second attempt had come six months later.

It had happened on a quiet country road a few miles from Parris Island, as Schofield was driving back there late one night. Another pair of French agents had pulled up alongside his car and abruptly opened fire. A short running gun-battle had followed and it ended with Schofield firing back with his Desert Eagle pistol and killing the gun-toting passenger before ramming the rival car off a bridge, sending the second French assassin plunging into a swamp.

The driver had survived. He was next seen sitting slumped on the front steps of DGSE headquarters in Paris, still covered in mud, handcuffed, with a pink bow tied around his mouth. A message was written in permanent marker on his forehead: ‘This belongs to you.’

Despite a face-to-face meeting between the new American President and his French counterpart on the subject, the French resolutely refused to remove the bounty on Schofield’s head.

And then this assignment had come up.

The Corps needed experienced Marines to test new equipment in extreme climates. It would involve accompanying scientists from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the famous DARPA, and some private contractors to the ends of the Earth—baking deserts, steaming rainforests and the brutal cold of the Arctic—to test prototypes of new weapons, tents, armour and vehicles.

Naturally, it wasn’t the kind of mission that the Corps wanted to waste on top talent, but as far as the brass were concerned it was perfect for Scarecrow: psychologically scarred, possibly unpredictable and the target of a vengeful foreign nation, it would keep him usefully occupied and out of harm’s way.

Schofield didn’t mind the Arctic.

It was quiet and peaceful and at this time of year it was actually quite beautiful. It was always a perfect dawn—the sun lurked just above the horizon, never setting but never rising either, bathing the ice plain in spectacular horizontal light. It was bitingly cold, sure, but still beautiful.

It also helped that he had a good team up there with him.

Eight people and one robot.

 

 

Over the last seven weeks, huddled in their camp of silver domed tents, Schofield’s team had got along pretty well—as well as eight human beings living in close proximity in freezing conditions could get along, really.

Having Mother around helped.

She could silence anyone who bitched or moaned with a single withering look. And even then, the only member of the team who’d been even remotely problematic was the senior executive from ArmaCorp Systems, Jeff Hartigan, and getting ‘the Look’ from Mother usually shut him up.

Mother, of course, had insisted on coming along. Not even the Commandant of the Marines Corps dared say no to Mother Newman. After many years of loyal and distinguished service in the Corps, she had her choice of deployment and she went where Scarecrow went.

‘Because I’m his Fairy Godmotherfucker,’ she would say when asked why.

The other two Marines in the group were considerably younger: Corporal Billy ‘the Kid’ Thompson and Lance Corporal Vittorio Puzo, a hulking Italian-American who because of his famous surname quickly got the nickname ‘Mario’.

Scarecrow had a soft spot for the Kid. While not academically gifted—he failed most written exams—what he lacked in smarts, he made up for in a desire to be smarter. He was also good-natured, a crack shot and a dab hand at field-stripping and rebuilding almost any kind of weapon.

Mario, on the other hand, was less easy to like.

He was a surly and dour guy from the Engineering Corps who kept largely to himself when they weren’t working. A highly skilled mechanic, he was responsible for maintaining the various vehicles they were testing.

Like Schofield, however, both the Kid and Mario were in the Arctic doing field testing for a reason.

They were also broken.

The Kid had lost the hearing in one ear in a training accident, so he couldn’t go on active deployment. And a little digging on Schofield’s part had revealed that Mario had been implicated in the disappearance of some sidearms and over $20,000 worth of vehicle parts from a Marine lock-up; he hadn’t been formally charged but a cloud had lingered over him and this assignment was seen by some as an unofficial punishment.

As for the four civilian members of the team, as far as Schofield was concerned, two of them were great and two less so.

Zack Weinberg was from DARPA and he was your typical geek genius: he was 29, gangly and thin, and he wore huge glasses that seemed three sizes too big for his head.

A physicist by training, he was at DARPA because of his work in robotics. Hopelessly devoted to Call of Duty video games and all things Star Wars and Star Trek, he was in the Arctic testing several new DARPA inventions, the main one being a small bomb-disposal robot called the BRTE-500, or, as Zack called it, ‘Bertie’.

Bertie was DARPA’s answer to existing battlefield robots like the PackBot, the Talon and the weapons-mounted variant of the Talon called SWORDS.

‘Except Bertie comes with a few extra features,’ Zack said the day he pulled the little robot from its crate. ‘Unlike other bots that require human operators to control them remotely, Bertie is able to operate completely independently. Thanks to an artificial intelligence chip developed by my team at DARPA, he can follow spoken orders, learn, and even assess a situation and make tactical decisions.’

‘He can make tactical decisions?’ Schofield said. To him, the little robot—with its two spindly bomb-disposal arms and its curiously emotive single-lens ‘eye’ mounted on a stalk—looked like a cute toy. It scurried around on four rugged little tyres and, when necessary, extended a set of triangular treads that enabled it to climb up steps and over obstacles.

‘He’s a smart little bot,’ Zack said, ‘and for a weedy little fella, he packs a punch. He was initially designed for bomb disposal but I removed his IED water blaster and lightened his armour plating—replaced all the steel with ultralight titanium. Then I augmented him with some offensive capabilities.’

As he said this, Zack attached a gunbarrel to Bertie’s weapons mount . . . and suddenly the little robot took on a wholly different appearance: he looked like Wall-E with a great big gun.

‘Those capabilities include,’ Zack explained, ‘four internal rotator-fed ammunition clips which load a custom-modified lightweight short-barrelled internal-recoil-compensated 5.56mm M249 machine gun; a blowtorch for cutting through fences and razor wire; full digital sat-comms; a high-res camera that can send video images back to base; a first-aid pack, including a diagnostic scanner and defibrillator paddles, both of which Bertie can apply himself; oh, and four of our new MRE ration packs in case the human beings working with him get hungry. And all this in a package that weighs about thirty kilograms, so you can even pick him up and carry him if you really need to get out of Dodge in a hurry.’

Schofield couldn’t help but like Bertie: the little robot followed Zack around the camp like a devoted puppy, albeit a puppy with a machine gun on its back.

Mother, however, was doubtful. ‘I don’t know. How can we know he won’t short-circuit and open fire on us with that cannon?’

‘Bertie can distinguish between friend and foe,’ Zack said. ‘I’ve scanned all our team’s faces into his memory bank with instructions that we are never to be fired upon.’

‘Hello? Didn’t you see the ED-209 in RoboCop?’

‘This is the big question about robotic weapons,’ Zack said. ‘But Bertie has operated for three hundred hours without hurting anybody he wasn’t supposed to hurt. We have to trust him sometime. Hey, speaking of which, Bertie, scan Captain Schofield. Facial and infra-red, please.’

The robot scanned Schofield’s face, then beeped.

Its robotic voice said, ‘Scan complete. Individual identified as Captain Shane M. Schofield, United States Marine Corps. Service identification number 256-3569.’

Zack said, ‘Store as secondary buddy, please.’

‘Captain Shane M. Schofield stored as secondary buddy.’

‘What does that mean?’ Schofield asked.

‘Bertie needs someone to follow. I’m his primary buddy, which is why he follows me, but if something were to happen to me, he needs a secondary buddy which I think should be you.’

‘I’m honoured.’

Schofield liked Zack. On quiet evenings, they played chess and during those matches Zack would happily explain things like space-time, the speed of light and the Big Bang Theory—the TV show and the universe-creating event.

On a few occasions, Schofield even played chess against Bertie, with the little robot moving the pieces with its long spindly arm.

Bertie won every time.

The second civilian Schofield got along well with was Emma Dawson, a young meteorologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In her late twenties, Emma was pretty, articulate and tremendously hardworking—she was almost always reading a chart or working away on her laptop. She was in the Arctic measuring the rate at which the sea ice was melting.

Her beauty had not gone unnoticed by the young males in the team. Schofield had seen the Kid and Mario—and young Zack—staring absently at Emma on various occasions. But she rarely looked up from her work, and Schofield wondered if it was the practised skill of an attractive young woman: bury yourself in your work so you don’t have to fend off unwanted advances.

The final two civilian members of the field team kept mainly to themselves.

Jeff Hartigan was a senior executive for ArmaCorp Systems, a weapons maker that produced assault and sniper rifles. ArmaCorp was trying to convince the Marines to buy its latest assault rifle, the MX-18 carbine, but the Corps had insisted on cold-weather testing before they committed.

At 48, Hartigan was the oldest member of the group. He was also perhaps the only one who occupied a position of status back in the real world. As such, he was haughty and aloof and didn’t care about anyone he deemed beneath him, which was pretty much everyone else in the camp—so long as they recorded the results of the carbine’s tests, he didn’t seem to care what they thought of him. Except during testing, he mostly stayed in his tent, well apart from the others, even going so far as to send his personal assistant—an equally aloof junior executive named Chad—to collect his food for him at mealtimes.

Their testing had generally gone well.

The ArmaCorp rifle had performed flawlessly in the ice-cold conditions—making Hartigan even more unbearable—and Bertie whizzed about impervious to all kinds of frost and snow, variously disarming explosives and blowing blocks of ice to pieces with his small but very powerful M249 machine gun.

A new anti-explosive paint-gel made by an Australian company, DSS, worked perfectly in the cold—after the gooey gel was painted onto a large crate, that crate could withstand the most powerful explosive blast, even one from some potent PET plastic explosive, brought along precisely for those tests. Longer-lasting scuba rebreathers and drysuits for cold-water insertions had performed excellently, as had the new Assault Force Delivery Vehicles: some had wondered if the deflating valves on their rubber skirts might freeze in the cold, but they’d held up just fine.

Mother liked the new MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—that they’d been instructed to try. Each MRE came in a small plastic tube the size of a Magic Marker, so they were extremely portable. Each tube held some powdered jelly, a high-energy protein bar and three new water filtration pills which worked brilliantly.

‘The jelly still tastes like shit,’ Mother said, ‘but the water pills are fucking brilliant. Best field water I ever tried and I haven’t got diarrhoea once.’

Zack said, ‘That’s always been an issue with water filtration pills. These ones are chitosan-based and so far the results have been great. Chitosan is a natural polysaccharide that dissolves organically in the body. Did you know it’s also the main ingredient of Celox, the bullet-wound gel?’

Mother held up a hand. ‘Hey. Genius. You lost me at polysaccha-something. I get it. It’s an amazing new substance that will change the way we live.’

‘Something like that,’ Zack said, deflating a little.

Mother was more interested, however, in another device that Zack had been trialling: a new high-tech armoured wristguard.

DARPA had been developing it in the hope that it would become standard issue in the Marines and Army Rangers. Made of light carbon-fibre, the wristguard covered its wearer’s forearm and featured, among other things, a high-resolution LCD screen.

‘This screen is designed to display real-time data—video signals, even satellite imagery—to a soldier in the field,’ Zack explained to Mother as they stood outside their tents one day, testing it.

‘Real-time satellite imagery?’ Wearing the wristguard, Mother peered at its small rectangular screen. Zack leaned over and touched some icons on it. The screen came alive, showing two people in black-and-white seen from directly overhead, standing on a barren white plain beside some hexagonal objects.

‘Okay, now wave,’ Zack said.

Mother waved her left arm.

On the screen, one of the figures waved its left arm.

‘Oh, that is way cool . . .’ Mother said.

‘The wristguard operates like a satellite phone,’ Zack explained. ‘Encrypted, of course. But so long as you can make a connection with the satellite, you can get real-time imagery, data, even voice signals. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve configured it so you can even surf the net.’

Mother threw Zack a grin. ‘You know, Science Boy, you and I are gonna get along just fine.’

Zack beamed.

A few items had been unable to be tested, like an acid-based aerosol ‘anti-ursine agent’—or as Mother called it, ‘polar bear repellent’. While Zack had studiously sprayed it on all their tents, armour and drysuits, it had defied testing since no polar bears had come near their camp during the entire trip (prompting Mother to conclude, ‘Then I guess it works, doesn’t it?’).

And some things hadn’t worked well at all.

A new version of the Predator RPG launcher froze up, while the older version worked just fine. And a portable proximity sensor on the armoured wristguard seemed to work okay at first, but toward the end of their tour, it started sensing a large moving object—a three-hundred-foot-long object—within half a mile of their camp.

But there was nothing near the camp. The endless ice plain, split by ever-widening cracks, stretched away to the horizon, starkly and obviously empty.

‘It might be picking up killer whales swimming under the ice,’ Schofield suggested. ‘Or even a submarine.’

‘No, it’s a lateral rangefinder. It scans the landscape in a sideways direction, not downward. It’s a glitch,’ Zack said sadly. ‘Shame. But then, that’s exactly why we’re here, to test these things out.’

 

 

Naturally, over the course of seven weeks in a remote Arctic camp, they had good and bad days, occasional clashes and the odd petty argument.

Like the time Mother accidentally picked up Zack’s iPhone, thinking it was hers, and listened to some music.

‘Goddamn hip-hop shit,’ she said, yanking the earphones from her ears. ‘How can you listen to this? It’s elevator music.’

‘What music do you like, then?’ Zack challenged.

‘Music peaked in the eighties, my young friend. Huey Lewis and the News. Feargal Sharkey. Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a fucking bat live on stage. It’s the same for movies. Seriously, there hasn’t been a decent balls-to-the-wall action flick since Predator. Arnie doing the business and, oh my, Jesse “The Body” Ventura. God broke the mould after he made Jesse Ventura. Hollywood actors today are all fucking nancy boys. Can you think of any leading man today who could say the line, “I ain’t got time to bleed”?’

Zack had to concede that he couldn’t.

But he did manage to convince Mother to listen to some other modern songs and she had to admit that she quite liked Lady Gaga. ‘Although, I’m not a “free bitch” like she is. I’m just a bitch,’ she said after hearing one song.

On another occasion, as they gathered around the small gas fire in the mess tent, the Kid had said, ‘Hey Mother, I saw a killer whale pop up for air through an ice hole the other day. You seen one yet?’

Mother stumped her left boot up on the table and rolled up her trouser leg, revealing that her left leg from the knee down was a prosthetic, all silver plating, hinges and hydraulics.

Zack leaned forward. ‘What is that, stainless steel?’

‘Titanium,’ Mother said. ‘Got it thanks to a killer whale I met in Antarctica.’

‘What happened to the whale?’ the Kid asked.

‘It died,’ Mother said, deadpan.

‘Mother shot it in the head,’ Schofield explained.

‘You shot a killer whale in the head?’ the Kid said in disbelief.

‘Fuckin’ fish had my leg in its mouth. What else was I supposed to do?’

Zack said, ‘You know, whales aren’t fish, they’re—’

‘I know they’re mammals!’ Mother snapped. ‘Christ, everyone tells me that. But when one of them’s got you by the foot and is pulling you under, trust me, you don’t care whether it’s a goddamn fucking mammal, all right!’

Schofield grinned.

During a long expedition, people will talk about many things over the campfire and this group was no different.

They discussed politics, sports, the killing of Osama bin Laden, all kinds of subjects.

One night they talked about the rise of China. It was one of the rare nights when Jeff Hartigan dined with the group and he spoke animatedly on the subject.

‘It’s hard to believe that only thirty years ago China was the laughing stock of the world, a rural shithole,’ he said. ‘Now, it’s a genuine global powerhouse: 1.3 billion people, the bulk of whom work in factories for a few bucks a day, building the world’s fridges, toys and DVD players. But now in China there’s this huge new middle class that wants everything we have in the West: cars, iPhones, the latest fashions. China is the future for every business in the world, in both supply and demand.’

Mother looked doubtful. ‘But as China rises, does that mean other countries have to fall? My husband, Ralph, is a trucker. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of his buddies who work in factories get laid off—they’re honest, hardworking, blue-collar workers who just can’t compete with cheap Chinese labour. The work they do just keeps going overseas.’

Hartigan shrugged. ‘Way of the world. A new power rises and an old one falls. America did exactly the same thing to England in the 1800s—outstripped it with industry, land and sheer human capital. Now China is doing it to us. And short of launching an all-out war, you can’t stop this kind of thing.’

‘Then what does the average American worker do? How do they pay their mortgage, keep a roof over their family’s head?’ Mother asked. She wasn’t trying to make a point. She genuinely wanted to know the answer.

Hartigan said, ‘There’s nothing they can do. In things like this, some poor bastard has to be the loser. It’s just that the average American has never been the loser before. Now he is. And he’d better get used to it because nothing can stop China now.’

On another occasion, a particularly spirited discussion arose when Zack—a very Jewish New York Jew—raised the classic campfire conundrum, ‘The Nazi Dilemma’.

‘You’re a Jew in Germany during World War II,’ he said, ‘hiding in a ditch beside a country road at night with a group of twenty other Jews. A Nazi regiment marches by. You all duck for cover and lie very still. But in your group is a baby. It starts crying. If the Nazis hear it, they’ll kill all of you. Someone suggests smothering the baby, killing it in order to save the larger group. What do you do? Do you let the baby live and condemn everyone else, including you, to death? Or do you kill one baby so that twenty other people may live?’

‘You find a machine gun and kill the Nazis,’ Mother said.

‘Seriously,’ Zack said.

‘The choice is easy, kill the baby,’ Jeff Hartigan said. ‘The good of the majority must take precedence over the life of one person, even a child.’

‘I disagree,’ Emma said. ‘If you kill the baby, you become as bad as the Nazis.’

The Kid said, ‘I could never kill an innocent person to save my own skin, least of all a baby. Couldn’t live with myself.’

‘What about you, Captain Schofield?’ Zack asked.

Schofield looked at them all, before settling his gaze on Hartigan. ‘For me, the choice is also easy. Either we all survive together or we all die together. I don’t leave any man behind. And I’d never sacrifice anyone in my charge who was slow or tired or just a little weaker than everyone else. A civilisation is judged by how it treats the vulnerable.’

‘You’d give your life for a crying baby?’ Hartigan asked, incredulous. ‘And you’d give my life as well?’

‘Absolutely and absolutely. But I’d also put up one hell of a fight to save you both before it came to that.’

Mother clapped him on the shoulder and gave him a big kiss on the cheek. ‘And that, folks, is why I love serving with the Scarecrow!’

There were also, thankfully, some lighter conversations.

‘Well, with one week to go,’ Mother said, ‘I have to say that this trip has really let me down. My horoscope in Cosmo a couple of months ago said that’—she pulled out a page ripped from a magazine—‘“You will meet your mirror image in the next few months, a member of the opposite sex who is your natural partner. The chemistry will be irresistible. Sparks will fly.”’

‘You read Cosmo?’ the Kid asked.

‘When I’m in the waiting room at the dentist, yeah.’ Mother tossed the page into the air and gazed pointedly at the men in the tent: Schofield, the Kid, Mario and Zack. ‘I mean, look at you lot. Except for the ever-handsome Scarecrow, who’s like a brother to me and therefore off-limits in that department, the rest of you are a pretty fucking sorry sample of masculinity. No alpha males here.’

‘Hey!’ the Kid said. ‘I’m—’

‘You, young man, are a boy. A whole-lotta-woman like me needs a whole-lotta-man,’ Mother said. ‘Oh, well, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t meet my male mirror. My Ralphy might get jealous.’

Ralph was all tattoos, sleeveless checked shirts and Popeye forearms, a real salt-of-the-Earth type. He and Mother had been married for years and as Schofield knew, Mother loved him dearly.

Although one night she’d made an odd comment that had surprised him: ‘I don’t know, Scarecrow, sometimes I worry about Ralphy and me. We got married young and now we’re both nearly forty and we know each other so well, maybe too well. There’s no mystery anymore. When I’m home, every night it’s the same old routine—eat dinner, feed the dogs, watch some TV and then finish off with The Daily Show. Ralph’s sweet but sometimes . . . I don’t know . . . we’ve even been having stupid fights lately and we never used to do that.’

‘Ralph’s a legend,’ Schofield said, ‘and you’re lucky to have him. You two were made for each other.’

And of course there were times when you had to get away from the group and be by yourself.

Often Schofield would retire to his tent to read a book, while some nights he’d sit down with the DARPA wristguard and correspond with a friend of his at the Defense Intelligence Agency, David Fairfax.

A T-shirt-and-sneakers-wearing cryptanalyst, Fairfax had helped Schofield on a couple of missions and they’d kept in touch.

The night before he got the call from the White House Situation Room, Schofield turned on the wristguard to find a message from Fairfax waiting for him:

Soon after, they were corresponding via live encrypted messaging:

Schofield stared at the screen. No matter who you were, living with a price on your head was a constant source of anxiety and stress. And this French business just wasn’t going away.

He gazed at the screen for a long time before signing off.

For her part, Mother had spent the last seven weeks watching Shane Schofield very closely.

More than anyone else, she knew what he had been through during that Majestic-12 bounty hunt and the months after.

She had been there on a rainswept cliff on the French coast when he had put his own gun to his chin and almost pulled the trigger. She’d been the one who stopped him going through with it.

He appeared to be doing okay. He was actually smiling again, not much but a little. That said, he did admit that he still didn’t sleep well and some days she saw deep bags under his eyes.

Mother knew the Corps had sent him to see a bunch of high-priced shrinks. The psychiatrists had offered him anti-depression drugs but he’d refused. He’d do any therapy they suggested—CBT, couch sessions, even a few sessions of hypnotherapy—but he wouldn’t take drugs. He hadn’t thought very highly of the shrinks, except for one, a lady in Baltimore he’d found separately; he said she was exceptional. But in any case it seemed like he was now more or less back to normal.

More or less.

For Mother knew he wasn’t completely whole again.

And she knew why he wasn’t sleeping. Her tent was next to his and on several occasions she’d heard him talking in his sleep, yelling plaintive cries of: ‘Fox . . . no . . . not in the . . . guillotine . . . no . . . NO!’

Then Mother would hear him wake with a gasp and breathe very heavily for a minute or two.

And then came the morning when the call came from the White House Situation Room.

 

ARCTIC ICE FIELD 4 APRIL, 0630 HOURS 4 HOURS 30 MINUTES TO DEADLINE

At 6:30 that morning Schofield called the group together, all eight of them, four Marines, four civilians.

He told them what he knew: that a group calling itself the Army of Thieves had taken Dragon Island and would be ready to set off some kind of atmospheric weapon at 11:00 a.m. local time. A missile attack had failed and aerial assaults would be likewise ineffective, which was why they were being sent in. They were one of only two groups close enough to get to Dragon in time by sea.

‘The Army of Thieves?’ Mother said. ‘Never heard of ’em.’

Schofield said, ‘Doesn’t sound like anybody has—at least until recently. The White House is sending through whatever intel they can find. Apparently, the DIA has something and the CIA is checking.’

The Kid said, ‘Why the delay in setting off the weapon?’

‘It takes time to prime the weapon’s principal element, some small uranium spheres, and they’re not fully primed yet. That’s why we have this window.’

‘Cutting it a little close, aren’t we?’

‘Closer than you think,’ Schofield said. ‘We need to prep all our gear. After that, it’ll take us nearly three hours just to get there. And the island itself is seriously fortified. Even if they open the front door for us, we’ll have maybe an hour to get in and get to the weapon in time, then disable or destroy it. And somehow I don’t think they’ll be opening the front door for us.’

He turned to the four civilians: Zack, Emma, Hartigan and Chad.

‘But four Marines is not enough to do this. We need as many bodies as we can get and if you’re willing to come along and help us, I will gladly take you. However, let me say this very clearly from the outset: this is not compulsory. None of you has to come. We’ll be a secondary team—I repeat, a secondary, back-up team—but if the primary SEAL unit fails to resolve this, we will be going in. And that will be ugly.

‘So none of you has any illusions about what “ugly” means, let me tell you now: it means shooting to kill, bloody wounds, broken bones and dead bodies right in your face. So, if you don’t want to go, you don’t have to and no-one will hold it against you.

‘But . . .’ he held up a finger, ‘if you do come, then I ask only one thing of you: that you obey my orders. However crazy or bizarre they seem, there will always be some logic to them. In return, I promise that I will not leave you. If you are captured or caught, while I still have breath in my body, I will come for you. Got that? Good. All right then. Who’s in and who’s out? Speak now or forever hold your peace.’

The group fell silent.

The civilians variously stared at the flickering gas flame or at their feet, deciding what to do.

Zack spoke first, swallowing, then nodding. ‘I’m in.’

‘Me, too,’ Emma Dawson said uncertainly. ‘Although I’m not much with a gun. I fired one once at my uncle’s ranch.’

‘Don’t worry, honey babe,’ Mother said gently. ‘Give me a couple of minutes with you and you’ll be a kick-ass bitch from Hell, just like me.’

Jeff Hartigan snorted. ‘This is ridiculous. What chance have you got—four Marines and some untrained civilians—against a dug-in military force? Like hell I’m going. I’m staying here and so is Chad.’

‘No, I’m not,’ Chad said quietly. ‘I’ll go.’

‘What?’ His boss whirled.

Schofield turned, too. He hadn’t expected this.

‘I said I’m going.’

‘You will do no such thing,’ Hartigan said. ‘You’ll stay here with me while these others go off and get themselves killed.’

The assistant shook his head. Schofield wondered if he’d ever stood up to his boss before.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Hartigan, but I think we have to do something—’

‘You think we have to do something,’ Hartigan mimicked. ‘Please. Chad, I thought you were smarter than this.’

Chad bowed his head. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

Schofield said, ‘I’m not. It’s good to have you aboard, Chad.’ He turned to Hartigan. ‘Sir, if everyone else is going, staying here on your own does present certain dangers. Perhaps you’d like to reconsider—’

‘I’ll be perfectly fine, thank you very much, Captain,’ Hartigan said. ‘You are the ones who should rethink your positions. Idiots.’

Schofield just nodded and said no more.

They spent the next half-hour hurriedly preparing for the mission: the Marines field-stripped their weapons, checked their mags; Zack loaded up Bertie with ammunition; and Mother even gave Emma and Chad a quick lesson in marksmanship.

When Schofield saw that Zack was bringing the experimental wristguard, he grabbed it and sent off a message to Dave Fairfax:

He then ordered everyone, civilians included, to put on drysuits in case they fell into the freezing water. Schofield and his Marines wore new snow-camouflaged drysuits—they looked like regular battle fatigues, only they were made of ultralight watertight material that retained body heat—with their gunbelts and holsters on the outside. On their backs, as always, all the Marines carried their signature weapon, the Armalite MH-12 Maghook, a magnetic grappling hook.

The civilians wore simple grey drysuits with hooded parkas on top for extra warmth; and since they didn’t have combat boots, they just wore their cold-weather Arctic boots, a mixture of heavy-duty Nikes and Salomons.

When everyone was ready, the seven members of the departing team boarded the two assault boats and set off on the long journey south to Dragon Island.

Jeff Hartigan watched them go, remaining at the camp, alone. His last words to Schofield were, ‘You’re a fool, Captain. You must realise that you cannot win this.’

Schofield didn’t reply. He just started his boat and pulled away.

 

ARCTIC ICE FIELD 4 APRIL, 0840 HOURS 2 HOURS 20 MINUTES TO DEADLINE

Killer whales and extreme cold are two things that the Arctic and the Antarctic have in common, but in many other respects they are actually quite different.

While Antarctica is a vast landmass covered in snow and ice, the Arctic is simply a giant frozen sea. Even the North Pole itself is situated on floating ice. In 1953, a submarine called the USS Nautilus sailed under the Pole; six years later, the USS Skate surfaced at the Pole, bursting up through the ice itself.

Around March every year, as the sun rises for the first time in months, the sea ice begins to melt, creating long cracks called ‘leads’. As the region warms, these leads get wider and wider, forming a labyrinthine network of canals and alleyways in the sea ice, some a few feet deep, others over thirty feet deep. Polar bears hunt in leads because seals and small whales surface in them to breathe.

The leads were also useful for an insertion team, as any land-based radar system could only scan the surface of the sea ice: anything down in the sunken network of leads would not be detectable to such devices. The leads could really only be monitored by human eyes looking down from a surveillance aircraft, and as Scarecrow’s little assault boats raced down a major lead to the site of the crashed Beriev, no such aircraft could be seen.

At 8:40 a.m., Schofield’s boats came to a small pancake-shaped ice floe floating out in the middle of their lead.

A large white shape lay slumped on it, unmoving.

‘What is that . . . ?’ Mother said over the radio.

Schofield slowed his boat, bringing it in close to the little ice floe. The white shape became clearer.

‘It’s a polar bear,’ he said.

‘Great, now we can test that stupid bear repellent,’ Mother said. ‘Hey Kid, go on. Go over and pat the nice widdle bear.’

‘Not this time, Mother,’ Schofield said as his boat came further around the ice floe and he saw the other side of the unmoving bear. ‘This bear’s deader than disco.’

It certainly was. The bear’s throat was ripped open, its belly a grisly mess of blood, flesh and sprawling intestines. This polar bear had practically been disembowelled.

The Kid said, ‘Jesus . . . the thing’s been gutted.’

‘But not eaten,’ Schofield observed. ‘That’s not right.’

Emma said, ‘No, it’s not right at all. The polar bear is an apex predator. The only other animal in these parts that could do something like this is another polar bear. You’re correct: another bear might attack a fellow bear out of starvation or for territorial reasons, but it would almost always eat its fallen rival. Polar bears are the most dangerous bear in the world primarily because they are opportunists; they’ll eat anything they can find, including humans and other bears. But this bear has been slaughtered and then abandoned. Polar bears just don’t do that.’

‘Are there any gunshot wounds?’ Mother asked.

‘Not that I can see.’ Schofield stared at the dead bear for a long moment. It was absolutely huge, and its snow-white coat was matted with blood. Who or what could have done this?

It didn’t escape his notice that they were now only about thirty miles from Dragon Island.

‘Come on,’ he said, turning. ‘We’ve got a plane to find.’

He gunned the engine and his sleek assault boat powered away from the remains of the dead polar bear.

THE BERIEV CRASH SITE

 

THE BERIEV CRASH SITE 4 APRIL, 0900 HOURS 2 HOURS TO DEADLINE

Twenty minutes later, the two assault boats pulled to a halt at a junction of two major leads. The ice walls that bounded the watery junction rose about twenty feet above the boats. After two hours of travel, they were close to the co-ordinates of the crashed Beriev.

Scarecrow extended a ladder, hooked its curved upper prongs over the lip of the ice wall and started climbing. His team remained in the boats below him, huddled in their drysuits and parkas, looking very anxious.

Schofield’s head appeared above the flat edge of the ice plain.

The crashed Beriev was right there, barely fifty yards away.

It was tipped over on its left-hand side, its nose pointing southward. Its tail section was completely destroyed, and its left wing had snapped under the weight of the fuselage rolling onto it. Beyond the plane, a vast expanse of ice stretched away to the west, cracked here and there by leads.

Far to the south, Schofield saw Dragon Island for the first time.

It loomed on the horizon, small but visible, a jagged upthrust of mountains on the otherwise perfectly flat horizon. Low clouds hovered above it. It looked dangerous, even from here.

Scarecrow peered warily up at the sky, scanning for surveillance aircraft.

Nothing. Only the purple dawn-like sky and some high-altitude clouds, although to the south, around Dragon, the sky did seem to shimmer somewhat.

He saw something.

A tiny object, circling lazily high above him. It wasn’t a surveillance plane; it was too small. It looked like a large Arctic bird, gliding on the thermals.

Schofield swore. He was completely unprepared for a combat mission and he knew it. He was working with untrained civilians just to make up the numbers and he had almost zero surveillance equipment. He wished he had a simple waveguide radar or even just a parabolic dish to scan the immediate airspace. But he didn’t even have that. Right now, all he had were his eyes and they just weren’t good enough.

‘Mother, come on up. Bring Bertie with you. Everyone else, stay in the boats for now.’

He stepped up onto the flat surface of the ice plain, MP-7 submachine gun poised and ready.

A few moments later, Mother joined him. She plonked Bertie on the ground between them and the little robot beeped and spun on his chunky tyres.

Mother stood beside Scarecrow, clasping a menacing Heckler & Koch G36A2 assault rifle in her hands.

Most Force Recon NCOs used the standard-issue M4, but Mother preferred the venerable German assault gun, and hers came with all the optional extras: it had a 100-round C-Mag drum magazine, underslung AG36 grenade launcher with the new anti-tank zinc-tipped incendiary grenades, a Zeiss RSA reflex sight and Oerlikon Contraves LLM01 laser light module. With all the additions, it looked like something out of a science fiction movie.

Scarecrow glanced from his compact MP-7 to her G36. ‘Could you have attached anything else to that thing?’ he asked.

‘Quiet, you,’ she said. ‘Weapons options are like good commanders: you love ’em when you’ve got ’em, and you wish you had ’em when you don’t.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

Mother scanned the area. ‘It’s too quiet here.’

‘Yeah, it is. Bertie, acquire and identify that object up in the sky, please.’

‘Yes, Captain Schofield.’ Bertie’s optical lens tilted skyward.

As the robot did this, Scarecrow and Mother approached the crashed plane, guns raised.

Standing before the Beriev, Schofield pulled down the thermal-vision scope on his helmet.

He saw the crumpled plane in infra-red, saw the strong residual warmth of its intact wing-mounted engine plus two man-shaped blobs in the cockpit, dim but pulsing.

‘I got two human signatures,’ he said. ‘Looks like they’re still alive in there—’

Suddenly, Schofield’s earpiece crackled to life.

Ironbark Barker’s voice growled: ‘SEAL team in position off the north-east corner of Dragon Island. Commencing underwater insertion via the old submarine dock.’

Ironbark and his team were going in.

Scarecrow returned his attention to the plane and stepping cautiously forward, arrived at its cracked cockpit windshield. Since the Beriev was rolled on its side, he couldn’t get in via its side doors, so he smashed one of the cockpit windows while Mother covered him, her G36 ready to fire.

Schofield saw two figures slumped in the plane’s flight seats. Still strapped into the pilot’s seat was an older man with a bushy grey moustache and ‘IVANOV’ stenciled onto his parka. He groaned as Schofield reached in and touched his carotid artery.

‘This must be the guy who sent out the distress call. He’s alive.’ Schofield pulled out a heat-pack from his first-aid pouch and pressed it against Ivanov’s chest. Ivanov immediately started breathing more deeply.

Mother crawled in and checked the other man, a young Russian private by all appearances. He was pale and pasty-faced, but after a few slaps, he came to with a grunt.

Beside him, Vasily Ivanov regained his senses. He blurted something in Russian before, seeing the US flags on Schofield’s and Mother’s shoulders, he switched to English: ‘Who are you?!’

Schofield said, ‘We’re United States Marines. Our people picked up your distress signal and we’re here to—’

Gunfire.

Schofield spun. Mother did, too.

But it wasn’t here. It was in their ears, in their earpieces.

Then Schofield heard Ironbark’s voice again and it was shouting desperately.

Cut into the cliffs on the north-eastern flank of Dragon Island was a Soviet-era submarine dock. It was essentially a rectangular concrete cave that had been carved into the rocky cliff face, and like all such edifices of the once mighty Soviet Union, it was enormous.

It featured two berths that could hold—at the same time, completely sheltered from the elements—a nuclear ballistic missile submarine and a 30,000-ton bulk carrier. The tracks of an oversized railway system ended at the edge of the two docks. In the old days, Soviet freighters had unloaded their cargoes—weapons, weapons-grade nuclear material or just steel and concrete—directly onto the carriages of a waiting megasized train.

Today, one of those berths was occupied by a most unusual sight: a huge red-hulled Russian freighter lay half-sunk beside the dock, deliberately scuttled. It was tilted dramatically forward, its bow fully under the surface while its stern remained afloat. The stricken vessel’s name blared out from that stern in massive white letters:

OKHOTSK.

It was the mysterious Russian freighter that had gone missing with an army’s worth of weapons and ordnance on board: AK-47s, RPGs, Strela anti-aircraft vehicles, ZALA aerial drones, APR torpedoes and even two MIR mini-submarines. One of those compact glass-domed submersibles could be seen tilted on its side on the half-submerged foredeck of the freighter.

Apart from the Okhotsk lying alongside the dock, the rest of the vast concrete cavern lay empty, long unused, its many ladders, catwalks and chains doing nothing but gathering dust and frost.

The first of Ironbark’s Navy SEALs emerged silently from the ice-strewn water, leading with a silenced MP-5N. He was quickly followed by a second man, then Ironbark himself.

It was a textbook entry. They never made a sound.

There was only one problem.

The force of a hundred armed men stationed at various positions around the dock, using the ageing debris and the half-sunk wreck of the Okhotsk as firing positions. They formed a perfect ring around the water containing the SEALs.

And as soon as all twelve of the SEALs had breached the surface, they opened fire.

What followed was nothing less than a shooting gallery. The SEALs were annihilated in perfectly executed interlocking patterns of fire.

Schofield heard Ironbark’s voice shouting above the rain of gunfire: ‘Fuck! Go under! Go under!—Jesus, there must be a hundred of them!—Base, this is Ironbark! SEAL assault is negative! I repeat, SEAL assault is fucked! They were waiting in the submarine dock! We’re being slaughtered! Miami, we have to get back to you. Miami, come in—’

Ten miles away, the Los Angeles–class attack submarine, the USS Miami, hovered in the blue void beneath the Arctic sea ice.

Inside its communications centre, a radio operator keyed his mike: ‘Ironbark, this is Miami. We read you—’

‘What the hell . . .’ the sonar operator beside him said suddenly before shouting: ‘Torpedo in the water! Torpedo in the water! Signature is of an APR-3E Russian-made torpedo. Bearing 235! It’s coming from Dragon and it’s coming in fast!’

‘Launch countermeasures!’

‘It’s locked on to us—’

Schofield listened in horror to the frantic commands being given on the Miami.

‘—Take evasive action—’

‘—can’t, it’s too close!’

‘—too late! Brace for impact! Fuck! No!—’

The signal from the Miami cut to hash.

Schofield heard Ironbark yell: ‘Miami? Come in. USS Miami, respond!’

There was no reply from the Miami.

Mother looked at Schofield in utter shock.

Schofield kept listening.

‘Ah! Fuck!’ Ironbark shouted in pain before, in a hail of louder gunfire, his signal also went dead and the airwaves went completely silent.

Schofield and Mother listened for more, but nothing came.

‘Holy shit . . .’ Mother whispered. ‘A hundred men waiting? A force that can take out a SEAL team and a fucking Los Angeles–class attack sub? Who in God’s name is this Army of Thieves?’

Schofield was thinking exactly the same thing.

‘Whoever they are,’ he said, staring out the cockpit’s shattered windshield at Dragon Island on the southern horizon, ‘our little team just became the last people on Earth capable of stopping them.’

 

 

Back in the assault boats, the rest of Schofield’s team waited tensely.

The Kid and Mario manned the controls of the boats, in case a swift departure was required.

Emma and Chad stared up at the ladder rising out of the lead, waiting for Schofield and Mother to return.

Zack, however, was busying himself with the wristguard. The high-tech device was one of his pet projects at DARPA and its failure frustrated him. There was no reason it shouldn’t be working fine. Also, tinkering with it took his mind off the mission at hand.

He had the wristguard’s upper panel flipped open and was peering at its internal workings.

He flicked it on—and suddenly the wristguard started pinging urgently, a red light blinking.

Zack frowned. ‘It’s saying there’s a three-hundred-foot-long object alongside us again.’

‘The sea ice?’ the Kid said, glancing at the ice walls around them.

‘No, it’s a metallic signature. The wristguard’s sensors can distinguish between ice and steel.’ Zack shook his head. ‘Why? Why is it doing that—ah-ha . . .’

He spotted something deep inside the wristguard’s internal wiring. ‘The emitter mirror’s been bent sideways. It must’ve got bumped somewhere. The emitter’s been pointing down the whole time.’

Now it was the Kid who frowned.

‘Wait a second. Are you saying that, right now, your wrist gizmo is picking up a three-hundred-foot-long metal object underneath us?’

Zack said, ‘Well, yes, I suppose so . . .’

‘How far away is it?’ the Kid asked.

‘Two hundred yards . . . no wait, one-ninety . . . one-eighty. Whatever it is, it’s getting closer.’

The Kid’s face fell. He looked up in the direction of the Beriev. ‘This is not good.’

A beep from just outside the Beriev’s smashed windshield made Schofield turn.

‘Captain Schofield,’ Bertie said. ‘Object identified.’

‘Let me see.’ Schofield was still inside the Beriev with Ivanov. Bertie came over, stopping next to the side-turned windows of the cockpit. Schofield looked at the display screen on the little robot’s back.

When he saw what was on the screen, he said, ‘Oh, shit . . .’

Bertie narrated: ‘Object is a Russian-made ZALA-421-08 unmanned aerial vehicle. Vehicle is designed for reconnaissance and surveillance purposes. It carries no weapons payload. Electric engine, wingspan of eighty centimetres; maximum flight duration: ninety minutes. Standard payload: one 550 TVL infra-red-capable video camera, one 12-megapixel digital still camera.’

Schofield was moving quickly now. He scrambled out of the Beriev, got to his feet and scanned the sky.

And found it: the high-flying, bird-like object he’d seen earlier.

Only it wasn’t a bird.

It was a drone.

A small, lightweight surveillance drone.

‘They know we’re here,’ he said aloud.

As if in answer, four dark aircraft appeared above the southern horizon, two big ones hovering in between two smaller ones, coming from Dragon Island.

They grew larger by the second.

They were approaching. Fast.

His earpiece came alive again.

‘Scarecrow!’ It was the Kid. ‘Zack’s got the wristguard’s proximity sensor working. I think he’s picked up a submarine lurking out here and it’s closing in on us!’

Schofield’s mind spun.

Drones, incoming aircraft, the loss of Ironbark’s team and the Miami, and now another submarine here . . .

Damn.

This was all happening too fast, way too fast for a commander out in the middle of nowhere with no support, few combat troops and nothing in the way of serious hardware.

His brain tried to put it all together, to somehow order it all.

You can’t figure it out now. You can only stay alive and figure it out as you run.

‘Kid!’ he yelled, diving back inside the Beriev. ‘Keep those engines running! Mother! Get these two out of the cockpit! Things are about to get hairy!’

 

 

The four aircraft were two V-22 Ospreys and two AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters, all of which had been stolen from the Marine Corps staging base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, four months earlier.

The Ospreys were, quite simply, aerial beasts. With tiltable rotors, they were capable of both swift aeroplane-like flight and helicopter-like hovering. And these Ospreys were the variant known as the ‘Warbird’: they were armed to the teeth. They each had not one but two 20mm six-barrelled M61 Vulcan cannons, door-mounted .50 calibre AN/M2 machine guns, and missile pods slung under both wings. The Warbird was the mother of all gunships—big and strong, yet also fast and manoeuvrable—and the Army of Thieves had two of them.

The two Cobras weren’t shy either: they carried slightly smaller M134 six-barrelled miniguns underneath their sharply-pointed noses.

The two Ospreys thundered over the ice plain, flanked by the Cobras, sweeping over the network of watery leads, rushing toward the crashed Beriev.

A short distance from the crash site, one of the big Ospreys broke away from the other three aircraft and zoomed off to the north-west. The remaining three attack aircraft kept coming straight for the Beriev.

‘Base, this is Hammerhead,’ the pilot of the Osprey that had stayed on course said into his mike.

While he wore a Marine Corps tactical flight helmet and a Marine Corps winter warfare parka, he was not a United States Marine.

Flowing tattoos lined his neck and lower jaw—images of snakes, skulls and thorny vines. In addition to the Marine parka, he wore Uzbek gloves and Russian boots. The eight armed and similarly tattooed men sitting in the hold behind him had the broad faces, dark eyes and olive skin of native Chileans. They, too, wore a hodgepodge of Arctic gear, including Marine Corps parkas, and they held AK-47 assault rifles in their laps with easy familiarity.

‘We’re coming up on Ivanov’s plane,’ Hammerhead said. ‘The drone spotted two people approaching it. They must’ve come by boat through the leads, so the tower radars on Dragon couldn’t spot them.’

A calm voice replied in the pilot’s ear.

‘Just as we suspected. It’s the American testing team.’ The speaker grunted a short, cruel laugh. ‘The Pentagon must be desperate if it’s sending product testers against us. Take out Ivanov’s plane with missiles, then find this test team and kill them all.’

Inside the Beriev’s cockpit, Schofield and Mother were moving frantically now.

Mother released the young Russian private from his flight seat and they shimmied out the smashed cockpit windows.

Schofield slid to Vasily Ivanov’s side and had just started to extract Ivanov from his flight seat when, through the lopsided cockpit windshield, he saw one of the Cobras loose a pair of heat-seeking missiles.

The two missiles looped through the air, zeroing in on the stricken plane.

Scarecrow yelled, ‘Bertie! Missile scrambler! Now!’

Outside the Beriev, Bertie replied, ‘Missile scrambling initiated.’ He then emitted a powerful burst of short-range electronic jamming.

Almost immediately the two missiles peeled away and slammed into the ice plain a short distance from the Beriev in twin explosions of fire and ice.

Schofield struggled with Ivanov’s seatbelt. It was jammed with frost.

‘Mother!’ he called. ‘Get back to the boats! Before that Osprey lands and unloads ground troops!’

‘What about you?’ Mother shouted back.

‘I gotta get this guy out! I’ll catch up! Now, go!’

Mother bolted, hauling the dazed young Russian private with her. As they ran across the fifty yards of open ground between the Beriev and the lead containing their boats the second Cobra tried to loose another missile, but this one also went haywire and smashed into the ice.

‘Cobras, forget it. They’ve got anti-missile countermeasures,’ the pilot named Hammerhead said. ‘I’m going to unload the ground team. You take care of those two runners.’

The Osprey powered ahead of the two Cobras, up-tilted its rotors and swung into a hover.

As it did so, its side doors were pulled open from within and drop ropes were tossed out. Within seconds, eight heavily armed men in black balaclavas and Marine Corps parkas were sliding down the ropes and hitting the ground one after the other.

They fanned out in perfect formation, AK-47s up, moving in on the crashed Beriev.

At the same time, one of the Cobras pivoted in the air and aimed its M134 at the fleeing figures of Mother and the Russian private.

The minigun whirred to life, barrels spinning, and unleashed a thunderous burst of hypermachine-gun fire.

The ice behind Mother’s running feet leapt upward as bullets strafed it.

‘Dive!’ she yelled to the young private limping along beside her.

They dived forward, toward the ladder hooks looped over the edge of the ice, chased by bullets.

Mother hit the ice on her belly and slid forward like a batter trying to steal second, before she hit the edge and went flying off it into open space, falling suddenly as she felt a bullet slap against the sole of her left boot. She dropped in a clumsy heap onto the first boat waiting at the base of the ladder.

Behind her, the Russian private did the same, but he was a split second behind Mother and that made a world of difference to the result.

As he slid over the lip, he was literally ripped apart by the hail of bullets. Blood fountains spurted all over his body, but propelled by his own dive, his corpse continued off the edge and, like Mother, it also dropped into the first AFDV, right next to Emma Dawson, who screamed at the sight of the bullet-riddled body that thudded down next to her like a slab of meat on a butcher’s block. It was no longer recognisable as a human being.

Mother gasped, out of breath. ‘Motherfucker, that was close! Oh, Jesus, Scarecrow . . .’

The roar of the hovering Osprey was deafening. A tornado of ice and snow swirled around the Beriev.

Inside the crashed plane’s cockpit, Schofield splashed some water from his canteen onto Ivanov’s buckle and the frost melted and the seatbelt unjammed. Schofield yanked the Russian from his flight seat.

‘Come on, buddy,’ he said, peering outside and seeing the eight-man balaclava-and-parka-wearing force approaching the Beriev from the south. He glanced eastward.

‘Mother, you okay?’

‘I’m clear, but my guy’s toast. What about you?’

‘On my way—uh-oh . . .’

One of the balaclava-clad men dropped to a prone position, took aim down the sights of a very powerful bipod-mounted machine gun and squeezed the trigger—

—braaaaaaaaack!

The gunman was himself thrown backwards by a terrible burst of machine-gun fire.

Schofield snapped up to see—of all things—Bertie’s gunbarrel smoking.

‘Oh, good robot,’ he said. ‘Good robot.’

Bertie lay down some more deadly fire and the other attackers variously dived for cover behind the Beriev itself or returned fire at Bertie. Bullets bounced off the little robot’s metal flanks while Bertie just kept panning left and right, emitting short controlled bursts.

But then while Bertie was facing right, Schofield glimpsed another enemy commando to their left—appearing between the Beriev and the lead containing their escape boats—as he swung a Russian-made RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher onto his shoulder.

The man was only just in Scarecrow’s field of vision. Schofield had to peer up through the cracked windshield of the Beriev just to see him. The angle was too narrow to fire at the man and in any case, Schofield didn’t have anything to match the firepower of an RPG.

He looked about himself for options.

Wait a second . . .

The parka-clad commando peered down the sight of his rocket launcher, steadied it on his shoulder—as inside the cockpit of the Beriev, Shane Schofield pushed Ivanov backward and said, ‘Cover your ears!’

Then Scarecrow yanked on the ejection lever of the Beriev’s copilot’s seat.

A gaseous whoosh filled the cockpit as a section of the plane’s roof was jettisoned and the co-pilot’s seat blasted out of the Beriev. Since the plane was lying on its side, the flight seat rocketed laterally through the air, shooting low over the ground on a flat horizontal trajectory before it struck the RPG-wielding commando with terrible force, square in the chest, cracking every one of his ribs before sending him flying backwards, all but breaking the man in two.

Vasily Ivanov’s eyes boggled as he looked out through the newly-opened hole in the roof of the cockpit and saw the dead commando on the ice plain.

‘You see that?’ Schofield yelled to Ivanov as the other parka-clad commandos opened fire again. ‘’Cause that’s how we’re getting out of here, too! Is that flightsuit you’re wearing good in Arctic waters?’

‘It is designed to survive in icy water for a short time, yes,’ Ivanov stammered.

‘Good enough.’ Schofield reached out through the smashed cockpit windshield with one hand, yanked Bertie back inside, and handed him to Ivanov. ‘Here, hold my robot!’ Schofield then sat on the remaining pilot’s seat and pulled Ivanov onto his own lap. ‘Now hold on to your breakfast.’

Then, with all three of them sitting on the pilot’s seat, Schofield pulled that seat’s ejection lever.

The flight seat shot out of the Beriev—with Schofield, Ivanov and Bertie on it—blasting through the ring of enemy commandos surrounding the plane!

The seat flew—on its side—a foot above the ice plain, the world around it blurring with speed, the force of its screamingly-fast lateral flight pushing Schofield and Ivanov down into it.

After about forty yards of this kind of flight, the speeding pilot’s seat hit the ground where it bounced twice like a skimming stone before shooting clear off the lip of the ice floe and out over the watery alleyway—out over the stunned faces of Mother and the others still in the two assault boats.

Having cleared the lip, the flight seat arced downward and speared into the freezing water of the lead, entering it with an almighty splash.

‘What was that?’ Chad asked, astonished.

‘That was the Scarecrow,’ Mother said, shoving the Kid out of the driver’s saddle, taking the controls and gunning the engine. ‘Hang on, people! We gotta grab him!’

 

 

Underwater silence.

As the flight seat shot under the water’s surface, Scarecrow and Ivanov separated, floating apart in the ice-blue haze. Bertie’s flotation balloons activated immediately on contact with the water and Schofield saw the little robot rise up and away to the surface.

Scarecrow felt the sting of the water against his face, the only part of his body not covered by his drysuit. It was outrageously cold, like daggers of ice.

The impact with the water had flipped his reflective glasses onto his forehead, and as he hovered there in the clear blue water of the Arctic, he was enveloped by eerie silence.

But not total silence. An odd thrumming could be heard.

It was then that Schofield realised that he was not alone.

There was something in front of him.

Something impossibly huge, black and enormous, hovering there in the void like a leviathan of the deep. Only it wasn’t an animal of any sort. It was man-made, mechanical.

It was a submarine.

A screaming sense of déjà vu overcame Schofield.

This had happened to him once before, during that mission in Antarctica, when he had come face-to-face with a French nuclear ballistic missile submarine. On that occasion, he had managed to destroy the submarine in question. It was one of the events that had made him a marked man by the French.

No. It couldn’t possibly be French—

And then Schofield saw the markings on the sub’s dome-shaped bow, saw the distinct blue-white-and-red flag painted on it.

Yes, it could. This submarine was French.

In the meta-time in which the brain operates, Schofield’s mind rapidly connected some dots.

The wristguard’s proximity sensor had picked up this submarine only minutes ago—which meant the sensor might not have been broken earlier in their trip and may actually have picked up the same submarine back then—the sub had followed them here—which meant it was a good guess that the sub wasn’t part of what was happening at Dragon Island—indeed, it was a better guess that this sub, this French sub which appeared to be following his team, probably had no idea at all what was going on at Dragon.

This French submarine, he realised with a shock, was up in the Arctic trying to find him.

Gazing at the gigantic submarine, Schofield suddenly noticed that there were three smaller submersibles mounted on its back, compact Swimmer Delivery Vehicles—similar to his AFDVs but smaller—carrying three frogmen apiece and which were at that very moment lifting off from the sub and coming toward Schofield.

It was an assassination squad.

A French hit team, coming for him, and yet totally unaware that they’d walked into a far more deadly firestorm.

Schofield swam for the surface.

Schofield burst up from the icy water and found himself treading water beside Ivanov and Bertie—the little robot was floating happily thanks to his flotation balloons, his fat tyres propelling him slowly but valiantly toward Schofield.

‘Captain Schofield, do you require assistance? My buoyancy features can keep you afloat till our colleagues arrive.’

Just then, like a shark rising from the depths, the first French SDV breached the surface ten yards from Scarecrow, Ivanov and Bertie.

One frogman drove while two more held short-barrelled FA-MAS assault rifles, raised and ready to fire—

With a roar, something slammed into the first French SDV, sending all three of the frogmen on it flying into the water.

It was Mother’s assault boat and it crunched over the top of the smaller French submersible, breaking it clean in two, before Mother swung her AFDV to a perfect halt beside Schofield.

‘Haul them out!’ she yelled to the Kid, Emma and Zack in the rear tray.

Schofield scooped up Bertie while the Kid and the two civilians grabbed him and within seconds he and the robot were in the boat. A moment later, Ivanov was, too.

‘Go, go!’ Schofield yelled. ‘This place is about to get really crowded and this might be our one and only chance to get out of here in one piece!’

That was the understatement of the year.

For in the next moment, several things happened at once:

First, the other two French submersibles surfaced, revealing more armed frogmen on their backs.

But then a Cobra thundered by overhead from the direction of the crashed Beriev, rotors thumping, minigun blazing, strafing the world. The skinny attack chopper’s wave of bullet-impacts traced a line across the water’s surface—a line that cut right across one of the newly-surfaced French submersibles, ripping the three frogmen on it to shreds.

That first Cobra was quickly followed by the second AH-1, which swooped into a deadly hover low over the water, right in front of Mother’s boat! It pivoted in the air, levelling its minigun at them.

‘Fuck me . . .’ Mother breathed.

The only weapon they had that possessed anywhere near enough firepower to threaten the Cobra was the grenade launcher on Mother’s G36 which right now lay at her feet, out of reach, and—

Schofield didn’t stop to think about it.

He quickly snatched up Bertie, held the little robot in front of him and instead of pulling a trigger—because Bertie didn’t have one—yelled: ‘Bertie! Fire! Fire! Fire!’

Bertie’s M249 came to stunning life.

Each shot emitted a deep puncture-like whump—whump!-whump!-whump!—yet the recoil was largely contained by Bertie’s internal compensator. The shots hit their mark. They erupted all over the Cobra’s body: cracking its canopy, slamming into its engine housing where they ruptured something, causing a thick plume of black smoke to stream out from the Cobra’s exhaust and the chopper banked wildly away, wounded but not defeated.

Mother yelled, ‘Scarecrow! What now! Which way do we go?’

That was the question, Schofield thought. In the cacophony of clattering gunfire, booming robots and thumping choppers, he tried to think clearly.

We need to talk to this Russian guy, get some intel and make a decent plan. We don’t have much time but—he recalled the old military maxim—a good plan with less time is better than a bad plan with more time. Maybe we can double back north, regroup a little, and then head for Dragon—

He turned to face the intersection that led back north when a monstrous whooshing noise filled the air and, right in his path, the giant black hull of the French submarine exploded up out of the water, breaching the surface spectacularly.

The bulbous nose of the sub rose a full thirty feet into the air before it slammed back down onto the surface with a colossal splash that sent huge waves rolling out in every direction, causing Schofield’s two low-slung boats to rock wildly.

Schofield’s face fell.

It was completely blocking their path. They couldn’t go north.

Then, with a deafening roar, the V-22 Osprey shoomed overhead, cutting a beeline for the massive French submarine.

It’s going for the more dangerous prey first, Schofield realised. Once it takes out the sub, it can come after us at its leisure.

With its rotors tilted upwards, the Osprey did a low banking pass over the sub, in the process dropping two Mark 46 Mod 5A anti-submarine torpedoes from its wing-mounts.

The torpedoes hit the water with twin splashes and immediately zeroed in on the submarine. The Mark 46 is a fine torpedo: reliable, accurate and deadly. Fired from this range, the French sub would have no time to launch any countermeasures and the Mark 46s wouldn’t miss.

Sure enough, a few seconds later, they hit.

It sounded like the end of the universe: two terrific and immense explosions.

The massive French submarine was almost lifted completely out of the water by the blast. A geyser of whitewater sprayed a hundred feet into the air and rained down on the entire area. As the sub bucked skyward, its midsection cracked and folded, wrenched open like a beer can, and as the great sub lunged back down into the foaming water—fatally wounded, its innards literally ripped open—it immediately began to sink.

The rain of spray fell on Schofield’s thunderstruck face.

The scene before him simply defied belief:

The French submarine—smoking and flaming, its bow tilting unnaturally upwards—was sinking. Cries and shouts rang out from inside it. And all the while the Osprey hovered over it, pummelling it with relentless gunfire, taking down the sailors who now scrambled out of the conning tower, fleeing one form of death only to step into the line of fire of another.

Then there were the two Cobra attack choppers: the wounded, smoking one had backed off a little but the unhurt one was hovering low over the ice-walled intersection, nailing the three frogmen on the third and last French submersible, strafing their defenceless bodies with minigun fire, flinging them into the water, turning the hapless frogmen—killers who had walked into a much bigger fire-fight—into convulsing fountains of bloody pulp.

‘Captain!’ a voice called from behind Schofield. ‘Captain!’

Schofield turned.

It was the Russian, Ivanov.

‘We can go south from here without having to land on Dragon Island! There are a couple of small islets near the main island we can land on, if only briefly!’

‘Good enough for me.’ Schofield turned. ‘Mother—!’

He stopped short.

He saw the wounded Cobra chopper pivoting in the air a short distance away, turning its brutal minigun on the last three French frogmen in the water—the frogmen from the submersible that Mother had run over as it had approached Schofield; only now they were treading water, totally exposed, at the mercy of the smoking Cobra.

And something inside Schofield clicked.

Whoever was flying these Cobras and the Osprey were cold bastards, and even if these French assholes had been coming to kill him, they didn’t deserve to be shot like fish in a barrel. And in the back of his mind he thought that these French troops, if rescued, might even be of some help . . .

And so Schofield scooped up Mother’s G36, shucked its underslung grenade launcher and jammed down on the trigger.

A zinc-tipped anti-tank grenade zoomed out from the launcher and, trailing a dead-straight smoke tail behind it, rocketed inside the Cobra’s already-smoking exhaust and detonated.

The Cobra exploded.

It simply burst outward in a flaming fireball, spraying fragments of metal before it just dropped out of the sky and splashed into the icy Arctic water in front of the stunned French frogmen.

Mother called, ‘Oh, yeah, now you like those optional extras, don’t you!’

‘Quiet, you!’ He turned to face Mario and Chad in the other AFDV. ‘Mario! Chad! Get over here! Help us pick up these frogmen, then let’s get the hell out of here!’

‘What are you—?’ Mother frowned but Schofield just yelled, ‘Do it!’

The two American speedboats came to fast halts beside the three stunned frogmen. They were quickly yanked out of the water: two went into the rear tray of Mario and Chad’s boat while the third, a big fellow, dropped into Schofield’s rear tray, his wetsuit dripping.

‘Bonjour,’ Schofield said. ‘Welcome to our nightmare. Mother! South, now! Zack!’

The bespectacled geek looked up, alarmed, clearly not expecting to be called upon. Schofield pointed at the wristguard on Zack’s left forearm.

‘You’re gonna be our guide! Use the satellite imaging! Get us through this maze to the islets north of Dragon!’

Zack looked down at his wristguard: its display now showed a zoomed-out image of the labyrinth of ice-walled leads in which they found themselves.

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. And you’ll have to get it exactly right or we all die,’ Schofield said, taking the handlebars from Mother and handing back her G36. ‘You guide, I’ll drive, Mother will shoot. Let’s do it!’

He gunned the thrusters and the AFDV leapt off the mark, kicking up a tail of spray as it peeled out, closely followed by the second American assault boat.

They sped south, leaving the sinking French submarine behind them, and headed in the direction of Dragon Island.

 

 

It was a whole lot quieter back at Schofield’s old camp.

Jeff Hartigan was in his tent revising some of his test notes when he heard the distant sound of an aircraft.

He stepped out of his dome-shaped tent and peered south.

A lone plane appeared above the horizon, approaching.

For a brief moment, Hartigan felt a stab of fear—and wondered if perhaps he’d made a mistake staying at the camp alone—but then the aircraft came closer and he saw that it was an American V-22 Osprey with ‘MARINES’ painted in large black letters on the side.

He relaxed. He’d been right and Schofield had been wrong. The Pentagon had found some Marines stationed somewhere nearby to come and get them.

Hartigan started waving. The Osprey brought itself into a hover and landed near the camp.

Smiling, he went out to meet it.

 

 

Schofield’s two AFDVs shot like bullets through the narrow ice-walled leads.

Guided by Zack, Schofield swung the first low-slung inflatable speedboat left and right—dodging pancake-shaped ice floes and sweeping around corners—trying to put as much distance as possible between them and the Cobra and the Osprey, before the two deadly aircraft finished off the French submarine and came after them.

They’d come a good way south, maybe ten miles, since they’d seen the French sub get torpedoed by the Osprey.

Mother sat behind Schofield, eyes searching the sky, G36 at the ready. In the rear tray sat Emma, the Kid, Ivanov and the big French frogman, who still looked hopelessly confused.

‘Take the next left!’ Zack yelled over the wind. ‘Then immediately go right!’

Schofield did so.

As he did, he glimpsed something up ahead between the walls of the lead.

Dragon Island.

The huge island looked completely out of place in the Arctic landscape. While the frozen sea around it was all white, flat and level, Dragon was dark, massive and jagged, a spiking upthrust of black rock that at some point in time millions of years ago had burst up through the pack ice and stayed. With its high snow-covered peaks and sheer cliffs looming over the ocean, it looked like an imposing natural citadel.

Schofield saw a light on one of the clifftops: the uppermost window of a watchtower or lighthouse; it seemed impossibly tiny compared to the scale of the island on which it stood.

In the foreground in front of the island, however, just as Ivanov had said, were a few small islets, low mounds of earth that rose above the ice field. They were covered in snow and mud and various oddly-shaped buildings.

‘Nice work, Zack,’ Schofield said when he saw them. ‘You got us here.’

‘Don’t stop at the first islet! It’s contaminated!’ Ivanov said, coming alongside Schofield. ‘Go to the second one. Are these boats submersible?’

‘Yes, why?’ Schofield was surprised that Ivanov might suspect that. The full capabilities of these AFDVs were classified.

‘The second islet has a small loading dock that is accessible only by submersible,’ Ivanov said. ‘We might be able to land there unseen.’

Schofield frowned. ‘Who builds a loading dock that’s only accessible by submersible?’

‘It wasn’t built that way,’ Ivanov said. ‘The dock was intentionally destroyed, because of an . . . accident . . . there.’

‘An acci—’

A line of minigun rounds cut across their path, ripping up the water in front of their boats and the remaining Cobra roared past overhead.

‘They found us!’ the Kid yelled.

‘Mother!’ Schofield called. ‘Go cyclic!’

‘On it!’ Mother raised her G36 and returned fire on full auto as they sped down the ice-walled alleyway toward the islets.

She fired hard but her bullets pinged off the Cobra’s armoured flanks. She tried firing her grenade launcher as Schofield had done before, but this Cobra’s pilot was ready for that: he released a showering spray of firecracker-like chaff and Mother’s grenades—confused into thinking that they had hit something solid—exploded too early and the Cobra remained unharmed.

It rained fire down on the fleeing, banking speedboats.

Schofield swung left and right, trying to put the ice walls between him and the chopper. He swept around a corner just as it was torn apart by minigun fire.

‘Kid!’ he yelled. ‘Keep an eye out for the Osprey! They probably split up to search for us and that Cobra will have told him where we are by now—’

With a deafening boom, the Osprey arrived, roaring low above them, its two six-barrelled Vulcan cannons blazing.

Chunks of ice and fountains of water kicked up all around the two speedboats as they shot behind another corner.

‘Goddamn it!’ Mother was still firing her G36 for all she was worth. The Kid joined her, firing with his much smaller MP-7. Even working together, they were nothing near a match for the firepower of the Osprey and the Cobra.

Schofield looked ahead: they were still about a mile away from the first—contaminated—islet.

Too far. They’d be dead in a quarter of a mile.

‘Scarecrow . . . !’ Mother yelled urgently.

‘I know!’ They were out of time and he knew it.

Unless . . .

‘Mario! Deflate skirts and prepare to submerge! Mother! I need one minute!’

‘I can give you maybe thirty seconds, honey buns!’

‘Give me whatever you can!’

He started flicking switches as Mother ejected one C-Mag and inserted another and prepared to fire again.

The Osprey swung around behind them. The Cobra dropped into the long alleyway in front of them, guns up, rotor blades blurring, cutting them off.

Shit! Schofield’s mind screamed. Caught in the middle.

Mother saw it, too. ‘Game over, dudes . . .’

‘Mais non,’ a gruff voice said from behind her, followed by a loud shuck-shuck.

Both Mother and Schofield turned to see the big French frogman—in fact, he was huge, easily six-feet-four—heft an absolutely gigantic gun that had been slung across his back, a gun that was nearly eight times heavier than Mother’s G36. It was a Russian-made 6P49 Kord, a brutish belt-fed heavy machine gun that was usually mounted on a tank turret and which fired 12.7mm ammunition. This Kord had been adapted for individual use and hung from two straps over the Frenchman’s impressively broad shoulders.

The burly frogman ripped off his scuba hood, revealing a wild tangle of brown hair and an equally wild beard that reached down to his collarbone. He hoisted the Kord into a firing position and let fucking rip.

A blazing three-foot-long tongue of fire roared out from the big gun’s muzzle, releasing an unimaginable torrent of heavy-bore bullets at the Cobra.

The chopper’s armoured flanks and windshield might have been able to resist Mother’s G36 fire but they were no match for the Kord.

The Frenchman’s bullets literally chewed up the helicopter.

Its windshield collapsed in a shower of spraying glass that quickly became intermixed with blood as the pilot behind it was chewed up, too. Then the chopper’s engine was hit and it flashed for a moment before the whole thing exploded under the awesome barrage of fire.

The chopper dropped into the water, a broken shell of an aircraft. Even the Osprey peeled away when the Frenchman turned his monstrous gun on it.

Schofield spun to see the big-bearded French frogman release his trigger with a satisfied grunt of ‘Hmph.’ He nodded to Schofield, ‘Allez! Go!’

Mother just stared at the Frenchman, stunned. She looked down at her G36 as if it were a peashooter.

As for Schofield, he didn’t need to be told twice.

He flicked more switches. ‘Mario! You ready? Let’s do this before that Osprey comes back!’

‘Ready for dive, sir,’ came Mario’s voice in his earpiece.

Schofield turned to the passengers on his boat. ‘Mother, open the regulator panel. Everybody, grab a mouthpiece, loop your wrists through a wrist cord, and slot your feet in the stirrups on the deck so you don’t float away. Zack, make sure Bertie doesn’t float or sink or whatever.’

Mother opened a small panel under the boat’s central saddle, revealing eight scuba regulators attached by hoses to a single compressed-air tank. Some extendable rubber cords with loops on their ends also popped out.

Schofield said, ‘Okay, Mario, follow me.’

As everyone scrambled for the regulators and wrist cords, Schofield deflated the AFDV’s outer rubber skirt, transforming the sleek black assault boat into a sleek black submersible. He threw his glasses into a pouch on his belt and reached for a scuba mask under the saddle and slipped it over his eyes. He then jammed a regulator into his mouth.

A moment later, their ‘boat’ slid under the surface and disappeared beneath the pack ice. Beside it, Mario’s AFDV—with Chad and the other two Frenchmen on it—did the same.

Ten seconds later, the Osprey came back for another pass, all guns blazing, but it hit nothing for by then the two Marine Corps assault boats were gone.

 

 

The two submersibles glided through the eerie underwater world of the Arctic.

It was a ghostly world of pale blue water and the white undersides of the pack ice. Everyone clung to the AFDVs by virtue of the wrist cords and foot stirrups.

As the two submersibles moved further through the haze, the ocean floor gradually rose up to meet them.

They’d reached the first islet.

Wearing a scuba mask and breathing through a regulator, Ivanov pointed to the right. Schofield skirted the edge of the islet, following its shoreline while still staying under the sea ice. A few minutes later, the two submersibles crossed another short channel, after which they saw the ocean floor rise up again to meet the pack ice: they’d come to the second islet.

Ivanov directed Schofield around the base of this islet until they arrived at a square concrete-walled entrance about the width of a train tunnel boring into the rocky landmass.

It was the loading dock Ivanov had mentioned.

Large chunks of broken concrete formed an ungainly roof above the entrance; bent and broken iron rebars protruded from it. At some time in the past, presumably during the ‘accident’ Ivanov had mentioned, the dock’s roof had caved in, blocking access to boats, but there was still room for a submersible to gain entry.

Beyond the tangle of concrete, there was only darkness.

Schofield hit the lights and two sharp beams lanced out into the murky tunnel.

Followed by Mario’s submersible, he carefully guided his Assault Force Delivery Vehicle into it.

About thirty yards in, he saw the surface. The water was so calm, it looked like a rectangular pane of glass.

Schofield signalled to Mother and the big French frogman to ready their weapons. They did so. Then Schofield brought their AFDV upward and broke the surface.

The AFDV breached inside a small concrete dock, its harsh white lights illuminating the space.

Schofield removed his mask. Shocking images greeted him.

Bloody smears on the concrete walls.

Cracked glass also stained with blood.

The half-eaten skeleton of what appeared to have once been a polar bear.

And the smell. Jesus. It smelt like an abattoir: a nauseating mix of blood and flesh.

A thick reinforced glass door with an illuminated keypad lock led further into the islet’s structure. Mercifully, the door was intact, but its other, inner, side looked like someone had thrown a bucket-load of blood onto it. Its wire-framed glass was etched with many deep animal scratch-marks.

‘What the hell is this place?’ Schofield stepped cautiously off the AFDV onto the concrete dock. Before anyone could answer him, something rushed at him from the shadows.

It was huge and white and it moved with shocking speed, launching itself at Schofield with a roar.

Scarecrow had no time at all to react. He spun to see a blur of bared jaws, shaggy white fur and outstretched claws—

A burst of gunfire echoed in the close confines of the dock and the thing’s head snapped backwards, hit by a volley of tightly clustered rounds.

A second burst followed and the polar bear’s chest—for indeed it was a polar bear, though unlike any polar bear Schofield had seen—was ripped open, hit in the heart, and it toppled to the floor, dead.

Holy fucking shit . . .

Schofield turned to see who had saved him, expecting to see Mother or the big French frogman holding a gun.

But it hadn’t been either of them.

It had been one of the other two French frogmen. Indeed, this time it had been the smallest of the three French troops. He held a smoking Steyr TMP machine pistol—an Austrian-made weapon that looked like a teched-up Uzi—in a perfect firing position.

Then the frogman turned and aimed the TMP at Schofield. As he did so, Schofield glimpsed the assassin’s right wrist. Tattooed onto it were a series of tally marks: thirteen of them.

This was Renard.

The assassin from France’s external intelligence agency, the DGSE, who had requested to kill Shane Schofield.

Gun extended, the frogman yanked back his scuba hood . . . to reveal that he wasn’t a man at all.

A dark-haired woman stared at Schofield with deadly eyes.

‘’Allo, Captain Schofield,’ she said evenly, her French accent strong. ‘My name is Veronique Champion of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. Call-sign: Renard. As you are probably aware, I am here to kill you, but before I do, would you be so kind as to tell me what on Earth is going on here?’

 

 

Schofield stared down the barrel of Veronique Champion’s Steyr.

His team stood behind him—Mother, the Kid and Mario, plus the three civilians, Zack, Emma and Chad.

Champion’s two French companions stood behind her, their weapons raised. The big one’s Kord looked like a Howitzer in the tight confined space.

And off to the side stood the Russian, Vasily Ivanov.

An uneasy stand-off.

Champion—Renard—stared intently at Schofield, evaluating him. She was tall, as tall as he was, and in other circumstances, she would have been striking: she had an athletic figure, slender and lithe, a short bob of black hair pulled back off her angular face, flawless pale skin and eyes that were as black as pitch and which did not waver.

As far as weapons were concerned, in addition to the state-of-the-art Steyr, she wore a weapons belt with various smoke and stun grenades on it, a couple of five-minute scuba breathing bottles the size of energy drink cans, two knives, a silver SIG Sauer P226 pistol and in a small holster across her chest, a Ruger LCP, a pocket pistol of last resort.

Schofield cocked his head to one side.

‘Veronique Champion?’ he said.

‘You recognise the name?’

‘I once encountered a French scientist named Luc Champion at an ice station in Antarctica,’ he said carefully.

The woman did not blink. ‘I am aware of this.’

‘Luc Champion was related to you? Your brother?’

‘My cousin. I had known him since childhood.’

In his mind’s eye, Schofield could see Luc Champion as if it were yesterday: he had been the French scientist from Dumont d’Urville Station who had led a team of disguised French paratroopers into Wilkes Ice Station to kill everyone there.

‘He was a civilian, a scientist—’ Veronique Champion said.

‘—who intended to kill all the civilian American scientists at that station so that he could be the first man to study an alien spaceship which turned out not to be an alien spaceship,’ Schofield hit back.

Champion’s face went cold. ‘Did you kill him yourself?’

‘He was complicit in a murderous plan—’

‘Did you kill him?’

‘No. Barnaby had him killed.’ In the face of an overwhelming incoming force of British SAS troops, Schofield had fled Wilkes Ice Station with his people on some hovercrafts. He’d left Luc Champion behind, handcuffed to a pole. The SAS commander, Trevor Barnaby, had had Champion shot in the head. They’d found the body later.

Veronique Champion still had her gun pointed at Schofield.

Her dark eyes scanned him closely—for a long, tense moment—before abruptly she tilted her head, frowning in genuine confusion, and Schofield realised why.

She’d been searching for a lie but hadn’t found one. This had surprised her and Schofield imagined she wasn’t used to being surprised. She had come to kill a killer but had instead found—

‘Captain Schofield. As you are no doubt aware, the Republic of France wants you dead. For what you did at Wilkes Ice Station and for other actions elsewhere, including the destruction of the aircraft carrier, Richelieu. I also want you dead, for my own reasons. Yet a short while ago, you plucked me and my men from hostile waters knowing that we had been sent to kill you. Why would you do this?’

Schofield said simply, ‘I’m facing an almost impossible task here, something much bigger than your country’s vendetta against me. I figured if I rescued you and you were someone who would stop and listen for a moment, you might help me on my mission. You just lost an entire submarine and I need as many soldiers as I can get. I took the risk that you might hear me out.’

Champion didn’t move.

Her gun stayed level.

Then, very slowly, she lowered it.

‘All right, Captain. I’m listening . . . for now. But know this: if we choose to help you and we emerge from this alive, the old score must be settled.’ She waved at her men. ‘This is Master Sergeant Huguenot and Sergeant Dubois. Now, tell us what is going on.’

Schofield quickly told Champion and her men what he knew about the situation at Dragon Island, the Army of Thieves, and the atmospheric weapon they had initiated. It was, he added, the Army of Thieves that had destroyed her submarine when the French had inadvertently intruded upon their skirmish.

Schofield took the wristguard from Zack and used it to show Champion the video clip of the leader of the Army of Thieves addressing the Russian President. While he did this, Mother sidled up to the big French commando.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘’Allo.’

‘Nice gun. A Kord.’

‘Merci beaucoup,’ he said with a quick nod. He glanced at her rifle. ‘G36. A fine weapon, too.’

Mother extended her hand. ‘Gunnery Sergeant Gena Newman, USMC, but everyone calls me Mother.’

‘I am Master Sergeant Jean-Claude François Michel Huguenot, on secondment to the DGSE from the First Parachute Regiment. I am known as Le Barbarian.’

With his shaggy hair and beard, Mother could see why. ‘Barbarian. Nice.’

‘Trust me, it is a title well earned. I eat like a bear, drink like a Viking, kill like a lion and make love like a silverback gorilla! Bah! My friends call me Baba and I have just decided that you, Gunnery Sergeant Mother Newman, with your impressive G36, may call me Baba.’

Mother eyed him sideways. Who was this guy? With his big physique, big gun, big hair, big beard and big mouth, he was—

‘Oh, God. You’re my mirror,’ she said aloud.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

Fortunately, at that moment she heard the French woman mention the Army of Thieves and she and Baba joined that conversation.

‘The Army of Thieves . . .’ Veronique Champion said, having just finished watching the mpeg of its leader addressing the Russian President.

‘You’ve heard of them?’ Schofield said.

‘The tracking of terrorist organisations is not the primary occupation of my division within the DGSE but, yes, I have been to briefings in recent months where this organisation has been mentioned.’

‘And?’

Champion said, ‘DGSE has been monitoring a series of incidents perpetrated by this group over the last year, one incident per month, in accordance with a crude pattern. The CIA and the DIA know all this.’

‘We were sent this summary.’ Schofield showed Champion the DIA report by the agent named Retter on the wristguard’s screen. She scanned it quickly.

‘I have seen a similar report.’

‘So who are they and why are they doing this?’

‘Who are they?’ Champion shrugged. ‘A new terrorist group? A franchise of al-Qaeda? A renegade army with no allegiance to any nation? No-one knows.’

‘What about their leader? The guy who taunted the Russian President? Any idea who he is?’

‘The man who leads them is unknown to us. In the few pieces of CCTV footage that exist of the Army’s actions, he always wears large sunglasses plus a hood or helmet of some sort to conceal his identity. But he makes no effort to hide the acid scars on the left side of his face: the DGSE searched every military database we have for soldiers or specialists with such a distinctive facial feature but found nothing.

‘Having said that, some of his lieutenants have also been caught on closed-circuit cameras during those incidents and some of them are known. I recall that his right-hand man, for instance, is an ex-Chilean torturer named Typhoon or Typhon or something like that.’

Champion paused, thinking.

‘By all appearances, the Army of Thieves is an army of rogue soldiers led by a small cadre of very capable veterans. Its members are volatile but they are no rabble. On the contrary, it is a very effective and disciplined fighting force. It has successfully attacked Russian military vessels and United States Marine Corps bases.’

‘But what do they want?’ Schofield asked. ‘Groups like this always want something: recognition of a new state, the freeing of prisoners, the removal of American troops from their land. In that video clip, their leader told the Russian President that his Army was an alliance of the angry and enraged, the disenfranchised and the poor, the “dog starved at his master’s gate”. That last phrase, by the way, is a quote from William Blake, from a poem called Auguries of Innocence.’

‘Nice poetry reference, boss,’ Mother whispered. ‘Classy.’

‘Is he some kind of demented Robin Hood?’ Schofield said. ‘Bringing down rich nations on behalf of poor ones?’

‘I do not know,’ Champion said. ‘We do not know.’

Schofield bit his lip in thought. ‘The first breakout in Chile released approximately one hundred prisoners. The second in the Sudan released another hundred or so. Add to that an inner sanctum of commanders and we’re looking at two hundred, perhaps two hundred and twenty men.’

‘And only ten of us,’ Mario said sadly. ‘Good fucking luck . . .’

‘Hey, I count for ten,’ Mother said.

‘And I, twenty,’ Baba said.

‘Ironbark’s team said they encountered a hundred men waiting for them at that submarine dock,’ Mario said despairingly. ‘Look at what happened to them, and they were SEALs!’

Schofield checked his watch.

It was 9:35 a.m.

‘We still have an hour and twenty-five minutes.’

Mario stood up. ‘Are you listening? Even if we had fifty fully trained men, we couldn’t storm that island in a week! Look at us: stuck in a stinking hole with nowhere to go. If they decide to send anyone in after us, we’re screwed. This has officially become a suicide mission.’

Schofield gave Mario a long hard look but said nothing, because in all honesty, the young Marine was right.

 

 

While Schofield and the others were assessing their situation in the dock, the V-22 Osprey that had attacked them flew south to Dragon Island.

The gunship soared over the three little islets to the north of Dragon before rising swiftly to clear the cliffs of the island’s northern coast, cliffs that formed a U-shaped bay around the closest islet. The winter pack ice had melted substantially here and the bay was unfrozen, dotted here and there with ice floes the size of cars.

The Osprey swept up and over an old cable car terminal that connected the closest islet to Dragon Island. Upon clearing the terminal, an astonishing view met the plane’s pilot, the man known as Hammerhead.

Off to his left were the two colossal vents, belching the shimmering TEB mixture into the sky. At some time during the morning, some wag had spray-painted a huge A-in-a-circle on the flank of one of them—the mark of the Army of Thieves—as a kind of ‘fuck you’ to the various reconnaissance satellites that, no doubt, would now be watching the island.

Directly in front of the Osprey was the main tower, the huge three-storey disc-shaped structure mounted atop a single two-hundred-foot-high concrete pillar. The whole structure was nestled in a circular concrete pit and access to it could be obtained only via one of two crane-operated bridges on either side of the pit. From each crane’s long extended arm hung a bridge that could be lowered to span the gap between the rim and the disc.

On top of the disc itself was a helipad, the two tall spires, and the large glass dome that enclosed the complex’s command centre.

From the base of the great pillar to the tip of the highest antenna on top of the taller spire, the whole structure was at least four hundred feet tall and it dwarfed the approaching Osprey; it also made the many men stationed at the base’s various guardhouses and watchtowers, the members of the Army of Thieves, look like ants.

Hammerhead brought the Osprey into a hover above the helipad, landed softly and with his four-man crew behind him, marched into the command centre.

Hammerhead and his crew stood before their leader.

The clear glass dome that covered the command centre was easily seventy feet across. Beneath it lay several levels of consoles, computers and communications desks, all surrounding a raised platform from which a commander could look out over Dragon Island in every direction.

Seated in the command chair was the leader of the Army of Thieves.

He no longer wore his gaudy Elvis sunglasses. Instead, his eyes were visible for all to see. They were quite unnerving: pale grey eyes that rarely blinked. The discoloured acid-melted skin on his left cheek and throat was also clearly visible, as were the many guns in the many holsters he wore on his thighs, under his shoulders and on his back. A series of small tattoos ran in an ordered line down his neck: among them an image of a Russian cargo ship, a crude ‘USMC’, and an apartment building with ‘Moskva’ written over it.

To his men, he had no name other than ‘the Lord of Anarchy, General of the Army of Thieves’. They addressed him as ‘my Lord’, ‘Lord’, or ‘sir’.

He was Caucasian but had deeply tanned skin. Where he hailed from, no-one knew.

He spoke English with an American accent but then he was also fluent in Russian, Spanish and Farsi.

All anyone in the Army of Thieves knew for sure was that they had all been recruited by him at some time or another. None knew how his inner circle had come together: the Lord of Anarchy and his tight gang of five men who had known each other before they formed the Army—the four senior officers with shark nicknames: Hammerhead, Thresher, White Tip and Mako; and of course Typhon.

Naturally, there were rumours among the men: some said they were ex–Turkish Army officers who had tried to join al-Qaeda but had been turned away because they were too aggressive; others claimed they were a mix of ex-Chilean and ex-Egyptian torturers who had performed enhanced interrogation on terrorist suspects on behalf of the United States; others still claimed they were American mercenaries who just loved the sight of blood.

Beside the Lord of Anarchy stood his XO, Colonel Typhon. Named after the most feared creature in Greek mythology—of immense size, it had fiery eyes and even the gods quailed before it—he was an exceedingly tall, blank-eyed killer whom the men feared greatly.

Upon acceptance into the Army’s ranks, every member of the Army of Thieves met Typhon.

It was he who bestowed the insignia of promotion—a red-hot branding iron to the skin of the forearm which was then infused with tattooist’s ink, creating raised chevrons on the skin. Your rank in the Army was not stitched onto your sleeve, it was seared onto your very skin.

It was also Typhon who performed the initiation ceremony—a drug-hazed beating of horrific proportions while you viewed four television screens at once, screens that bombarded you with clips of gore and grotesquery, snuff killings and beheadings, rape and bestiality, drowning and torture.

The men obeyed the Lord of Anarchy because he was their leader. They obeyed Typhon out of pure terror.

‘Report,’ the Lord of Anarchy said.

‘My Lord,’ Hammerhead said, ‘we found the wreckage of Ivanov’s plane. By the time we arrived, the American testing team was there. We engaged them but then a French submarine surfaced nearby.’

The Lord of Anarchy raised an eyebrow. ‘A French submarine? Go on.’

‘The sub did not appear to be acting in concert with the Americans but we torpedoed it anyway. While we were engaged with the sub, the American team knocked out one of our Cobras and then fled in their assault boats. My second Cobra reacquired them a short while later not far from the islets near here, but the Americans brought down that chopper as well and by the time I got there, they were gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Their boats, they must have been a new type of subskimmer, sir.’

‘They are a testing team, Captain. I fear, however, that you have neglected something in your report.’

Hammerhead froze, confused. ‘Wh . . . what was that, sir?’

‘How you failed in your mission. You were ordered to go out and kill the Americans. You did not. Ergo, you failed.’

‘They put up a hell of a figh—’

‘I cannot tolerate failure, Captain. Not during this mission. This army expects only one thing: that each of its members performs his duties to the letter. You have not done this, thus you endanger us all. Who is your immediate junior officer?’

Hammerhead nodded to the younger man beside him. ‘Flight Lieutenant Santos, sir. From Chile.’

The Lord of Anarchy turned his gaze upon the younger man, looked him quickly up and down. Then he turned to Typhon and nodded.

The dead-eyed XO pulled a gleaming meat cleaver from behind his back and placed it on a table in front of Hammerhead and the young lieutenant.

The Lord of Anarchy said, ‘Lieutenant Santos, I need to teach your captain a lesson, one that he will not soon forget. Now, I could punish him, but in my experience I have found that the only truly effective way to motivate someone—or, for that matter, to extract information from an enemy—is to hurt someone close to them or in their charge. So, if you would be so kind, Lieutenant Santos, would you cut off your own left hand, please.’

A few of the communications operators who had been surreptitiously watching this exchange looked up suddenly.

Santos’s eyes went wide. He threw a look at Hammerhead, but his captain just stared resolutely forward, not meeting his eye.

The Lord of Anarchy waited patiently. He said nothing.

Then, to all the spectators’ surprise, the young lieutenant stepped forward and picked up the steel-bladed cleaver.

Many of them had heard about this sort of thing before, but none of them had ever seen it: tales of the Lord of Anarchy ordering disobedient or disgraced members of the Army to hack off parts of their own body. Fingers, toes, and in one famous case—according to rumour—the Lord had ordered a man who had raped an African nun to sever his own penis . . . and the man had done it.

How he could make this happen, no-one knew. Those members from African and South American countries called it black magic or voodoo, while those from Western nations suspected it was some kind of subliminal process that had been implanted into their minds during the sadistic initiation ceremony. Whatever it was, it made an impact. It ensured total obedience.

As the audience watched, Santos tested the weight of the cleaver in his right hand. Then he placed his left wrist flat on the wooden table.

And raised the cleaver.

The communications men held their breath . . .

The Osprey crew watched in horror . . .

Hammerhead kept staring forward . . .

The Lord of Anarchy gave away nothing . . .

Typhon smiled . . .

The meat cleaver came down hard and the lieutenant’s scream cut through the air.

The Lord of Anarchy turned to Hammerhead.

‘Do not fail me again, Captain. This Army is depending on you. Dismissed.’

As Hammerhead left with his remaining crew members, the Lord of Anarchy directed his personal guards to the now-kneeling figure of Santos. The young lieutenant clutched the bloody stump of his left arm to his body.

‘Put him to work in the gasworks beneath the main vents,’ the Lord of Anarchy said, ‘in a place where he can be seen by all the men. Let word of this spread.’

Santos was dragged away.

When he was gone, the Lord of Anarchy turned to his XO.

‘Colonel Typhon, how long till the uranium spheres are ready?’

‘One hour and twenty minutes, sir.’

‘This American testing team bothers me. While small, its members are worryingly determined. They might be more trouble than they appear.’

‘Mako is on his way back from their camp now. He found one person still there, a military contractor named Hartigan. Mako’s bringing him back now in the second Osprey.’

‘Take Mr Hartigan to the gasworks, too, and torture him. I want to know everything he knows about that test team. He may also provide some entertainment for the men later.’ The Lord of Anarchy nodded at his surveillance screens. ‘Where are they now?’

‘They’re on Bear Islet.’

‘Do we have visuals?’

‘Yes, sir. CCTV feed.’

‘Get stills of all of them and run the images through the military databases. In the meantime, send in Bad Willy and his boys, plus a few berserkers, from behind, and Thresher’s team from in front. We’ve come too far for some rogue group of wannabe heroes to stop us now. Squeeze them and kill them.’

 

BEAR ISLET LOADING DOCK 4 APRIL, 0940 HOURS 1 HOUR 20 MINUTES TO DEADLINE

In the dark concrete loading dock on Bear Islet, Zack Weinberg and Emma Dawson were checking the corpse of the polar bear that had come bursting out of the shadows upon their arrival. As always, Bertie trailed along behind Zack.

‘I’ve never seen a polar bear like this,’ Emma said. ‘Look at its coat: it’s shaggy and matted and filthy. Polar bears usually have short coats which they keep fastidiously clean.’

Zack winced at the sight of the dead bear. It was indeed filthy. It was also stained all over with its own blood from the gunshot wounds.

‘It’s smaller than other polar bears I’ve seen,’ he said.

‘Yes, it is.’ Emma stepped around the corpse, eyeing it analytically, scientifically. ‘I’d say it’s an adolescent, the bear equivalent of a teenager; moody, aggressive and impetuous.’

She gazed through the reinforced glass door that led into the islet’s laboratory structure. In there she saw a wide octagonal space with a sunken section in the middle. On the elevated walkways ringing that sunken section, four larger polar bears padded around, pacing. One of them came over to the glass door and peered through it at her and Zack.

‘Do you think this bear was living in this dock?’ Zack asked.

Emma shrugged. ‘It’s a good home for a polar bear. A fully enclosed cave with a single underwater entrance.’

‘But why would it be living apart from the others?’

‘Adolescent bears of all species—grizzlies, Kodiaks, polars—often overstep their bounds and fall foul of the older bears. I’d guess this bad boy crossed one of the older males and got chased out. He was living here in exile—’

Smack!

The large bear on the other side of the door punched the glass.

The door shuddered, but held.

Schofield turned at the noise, took in the bear on the other side of the door. ‘You guys okay over there?’

Zack and Emma nodded.

‘How about you, Chad?’ Schofield said.

The young executive was sitting with his back against the wall and his head bowed. He looked up, clearly shaken by their recent experiences, but nodded gamely.

Schofield glanced at the stalking bear. ‘I think it’s time we learned more about this place from Mr Ivanov.’

The group gathered around the Russian scientist.

‘All right, Mr Ivanov, or is it “Doctor” or maybe “Colonel”?’ Schofield asked.

‘It is “Doctor”.’

‘Okay, Dr Ivanov. We know the big picture stuff about Dragon Island, now I want the details from someone who knows them: I want to know everything about that island, from the layout to the atmospheric weapon and what we can do in the next eighty minutes to stop it going off.’

Ivanov shook his head. ‘Ostrov Zmey is a rock, a fortress. With enough men stationed at its watchtowers, it is very difficult to take by force.’

‘If it’s so impregnable, how could this group take it so easily?’ Mother asked.

Ivanov sighed. ‘I suspect they bribed one of the members of the skeleton team I was coming to replace. Specifically, a man named Dr Igor Kotsky. In the new Russia, we men of science are not well paid and I know Kotsky was in considerable debt. He could have been easily bought. We all could have been bought. When my relief plane arrived at Dragon, Kotsky was there at the hangar, waving us in, calling us over . . . into a waiting field of fire.’

‘Okay, then,’ Schofield said, ‘tell us about the weapon. We’ve been told we can disrupt its use by stealing or destroying some red uranium spheres or destroying the missiles that will fire them into the gas cloud. Is that correct?’

‘That is right,’ Ivanov said. ‘In theory, you could also disrupt the creation of the gas cloud itself, but it is far too late for that. If you destroyed the vents now, you might create a gap in the gas cloud, but any gap you created would not be wide enough. The atmospheric flame, once ignited, is incredibly potent. It would be able to leap any such void. You would need a gap created by at least ninety minutes of zero gas production to create a large enough gap and that is not possible anymore.’

‘So it comes down to the spheres and the missiles?’

‘Yes.’

‘So where are these spheres kept?’

‘They are stored in a sealed laboratory atop the shorter of the two spires mounted upon the main tower. They are the reason for our enemy’s delay—due to their substantial potency, the red uranium spheres are kept at a temperature close to zero Kelvin, or −273 degrees Celsius. So they must be primed before use: priming involves reheating them to ambient temperature at a very precise incremental rate or else their molecular structure will break down and their ability to light the gas will be lost.’

‘How many of these spheres are there?’ Champion asked.

‘Well, there are six in that lab . . .’ Ivanov said, a little hesitantly. Schofield saw it.

‘Are there more spheres elsewhere on Dragon Island?’ he asked.

Ivanov grimaced. ‘There is a secret laboratory built directly underneath the main tower, beneath the great pillar. This laboratory is only accessible by a security-coded elevator and is equipped with a reheating unit of its own and one red uranium sphere. It is a fallback, a last retreat in the event of nuclear conflict, but . . .’

‘But what?’

‘But Kotsky does not know about it. Its existence is beyond his level of clearance. And if Kotsky does not know about it, then neither can this army.’

‘Hmmm.’ Schofield bit his lip in thought. ‘Still, if we can get to that shorter spire and disrupt the priming process, we can render the spheres useless.’

‘Yes, if you get there in time,’ Ivanov said.

Champion asked, ‘Can we destroy the spheres with a grenade blast?’

‘No, they are too dense for a conventional explosive to do any damage to them. Such an explosive would not even crack a red uranium sphere. It requires a large, carefully timed and even more carefully calibrated implosive blast to break one.’

‘How much do they weigh?’ Schofield asked.

Ivanov shrugged. ‘They are heavy for their small size, as one would expect of a semi-nuclear substance. Perhaps three kilograms each. Why?’

‘Because a three-kilogram sphere the size of a golf ball will sink like a stone,’ Schofield said. ‘If we can steal those spheres and get them to the coast and hurl them into the ocean, finding them would be all but impossible.’

‘This is true,’ Ivanov said.

‘Wait a second,’ Mother said. ‘Aren’t we talking about radioactive material here? You can’t just pick up a nuclear substance and run off with it.’

Ivanov said, ‘No, this is the advantage of red uranium. While its explosive energy is great, its passive radioactive decay is minimal. You can carry it in a suitcase or even create a hand grenade with a tiny amount of it—’

‘Hold on. There are other devices made from this stuff?’

‘Why, yes. Our weapons scientists fell in love with red uranium. It is an almost perfect thermobaric explosive. Smaller devices were fashioned, including hand grenades with red uranium cores the size of ball bearings that could blow apart a T-72 tank.’

‘You assholes built nuclear hand grenades?’ Mother said.

Ivanov bowed his head. ‘This island is a product of a different time. We were given leave to create whatever weapons science would allow and so we did. On occasion, we may have gone too far—’

‘No shit,’ Mother said.

‘Hey! I have a family, too!’ Ivanov said indignantly. ‘Two sons. Six grandchildren. They live in Odessa, in southern Ukraine. If the weapon is ignited, the firestorm will kill them, too. I have as much to lose in all this as you do. I may have helped build this terrible thing, but I most assuredly do not wish to see it set off.’

‘Okay, everyone, settle down.’ Schofield got back on topic. ‘What about the missiles that are used to fire the spheres into the gas cloud? Where are they located?’

Ivanov nodded. ‘Our enemy will have readied the battery of intermediate-range ballistic missiles on the launch pad to the south of the main tower. Sabotaging those missiles is a possibility, but as one would expect, the missile site is very well protected—one can only get to it via a high, single-lane bridge. If our enemies have men guarding the missile site, it will be exceedingly difficult to get to.’

Schofield was silent for a moment, deep in thought.

‘There might be one other thing we can do,’ he said. ‘It occurred to me before, but it comes with . . . complications.’

‘What’s that?’ Mother asked.

‘The reason we’re here is because this Army of Thieves is able to detect incoming missiles and bombers from long range, right? They even managed to turn a Russian ICBM around and have it strike its own launch site.’

Mother shrugged. ‘They’re teched up. We know this.’

Schofield said, ‘But it goes deeper than that. To possess this kind of early-warning capability—which lets them see an incoming missile or plane from thousands of miles away—they must be patched into some kind of early-warning satellite. Which means somewhere on this island there’s a satellite uplink connecting them to that satellite.’

‘Oh, I see, I see . . .’ Veronique Champion nodded. ‘But, yes, as you say, such a plan brings with it substantial complications.’

Mother didn’t get it. ‘Wait, wait. What complications? I don’t see it.’

Schofield said, ‘If we take out the Army of Thieves’ satellite uplink—destroy it or disable it—then the Army of Thieves will be blinded and we can open the way for a nuclear strike on this island.’

‘Once that uplink is destroyed,’ Champion added, ‘a nuclear missile launched from, say, Alaska or a site in central Russia could strike this island inside twenty minutes. The complication is—’

‘Us,’ Schofield said. ‘We won’t have time to get away before any nuclear missile hits. If we can find and knock out their uplink, we can save the world . . . but in doing so, we kill ourselves.’

‘Oh,’ Mother said. ‘Right. I see.’

There was a short silence.

‘We have to keep it as an option,’ Schofield said seriously. ‘Maybe not our first option, but if all else fails, we might have to consider it.’

He turned to the group.

‘All right, people, here’s how we’re going to do this. If we can somehow get in, I say we make this a split-op: one team goes for the spheres while a smaller second team tries to disable the missile battery. I’ll lead the first team: if we can disrupt the reheating of those spheres before eleven o’clock, we stop this thing cold; if not, we steal the spheres and get them to the coast and toss them into the ocean. At the same time, the second team—I’m thinking of the Kid and Mario here—tries to knock out the missiles, thus preventing the bad guys from firing the spheres into the gas cloud should the first team fail.’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ Mother said.

‘If we can get in there by eleven o’clock,’ Champion said. ‘That in itself will be extremely difficult.’

Schofield nodded. ‘While we’re doing all this, Dr Ivanov is going to try and spot any recently-added satellite uplink dishes around the complex. In the event of everything going to Hell, our last resort will be blowing the uplink and calling in a nuclear airstrike on ourselves. Any questions?’

No-one said a word. They were all taking in exactly what the final option meant.

‘I have a question,’ Mother said. ‘For him.’ She jerked her chin at Ivanov. ‘Who the fuck designs and builds a global-killing weapon like this?’

Ivanov smiled tightly. ‘You may not like the answer. You see, we stole the plans for the atmospheric device, indeed for this whole complex, from a top secret laboratory at Nellis Air Force Base in the United States of America. Your country designed this terrible weapon. We just built it.’

Schofield nodded at the reinforced glass door, at the shaggy polar bears on the other side.

‘What about them? What’s the story with the bears?’

‘They were another experiment,’ Ivanov said. ‘An experiment gone wrong.’

‘Oh, come on. What did you do to the bears?’ the Kid asked.

‘It was not one of my projects,’ Ivanov said, ‘and not one I agreed with. The idea was not unlike the infamous US tests with dolphins: we tried to train the bears to carry out certain military tasks. Laying mines, attaching explosives to submarines. One group, however, was given advanced mood-altering drugs, to heighten their aggressive instincts, the goal being to turn them into hyper-aggressive frontline troops that would strike fear into the hearts of an enemy force as they rampaged toward them.’

Emma Dawson was shocked. ‘You tried to make polar bears more aggressive? And obedient? Were you out of your minds?’

Ivanov shrugged. ‘There was a similar American project only recently, involving gorillas, based on an island in the Pacific Ocean known as Hell Island.’

At his words, Mother glanced at Schofield but he just shook his head imperceptibly.

‘But it didn’t work, did it?’ he said.

‘No. The drugs wreaked havoc with the bears’ primitive brains and they became demented, enraged, deranged with fury. They started attacking their handlers and the other bears. They also became very resourceful and continually broke out of their cages.’

‘They attacked the other bears.’ Schofield recalled the dead polar bear they’d seen on the ice floe earlier that morning, the one that had been torn to pieces by something. ‘And they’re cage-breakers. Wait, are you saying that those bears in that lab are not trapped in there?’

‘Oh, no,’ Ivanov said. ‘There are other exits to that laboratory: cracks in the roof dome, fire exits. When Dragon Island was decommissioned in 1991 and reduced to a skeleton staff, we just left the bears to their fate. They come and go as they please. These ones choose to stay here.’

Emma shook her head. ‘You just left them. You guys are something else.’

Schofield gazed through the reinforced glass door at the pacing bears. ‘Deranged polar bears. Just what I need—’

‘Er, Captain . . .’ Zack said, looking the other way, down into the pool of water behind them. He was crouched at its edge with Bertie beside him. ‘What is that?’

Schofield turned . . .

. . . and saw it.

An eerie green glow coming from deep within the pool.

It was moving, growing, coming closer.

Schofield hurried to the edge of the pool, where he grabbed Bertie, flipped him upside-down, and plunged the little robot’s stalk-mounted lens under the surface while keeping his display screen above the waterline.

‘Shit!’

On the display Schofield saw six small sea-sleds rising quickly through the haze—each sled bearing two armed men wearing scuba gear. They were zooming quickly through the tunnel toward the dock, their forward lights emitting sharp green beams.

‘They sent a dive team in behind us . . .’

He yanked Bertie out of the water and spun, taking in all the available options. The enclosed concrete dock had only two possible escapes: the pool of water and the reinforced glass door that led into the lab containing the polar bears.

‘Between a rock and a hard place.’ Schofield quickly put his battle glasses back on and drew his Desert Eagle pistol . . .

. . . and aimed it at the reinforced glass door. ‘Only one option. Marines, ready your weapons!’

Then he fired repeatedly into the door and eventually its glass shattered and the world went completely mad.