 |
WASHINGTON, D.C. |
Dave Fairfax sped through the streets of Washington, D.C. with Marianne Retter by his side in a little Toyota Prius.
After they had opened Marius Calderon’s classified CIA plan to use Russia to destroy China—appropriately named Operation ‘Dragonslayer’—they had given away their position and so had had to run.
Which was why they were now driving in the Prius. It was actually part of the Zipcar network—an eco-friendly car-sharing network that Dave belonged to; Zipcars were parked at various sites around the city and if you had a Zipcard, you could access them. Dave guessed—correctly—that not long after he used his swipecard to access the car, someone somewhere would detect the ensuing deduction on his credit card and flag the car for immediate detention by the D.C. police. But it was worth the risk, because he didn’t plan on being in the car for long.
‘Where are we going?’ Retter asked.
Dave looked determinedly forward. ‘There’s only one place we can go: the one place they don’t want you to go.’
They swung onto the north-west arm of Pennsylvania Avenue and beheld the famous mansion at the other end, lit up by floodlights, glowing in the night.
‘We have to get you to your appointment at the White House,’ Dave said.
‘The CIA will be watching it for sure,’ Retter said as they cruised down Pennsylvania Avenue with the gentle flow of night-time traffic. ‘They’ll have people stationed all around it.’
‘I imagine they will,’ Dave said, ‘so we’re gonna need a little luck.’
They came to the corner of Pennsylvania and West Executive Avenue, the road that gave access to the West Wing Entrance. They turned onto West Executive Avenue.
Dave’s eyes fell on the West Wing Entrance and its boomgated guardhouse.
Retter scanned the wider area, searching for CIA agents. Lafayette Square was filled with the usual crowd: tourists, cops and . . . four pairs of men in suits positioned at strategic points, several of whom were touching their ears and whispering into their cuffs as they surveyed the area.
‘You see ’em?’ Dave said.
Retter said, ‘They could just be Secret Service—’
Suddenly one of the men pointed at their Prius and started running.
‘Shit!’ Retter said. ‘We’re made!’
Dave snapped to look at the West Wing Entrance.
‘Aw, fuck it,’ he said as he floored the gas pedal and yanked left on the steering wheel.
The little Prius squealed as it swung off the road, jumped the kerb and sped towards the West Wing Entrance!
As Dave had expected, uniformed Secret Service guardsmen in the gatehouse opened fire on the little car immediately—although he didn’t think many terrorists charged toward the White House in hybrids. He and Retter ducked as their windshield shattered.
The Prius veered wildly and smashed into a reinforced gatepost, coming to a crunching halt. Its bonnet crumpled and Dave and Retter were flung forward in their seats as the car’s airbags inflated with a sudden whoosh!
Hissing steam, the little car was quickly surrounded by no fewer than six Secret Service guards, all with their pistols raised.
The CIA men in the park who had briefly given chase on foot hung back—Dave and Retter were now in the Secret Service’s jurisdiction and when it came to the security of the White House, the Service guarded their turf jealously. They didn’t hand over anyone to anyone until they had done their own investigation.
‘Get out of the vehicle with your hands up!’ the lead Secret Service agent yelled furiously.
Dave and Retter exited the vehicle as instructed, and were promptly shoved to the ground, faces rammed into the dirt. They were then handcuffed while the car was searched.
‘No devices in or under the car,’ a guard reported.
The lead guard shook his head. ‘Check their IDs.’ He lifted Dave to his feet. ‘You just landed yourself in big trouble, buddy.’
As he came to his feet, Dave said in a loud voice that every guard could hear, ‘Sir, my name is David Fairfax, Defense Intelligence Agency. This is Marianne Retter, also DIA. Please check your visitor’s log. You’ll find that Ms Retter has an urgent appointment with the President.’
It took twenty minutes—time which Dave and Marianne spent in the back of a prison van parked just inside the West Wing Entrance—but eventually word came through.
The senior Secret Service guard opened the van himself. With him was a presidential aide in a suit.
‘Turns out the lady does have an appointment,’ the senior guard said. ‘And you, Mr Fairfax, have a distinguished record. I’ve been told that if the lady wants you with her, you may accompany her inside.’
Retter said, ‘You bet I do.’
‘Next time,’ the guard said, ‘just stop at the gate and wait your turn.’
‘Sorry,’ Dave said. ‘Couldn’t do that. This place was surrounded by people who wanted to prevent us getting in. If we’d stopped, we’d have been dead.’ He gave the guard a weak smile. ‘Sorry about your gate.’
And with those words, Dave Fairfax and Marianne Retter hurried inside the White House.
|
DRAGON ISLAND GASWORKS |
Like Ironbark and Hartigan before him, Schofield’s body—still attached to the metal bedframe—was immediately and unceremoniously disposed of: it was tossed off the balcony.
The whole cruel contraption, bedframe and corpse, landed on the long industrial conveyor belt on the level below and commenced its journey toward the furnace fifty yards away. Before it reached the furnace, Schofield’s body would pass underneath the broad ramp that stretched out from the railway platform into the gasworks.
Because of this, Schofield’s corpse would be out of sight from the Army of Thieves men on the balcony for perhaps ten seconds.
Schofield’s immobile body passed under the ramp, disappearing from view.
‘Fire! Fire!’ the crowd chanted furiously, eager to see their enemy’s leader fall into the furnace.
Their eyes were glued to the conveyor belt on the other side of the ramp, waiting for Schofield’s body to reappear.
Marius Calderon also watched, keen to see Schofield destroyed forever.
It was he who frowned first when Schofield’s body didn’t reappear as it should have.
The conveyor belt kept rolling by, but in the spot where Schofield’s body and the bedframe should have been, it was bare, empty.
Calderon blinked, confused. Had something happened to Schofield’s body under the ramp? He sent two men down to check on it—only to hear a brief spray of gunfire from down there shortly after. When the two men didn’t return, Calderon started toward some steel stairs leading down to the lower level—
At which moment Schofield reappeared.
Only he wasn’t cuffed to the bedframe . . .
. . . and he wasn’t dead anymore either.
Shane Schofield stepped up onto the balcony, having climbed the steel stairs from the level below.
Calderon couldn’t believe it. And for the first few moments, neither could anyone else in the gathered group of Thieves.
Schofield stood there, stock still, looking like something out of a horror movie: bare-chested and barefoot, he was covered in sweat and water and foul scorch-marks, bloody scratches and open wounds. His jaw was clenched tight and his bloodshot, scarred eyes glared at Calderon with murderous rage.
Not only had he returned from the grave, he had returned from it armed: he held a Steyr TMP machine pistol in one hand and a SIG Sauer P226 pistol in the other.
As he’d stepped up from the stairs he had placed something on the floor beside him, before taking the SIG Sauer from its back. It now stood there next to him like a loyal dog.
A little silver robot.
If anything could be said about Bertie, it was that he was a damned determined little robot.
After being blasted out of the cable car terminal earlier, he had plummeted three hundred feet before landing in the freezing waters of the bay.
Of course, the landing hadn’t harmed him and he automatically inflated his buoyancy balloons and floated to the surface, bobbing there like a funny-looking mechanical duck.
Then his acquisition program kicked in: he searched for a buddy to follow.
His wheels spinning in the water, he made his way slowly but determinedly to the outer edge of the bay, where he saw to the west a point of access to Dragon Island: the abandoned whaling village.
It took him almost an hour to get there, but get there he did, and sure enough, shortly after he arrived, he saw his secondary buddy, Captain Shane M. Schofield, turn up with Veronique Champion.
When Schofield and Champion had been observed entering the whaling village, it had been Bertie doing the observing.
The little robot had hurried to catch up with Schofield, but Schofield had dashed away too quickly, to be outsmarted by Typhon at the roadblock and taken away.
Bertie could only watch in robotic dismay as this had happened.
But then, from out of nowhere, a woman’s voice had said to him, ‘Bonjour, little one.’
‘Bertie must reacquire his secondary buddy, Captain Shane M. Schofield,’ Bertie had said earnestly.
‘Oui, he must. And when you find him, I want you to give him a few things from me,’ Champion had said.
Getting past the roadblock had been a team effort: Champion had shot Schofield’s two smoke grenades—still lying near the roadblock, having been thrown to the ground by Typhon—and in the smoky haze that followed, Bertie had been brutal.
Guided by a thermal imager that could see through the smoke as if it wasn’t even there, his cannon had annihilated the roadblock team, ripped them to shreds, and within a minute, Bertie was whizzing up the steep road on his chunky little tyres, heading doggedly into Dragon Island in search of his secondary buddy.
Champion, wounded and unable to be of any more help, watched him go.
But she had given him one more instruction: follow the fresh tyre tracks of the jeep that had taken Schofield away from the roadblock. By following them diligently, Bertie had come to the gasworks.
There he scurried in through a side door and arrived underneath the ramp just in time to see Schofield’s body land with a thud on the conveyor belt right in front of him.
Recognising his secondary buddy, Bertie had whizzed forward and using his little robotic arms, pulled Schofield and the bedframe off the belt. A quick scan had revealed that Schofield had no pulse, so Bertie had unfolded his defibrillator and applied it according to his CPR programming.
Whack. Whack.
Schofield’s body jolted twice . . .
. . . before his eyes flew open and he gasped, sucking in deep rasping breaths to fill his lungs.
As Schofield recovered his breath, Bertie used his blowtorch to cut through his handcuffs and leg rope.
Thanks to the tough little robot, Schofield was alive and free again. Indeed, the only way for him to escape from Marius Calderon and the Army of Thieves had been to die.
He snatched Bertie’s first-aid pack, grabbed an AP-6 needle from it and jabbed himself with the painkiller/stimulant. His breathing evened out; he began to feel stronger.
It was then that he saw the three items sitting on Bertie’s back: Champion’s Steyr TMP, her SIG Sauer P226 pistol and a Magneteux.
He stood and nodded at Bertie. ‘Thanks, little buddy. You’re good to have around. Before we go, access your friend and foe memory bank, please.’
‘Memory bank accessed,’ Bertie said.
‘Delete Lance Corporal Vittorio Puzo from friend list.’
‘Entry deleted.’
‘Good. Now, come with me. It’s time to do some fucking damage.’
Facing off against Marius Calderon and his Army of Thieves in the gasworks—two against forty—Schofield and Bertie opened fire together.
Bertie blazed away with his cannon on full auto, sending forth a three-foot-long tongue of fire from the muzzle of his gunbarrel. His wave of heavy-calibre bullets cut into the crowd of Thieves, scything across them, and in the first burst alone, sixteen men fell, practically cut in half, bloody fountains spurting everywhere.
Schofield was more precise with his fire, but no less deadly.
The first man he took aim at was Calderon, but the Lord of Anarchy was quick. As Schofield fired, Calderon yanked Mobutu in front of him and Mobutu was hit twice in the chest while Calderon dived through the nearby exit door, disappearing outside, followed by Mario.
Next, Schofield took down the two men holding Zack, dropping them with one shot each before yelling, ‘Zack, lie down and stay down!’ Zack immediately dropped to his belly and covered his head with his hands.
Schofield then took rapid aim at the Thief holding Emma—a wiry bald man with a silver chain stretched between two facial piercings—but as Schofield fired, the man dropped down a ladder behind him, yanking Emma with him. Schofield wasn’t sure if he’d hit the man or not, but he didn’t have time to check, because right then a horizontal finger of fire rushed past him at very close range and he had to dive away.
It had actually been aimed at Bertie. The little robot had been doing so much damage that a Thief with a flamethrowing unit slung from a harness over his shoulders had unleashed a lance of fire at him. The flames washed over Bertie, engulfing him completely, but the little robot just rolled out of them, his rubber tyres alight, and shot the flamethrowing Thief right between the eyes.
But then a far more dangerous attack came: the Caucasian officer known as Mako snatched up an RPG from the floor and fired it at Bertie.
The grenade shot across the wide space and hit Bertie square in the lower body.
Bertie blew apart.
His already-flaming tyres went flying out in four different directions while shards of titanium sprayed wildly outward. The little robot disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
Schofield saw it happen and his heart sank, but he couldn’t stop shooting. He was now alone in this fight, which meant he had to finish it quickly.
And so, in the single minute that followed, Shane Schofield, the Scarecrow, unleashed all of his fearsome skills as a warrior on the remaining twenty members of the crowd of Thieves.
He killed like a force of nature.
His face was blank, devoid of emotion. He just marched forward, firing coolly and calmly, without a single wasted bullet, an unstoppable, relentless, merciless Marine rifleman.
He nailed every man in sight.
The few members of the crowd who managed to raise a weapon in defence went down in sprays of blood, thrown off their feet by Schofield’s powerful fire. After firing the RPG, Mako used one of his own men as a human shield and took aim at Schofield but Schofield dropped them both with the same volley from his Steyr, firing it through the first man’s chest so that the same bullets lodged in Mako’s heart, too.
Schofield then saw Big Jesus and took aim at him, but the big Chilean lieutenant was smart and he dived out the exit door, shutting it behind him—and those who fled for the door after him found that he had locked it behind him, sealing them in with Schofield.
They looked back in horror at the grim face of the man whose torture they had cheered only a short while ago.
Schofield shot them where they stood until there was no member of the Army of Thieves left alive on the balcony.
His enemies dead, Schofield raced to Mother’s side.
As he arrived at her body, hanging motionless from the forklift, to his great surprise, he saw her head move slightly, as if cocking to one side.
‘Mother?’ he said, unsure. It could have been a post-death reflex.
‘Scarecrow?’ Her voice was muffled by the wooden box over it. ‘No way. Was all that gunfire yours?’
Schofield hurriedly lowered the forklift, bringing Mother and Baba down to the floor, where he quickly shot open their handcuffs and hastily removed the boxes from their heads.
Mother’s box came off first.
Two dead rats tumbled out of it . . . headless. Their necks ended in ragged bloody stumps. Their heads had been wrenched off.
Mother’s teeth, Schofield saw, were bloody.
‘Oh, Mother . . .’ he said, clutching her in a firm embrace.
‘Ozzy fucking Osbourne’s got nothing on me,’ she said, hugging him back. ‘Anyone can bite the head off a bat onstage. Try biting the heads off two wild fucking rats while they’re trying to get at you! Now that takes balls.’
Zack came over and removed Baba’s box and, just like Mother’s, out of it dropped two headless rats.
The Frenchman spat out some tiny rat bones. ‘Eugh! The fur gets between your teeth!’
‘That was your plan?’ Schofield said to Mother. ‘Fake your death and maybe make a move when they dumped your body?’
‘Hey. Last I saw, you’d been crispy-fried and told me to fight on after your death. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.’
‘Nice plan, actually.’
Mother shrugged. ‘When they put those boxes on our heads, I said to Baba, “Do what Ozzy Osbourne would do and then play dead.” Luckily, Baba is a man of fine musical taste and understood what that meant.’
Schofield smiled. ‘I love you to death, Mother. And you’re growing on me, too, Baba.’
Baba nodded at Schofield’s weapons. ‘And I know those guns, monsieur. A fine woman owns them. Is she alive?’
‘For now, yes, but we can talk about that later. This resurrection isn’t over yet. We gotta stop those bastards firing another missile.’
As he turned to move, Schofield saw Zack crouching a short distance away. He was bent over the remains of Bertie.
Schofield came over.
Bertie lay on the floor, horrifically mutilated. His entire lower half—his wheels and motor—had been blown apart by the grenade blast. It was now a tangled mess. His upper half was still intact and his internal battery was evidently still working, too: both his cannon and his stalk-mounted lens kept roving around, searching bravely for enemies even though he could no longer move.
‘How is he?’ Schofield asked.
‘He wants to keep fighting, but he isn’t going anywhere anymore.’
Schofield looked down at the little robot. ‘That little guy brought me back from the dead. He stays with me.’
Schofield quickly grabbed an object off the nearby corpse of an Army of Thieves man. Then he picked up Bertie—what was left of him—and did something that made Zack smile.
‘Hey, nice . . .’ Zack said.
Last of all, Schofield went over to Mobutu’s body and took his Maghook back. When he had it, he nodded at the exit door. ‘This way.’
They all hurried for the door.
Mother and Baba were at the rear of the group. They crouched to grab an AK-47 each from a couple of dead Thieves, plus some spare clips and also an earpiece radio each.
As she hurried after Schofield, Mother looked back at the carnage behind them: nearly forty bloody corpses.
‘Mental note,’ she said softly to Baba. ‘Never ever make the Scarecrow angry.’
Flanked by Mother, Baba and Zack, Schofield blew the lock on the exterior door of the gasworks and peered outside—in time to see Calderon, flanked by Big Jesus and half a dozen men, striding off toward the missile battery.
A short distance ahead of them was Typhon, carrying the Samsonite case with the spheres in it. He was about to cross the high bridge that gave access to the missile battery.
Without warning, Calderon turned and saw Scarecrow and at his shout, his men opened fire on Schofield and his people, trying to keep them at bay long enough for Typhon to get to the missile battery with the spheres.
Schofield immediately saw that he was too late.
He couldn’t overcome Calderon’s men and stop Typhon.
‘Damn it,’ he said. ‘There’s no way we can—’
He cut himself off as he saw the tiny figure in the distance, seemingly sitting at the far end of the high bridge that Typhon was now in the process of crossing, a figure Schofield recognised.
He never finished his sentence, for it was at that exact moment that the explosion came and the missile battery blew sky high.
The entire missile battery went up in a great billowing fireball, right in front of Typhon.
A rolling series of explosions went off as, one after the other, the six transport erector launchers on the flat-topped rocky mount blew apart, their gas tanks rupturing, the missiles on their backs either shattering to pieces or being flung off the mount by the force of the blasts.
The only explanation Schofield had for the blast was the tiny figure he’d glimpsed sitting at the end of the road bridge.
It had been the Kid, just sitting there on the roadway. The blast, when it went off, had consumed him and now he was nowhere to be seen.
Schofield recalled seeing Mario earlier, before his torture. Betraying his team and siding with Calderon, Mario claimed he had shot the Kid in the head.
Schofield couldn’t know for sure, but he suspected that Mario—more mechanic than rifleman and a low-level hoodlum to boot—had made the mistake of many a criminal thug: he had shot the Kid in the forehead and walked away.
The thing was, contrary to popular belief, a forehead shot is the most unlikely headshot to kill someone. Through millennia of evolution, the bone of the forehead, the brain’s primary protective barrier, is the thickest and strongest part of the human skull. Experienced criminal killers always fire two shots into the back of the head, where the skull is much softer: the so-called execution-style killing. Snipers will aim for the temple or, if they can, the eye. But with a shot to the forehead, if the victim can get to a hospital in a reasonable time, the wound is actually very survivable.
The Kid had evidently survived.
Long enough to complete his mission, if slowly.
Schofield pictured him, bleeding from the forehead and moving with difficulty, planting his grenades around the missile site, placing them on gas tanks for maximum effect, and then when it was done, slumping on his ass on the roadway, waiting for the end to come.
It had come in spectacular fashion.
When Marius Calderon saw his missile battery go up in flames, his mouth fell open.
He shook the shock away. He hadn’t come this far without contingency plans and he still had a few of those.
‘Big Jesus!’ he yelled, handing the burly Thief one of the spheres. ‘Get to the train! Roll it out and use its mobile missile launcher to ignite the atmosphere! Typhon! Come with me!’
‘Yes, sir!’ Big Jesus hurried back toward the gasworks, unslinging the Kord, accompanied by six other Thieves, their AK-47s raking Schofield’s door, keeping him and his people pinned down inside.
But they didn’t try to enter the gasworks. Big Jesus and his team ran right past the door—pummelling it with gunfire—and hurried around the northern corner of the gasworks.
They were heading for the railway platform’s outer entrance.
After they were gone, Schofield cracked open his door and saw Calderon.
The CIA man was leaping into a jeep—with Typhon, Mario and the other sphere. He sped off in the opposite direction, heading along the road that led around the disc tower toward the runway on the other side.
‘Now where is he going?’ Mother said.
‘He’s hedging his bets,’ Schofield said. ‘He sent those assholes to the train to fire off a sphere on a carriage-mounted missile. If they succeed, he wins. But if they fail, he still has one sphere left, and if he has another plane he can use—’
‘He does,’ Zack said. ‘In one of the hangars. Emma and I were hiding in it when we were caught. It looked just like the one you drove off the waterfall. Had a whole lot of stuff in the hold, all covered up.’
‘Did it now?’ Schofield paused, thinking. ‘I’m guessing that apart from the missiles on that train, he’s all out of missiles. The only other choice he has left is flying that last sphere directly into the gas cloud and releasing it like a bomb. What the—’
As he said this, Schofield had been peering out through the doorway, watching Calderon’s jeep.
To his surprise, the jeep skidded to a halt beside the cable car terminal overlooking the islets to the north. Typhon leapt out of the jeep and ran inside, appearing a minute later on the roof of the terminal.
Schofield watched him intently. ‘No . . . no way . . .’
On the roof of the terminal, partially hidden behind a low wall, Typhon crouched for a few seconds and then rose holding something in his hands: a compact and very modern black satellite dish.
The curved dish was square in shape and made of a metal mesh.
Typhon didn’t waste any time. Moments later, he appeared on the ground level again, leapt back into Calderon’s jeep and the jeep sped off.
Schofield’s eyes narrowed.
His mind was whirring now, connecting dots. Things were moving way too quickly and he was struggling to keep everything clear in his head, when suddenly he saw it, saw it all.
‘I think I just figured out what Calderon’s exit strategy is,’ he said.
‘I thought you already figured that out? It’s his second plane,’ Mother said.
‘No, the exit strategy for his entire plan, a secret CIA plan that’s been in operation for over twenty years,’ Schofield said. ‘It’s his final exit strategy, one that leaves no trace of the Army of Thieves and thus no witnesses.’
Schofield gritted his teeth, looked around for a nearby vehicle, and spotted one, a jeep. ‘I have to stop him taking off in that plane or else this whole island and everyone on it is history.’
‘What!’ Mother said.
‘Are you serious?’ Baba said.
‘Trust me. There’s no time to explain. Right now, I need you two to take care of that train. Do whatever you have to do to stop them launching a missile from it. I’ll take Zack and go after Calderon and his plane. Zack—’
He turned.
Zack was nowhere to be seen.
He was gone.
‘Now where the hell did he go?’ Mother said.
Schofield gazed back into the gasworks and thought of Emma. ‘I have an idea, but that’s Zack’s fight. I wish we could help him, but if we don’t stop Calderon now, a whole lot more people will die. Now go. You take the train. I’ll take the plane.’
And with those words, they split up—Mother and Baba dashed back inside the gasworks, heading for the railway platform, while Schofield leapt onto the nearby jeep and gunned it off the mark, speeding as fast as he could in the direction of the runway in a last desperate attempt to stop Marius Calderon.
Zack crept silently across the bottom level of the gasworks, wending his way through the maze of industrial-sized piping. He passed hissing valves and vats of steaming liquids. On the sides of all the vats were warning labels written in Russian. The only text he recognised was on one huge vat marked ‘TEB’ followed by a warning in bold red letters.
He was following Bad Willy.
As he’d stood with Schofield, Mother and Baba at the exit door, he had glanced back inside the gasworks—and glimpsed Willy, with Emma, down on the bottom level.
During the mayhem of Schofield’s resurrection, Zack had hit the ground and covered his head with his hands. He hadn’t seen where Bad Willy had gone with Emma.
But now he knew.
When Schofield and Bertie had started firing, Bad Willy must have dived with Emma—his hard-earned prize—down a nearby ladder and hidden with her down on the lower level.
As soon as he’d seen them in the gasworks, Zack had taken off after them, not even bothering to tell Schofield and the others where he was going. Nothing they could have said would have stopped him anyway. They could save the world, but it would mean nothing to Zack if Emma was defiled by Bad Willy before then.
And so he’d grabbed a pistol from beside the corpse of an Army of Thieves man and hurried down to the lower level and commenced his pursuit.
Mother and Baba raced through a different section of the gasworks, the uppermost level, heading for the massive train parked at the railway siding on the northern side of the vast space.
As she ran, Mother saw the megatrain start to move. Big Jesus and his six-man team were all over it, AKs in hand.
The train was only five cars long, but each car was huge, oversized in the extreme. There was an armoured locomotive at each end, then a double-levelled cargo carriage—capable of conveying jeeps, trucks and other large loads—then in the middle, a long flatbed car on which sat two huge SS-23 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, currently lying horizontally side-by-side on big hydraulic risers.
‘The Russians built many train-launched missile systems,’ Baba said as he ran. ‘But the train needs to be stationary in order to fire the missile, otherwise it will misfire.’
Mother said, ‘So they need to drive the train out of this building and then stop it to fire the missile?’
‘Correct.’
Mother pursed her lips again. ‘Think, Mother. What would Scarecrow do?’
‘What?’
‘Never mind,’ she said, as it hit her. ‘He wouldn’t let them stop the train. He’d keep it moving. Come on, Baba. We gotta get aboard, seize control of the lead locomotive and keep that train moving.’
Schofield sped along in his stolen jeep, skirting the massive moat surrounding the disc tower, heading toward the runway.
With him was Bertie, but in a most unusual configuration—the configuration that had made Zack smile.
Bertie was mounted on Schofield’s back, clipped securely to it by virtue of the flamethrower harness Schofield had taken from the dead Army of Thieves man in the gasworks. The harness’s four main carabiner clips—usually used to hold a tank on the user’s back—had clipped perfectly to points on Bertie’s metal exoskeleton so that now he sat on Schofield’s back, piggyback style.
Bertie’s stalk-mounted eye looked out eagerly over Schofield’s right shoulder, panning left and right, while his M249 cannon poked out over Schofield’s left shoulder.
Schofield drove hard.
He saw Calderon’s jeep heading round the wide circular moat, making for the steep road that led to the runway.
There hadn’t been time to tell the others about the significance of Calderon’s short stop at the cable car terminal.
The satellite dish that Typhon had grabbed was the uplink—the satellite uplink keeping Dragon Island safe from Russian and American nuclear missile strikes.
When he had first arrived on Dragon via that very same cable car terminal, Schofield had scanned the area for the uplink in the hope of disabling or destroying it, but it had been hidden, as it turned out, right above his head.
Typhon’s recent snatching of the uplink, however, had terrible ramifications.
Calderon and his key lieutenant were getting away from Dragon Island, leaving their fake terrorist army behind. Presumably, the Army of Thieves believed he would come back for them once the sky was alight.
But he wouldn’t be coming back at all, Schofield realised.
No. Watching from his escape plane, as soon as his men on the train launched their missile—or if he got away and ignited the sky with his sphere—Calderon would then simply switch off the uplink.
Russian Missile Command, still monitoring Dragon with their own satellites, would immediately detect that the defensive uplink was down and, enraged at Calderon’s previous reversal of one of their nuclear missiles, immediately fire a nuke on Dragon.
Calderon would destroy China, while he would get away with his small leadership group and his fake terrorist Army would be annihilated by the Russian nuclear missile. The world would be irrevocably changed, the blame would be laid on the mysterious terrorist group, and Calderon would make a clean getaway, unconnected to any of it.
Mission accomplished.
Which was why Schofield had to stop Calderon’s plane. If he could keep Calderon on Dragon Island, Calderon wouldn’t switch off the uplink, as it would mean condemning himself to death—
Gunfire hit Scarecrow’s jeep.
Schofield spun to see an Army of Thieves troop truck thundering along behind him, with men hanging off it, firing.
‘Bertie! Take them out!’
‘Yes, Captain Schofield.’
As Schofield kept looking forward, driving hard, weaving and swerving, Bertie swivelled both his eye and his cannon around and loosed two booming shots.
The first shot hit the truck’s grille, puncturing the radiator, causing it to release a hissing plume of steam; the second hit its front left tyre, causing the truck to wobble, then fishtail, then skid out of control before it tumbled onto its side, spilling men everywhere.
Schofield smiled grimly. While deafening, it was like having eyes—and a gun—in the back of your head.
‘Good robot,’ he said.
Up ahead, he saw Calderon’s car take the left-hand fork and shoot down the steep road leading to the airfield. He made to follow, but some Army of Thieves sentries quickly stepped out onto the road there and unleashed a heavy rain of gunfire. One man had a flamethrower and sent forth a blazing tongue of fire.
Schofield swore. He couldn’t run that blockade.
So, without any loss of speed, he yanked his steering wheel right and took off up the right-hand fork. He could still reach the runway by going the long way, around the higher ground to the north.
It would take time and he wasn’t sure if he had enough of that.
But he had to try. With Bertie on his back covering him, Schofield floored the jeep.
Zack heard them before he saw them.
He heard Emma struggling. ‘No! No! Leave me alone!’
A sharp slapping sound followed.
‘Shut up, bitch!’ Bad Willy’s voice echoed through the tangle of pipes, tanks and vats. ‘No knights in shining armour left to save you now.’
Zack rounded the corner and beheld the scene: Emma on the ground with Bad Willy standing over her.
‘There’s still one left,’ he said loudly.
They both snapped around. Emma’s face lit up with both hope and horror. Bad Willy’s face transformed from surprise to wicked glee.
‘Zacky-boy,’ he grinned. ‘Who’da thunk it? The weedy little poindexter coming to save the girl from the nasty fucking rapist?’
Zack raised his pistol.
Bad Willy said, ‘I don’t have a gun, Zacky. You’d shoot me in cold blood?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t miss.’
His jaw clenched, Zack fired. Twice.
And missed high with both shots. They sparked off a large pipe behind Willy’s head.
He pulled the trigger again, several times: click-click-click.
Bad Willy grinned more darkly. ‘I am going to kick the fucking shit out of you, you little pansy-assed dandy, and then I’m going to do every kind of nastiness to your woman here.’
Willy shoved Emma into a nearby storage cage and snapped its bolt home, locking it.
Emma shook the gate, but it was no use, she was trapped there, trapped to watch what was to come: a fight between Bad Willy of the Army of Thieves and Zack Weinberg of DARPA.
Willy lunged at Zack, teeth bared, fists flying.
Zack ducked beneath Willy’s first two blows, bobbed up, and managed to land a killer punch on Willy’s face. Willy froze in mid-stride.
Zack paused. Had he—?
Willy started laughing.
‘Is that it? Is that the best you’ve got? Oh, this is not fair. Not fair at all.’
Quick as a rattlesnake, Willy hit Zack in the face and Zack dropped to the ground, nose bleeding.
Then Bad Willy grabbed him by the collar and headbutted him, dropping him again.
Emma screamed.
As he stood over Zack, Bad Willy called back to her: ‘Keep doing that, honey. Keep screaming. I love screams, feed off ’em.’
He lifted Zack and rammed him up against a thick round pipe, narrowly missing a pressure valve sticking out of it.
Dizzy and in considerable pain, Zack’s vision was becoming blurred. He felt ill. He was about to pass out, and if he passed out, this was all over. Willy would kill him and then take Emma and—
Through his blurred vision, Zack saw something on the valve beside his head. Letters that gradually came into focus: T . . . E . . .
Suddenly Willy was right in his face.
‘You blasted my ear off, you little fuck,’ Willy growled. ‘To pay you back for that, I’m gonna hack off both your ears and make you eat ’em. Then I’m gonna slash your fucking throat and drink your blood.’
Willy unsheathed a long-bladed hunting knife and held it up to Zack’s eyes.
Zack gasped, coughing.
Willy said, ‘Got something to say, eh?’
Zack whispered something.
‘Speak up! I can’t hear you!’
‘I said . . .’ Zack began as, with his last ounce of strength, he quickly reached up and yanked hard on the lever on the gas valve beside his head, the valve whose label read ‘TEB’.
The valve opened and a high-pressure spray of green liquid came blasting out of it, directly into Bad Willy’s eyes.
Willy wailed as the searing-hot liquid gushed into his face. He dropped his knife and clutched at his eyes as the skin on his forehead, cheeks and chin immediately began to melt.
His wails became shrieks as the searing explosive fuel mixture—the undiluted raw concentrate that was the basis of the combustible gas in the sky—ate through the skin of his face.
Willy clawed at his cheeks, but this only served to pull away the melting skin, revealing flesh and bone. Then his hands came away and Zack saw that Willy’s eyes were melting, too. The whites of his eyeballs dribbled down his melted-away cheeks and stuck to his fingertips.
Willy shrieked a hideous, inhuman scream.
He lunged at Zack, clutching at him with his disgusting hands, but Zack kicked him hard in the chest, pushing him away and Bad Willy fell to the ground, whimpering.
Moments later, the acid ate into his brain and Bad Willy lay still, dead.
Zack ran to the cage, threw it open, and Emma leapt into his arms and sobbed as he held her.
As the megatrain left the siding, Mother and Baba ran up alongside it and leapt onto its last carriage, a backward-facing armoured locomotive.
The train lumbered forward. It was truly a Soviet monster, double-sized in every way: two storeys high, two train-widths wide and riding on two sets of train tracks.
But it wasn’t designed for speed. It had been designed for heavy cargo freight, to carry the building materials for Dragon Island from the north-east dock—now reconfigured as a submarine dock—to the central complex, which meant it was a relatively slow beast.
Today, however, it only had to clear the station and stop in a firing position to launch one of its missiles.
‘We have to get to the forward locomotive,’ Mother called to Baba, ‘to keep this train moving!’
Blocking their way, though, was the Chilean lieutenant, Big Jesus, and his six-man team. While two men drove, Big Jesus and the other four had established a defensive position around the central missile carriage—where Big Jesus was currently busy bent over the missile, inserting the uranium sphere into its warhead.
Mother assessed the situation. They had to get past that missile car.
‘Okay, handsome,’ she said to Baba. ‘You’re gonna lay down a shitload of fire on those cocksuckers from here while I go forward and take the locomotive. Then you come and join me.’
‘I beg your pardon, but how are you going to get past them?’ Baba asked.
‘Not going past them,’ Mother said. ‘Going under them. Now, gimme some hot lead, baby.’
‘With pleasure.’
Baba hefted his AK-47 and started firing at Big Jesus and his men, while Mother jumped off the slow-moving train and crouch-ran under it.
Big Jesus returned fire at Baba . . . with Baba’s own Kord machine gun. Its mighty rounds clanged loudly off the rear locomotive’s armour, forcing Baba to take cover.
‘Merde!’ Baba growled to nobody. ‘Fired on by my own beautiful gun.’
He returned fire as best he could with the puny AK-47.
By doing so, however, he captured the full attention of Big Jesus and his men, distracting them from the figure running underneath the rumbling carriages of the megatrain: Mother.
The train was only moving at about five miles an hour and its immense size meant that Mother could run bent over along the tracks underneath it. She hurried forward under the first cargo car, then—careful not to be seen by Big Jesus and his men—under the missile car.
When she crossed the gap between the missile car and the second cargo car, she was briefly exposed and found herself standing in daylight. The first half of the train had cleared the siding! Once its missile carriage was fully outside, it would be ready to fire.
Huffing and puffing, she pushed on and was halfway along the second cargo car with the lead locomotive in sight when she realised the train was slowing.
It was already coming to a halt, coming into a firing position.
‘Outta time, must run faster,’ she said to herself, ducking out from under the cargo car and running at full stride alongside it.
Behind her, she could hear Baba exchanging fire with the men on the missile car, still taking the attention from her.
Mother came to the forward locomotive, bounded up onto a running board mounted on its side and just as the train’s wheels were squealing, announcing its impending halt, she swung up into its cab, leading with her gun.
The two Army of Thieves men driving the megatrain turned from its controls, eyes wide, and reached for their weapons.
Blam! Blam!
Starbursts of blood splattered the forward windshield behind their heads. Both men fell.
Mother hurried to the controls and just as the train was about to come to a stop, she pushed forward on the throttle and the train lurched, accelerating.
On the missile car, Big Jesus felt the lurch and spun.
‘They’ve taken the engine car!’ he called to the four men with him. To two of them, he said, ‘You two, stay here, keep the missile safe and hold that big fellow where he is!’ He nodded to the other pair: ‘You two, come with me. We must stop this train!’
With that pair at his side, Big Jesus hurried forward, leading with the Kord, going after Mother in the lead locomotive.
Mother saw them coming. ‘Uh-oh . . .’
She snapped round, peered out the forward windshield.
The entrance to the submarine dock was about a kilometre away, at the end of a flat plain of open, barren ground. It looked like a tunnel, with the megatrain’s tracks burrowing down into the ground near the coastal cliffs. Plenty of time to stop the megatrain and fire the missile.
I can’t let them stop us, Mother thought desperately. But how can I make sure of that?
The solution struck her immediately.
And as the first massive round from the Kord clanged against the steel roof above her head, Mother jammed the throttle all the way forward, causing the megatrain to pick up speed alarmingly.
Then she left the lever, scooping up her AK-47, and rejoined the battle.
She was now defending the lead locomotive alone, one against three, and woefully outgunned. In her heart of hearts, Mother knew she couldn’t win this battle, but if she could hold out long enough, she might just win the war.
The megatrain thundered across the barren north-eastern plain of Dragon Island, picking up speed.
The tiny figures of Big Jesus and his two comrades could be seen advancing along the roof of the second carriage, the cargo car, firing on the lead locomotive, while the muzzle flashes of a lone figure could be seen firing back at them through the open rear window of the locomotive’s driver’s compartment.
There was, however, no longer any sign of a gunbattle at the rear of the train.
On the roof of the train, Big Jesus and his men leapfrogged forward in perfect formation. They weren’t amateurs and they knew they had the edge on Mother both in numbers and firepower. Soon they were up near the locomotive, firing at her at close range and suddenly Mother recoiled, hit in the right shoulder.
She was flung backwards and they rushed the driver’s compartment, covering her.
Big Jesus reached for the control lever and had gripped it when out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a figure thump down onto the flat bonnet of the locomotive right in front of him.
Big Jesus looked up and that figure took form, the form of a big bearded Frenchman lying on his belly on the locomotive’s bonnet, taking aim at Big Jesus’s face with a pistol.
Baba fired once through the glass.
The bullet came slamming through the windshield and into Big Jesus’s left eye before it exploded out the back of his head. He collapsed where he stood, dropping the Kord.
Two more shots and the other two Thieves also went down.
Baba swung in through the shattered windshield and crouched by Mother’s side.
‘Nice entrance,’ Mother groaned, pressing a hand to the wound on her shoulder.
‘I am French,’ Baba said simply. ‘I was born with a certain je ne sais quoi.’
Mother smiled despite herself. ‘You’re one bad-ass dude, I know that. You didn’t stay at the back of the train like I told you to, did you?’
‘I couldn’t.’ Baba nodded at the rest of the train. ‘They sent reinforcements.’
Mother followed his gaze.
Another two dozen Army of Thieves men were now boarding the megatrain, clambering onto it from two troop trucks, one on either side of the train.
‘I had to come here,’ he said. ‘So I came the same way you did, running underneath the train.’
A bullet slammed into the roof above them. Then another. Then a wave of them.
Mother and Baba ducked. Mother hefted her AK-47. Baba grabbed his beloved Kord from the floor.
‘Come!’ Baba called as he dragged her out through the shattered forward windshield. ‘Out onto the bonnet! If we are to make a last stand, it is the best place!’
‘Our own private Alamo . . .’ Mother said as she arrived on the bonnet beside Baba.
Then, facing back down the length of the rumbling train, they opened fire together on the advancing horde of Thieves.
The exchange of gunfire that followed was vicious in the extreme: Thieves swarmed all over the megatrain like ants at a picnic, while Mother and Baba held them off from the bonnet of the lead locomotive, picking them off left and right.
The Thieves kept coming.
Mother and Baba kept firing.
A round sizzled past Mother’s ear, slicing through her earpiece’s filament microphone on the way by, nicking skin, drawing blood. Close.
Then, abruptly, in between shots, Baba called, ‘Mother! You are a fine warrior and a magnificent woman. Are you spoken for? If we should survive this, I should very much like to wine you, dine you and make mad, passionate love to you for many hours. But smitten as I may be, I am a man of honour and do not court other men’s wives. Are you spoken for?’
Mother paused in between shots, thinking for a moment.
She thought of Ralph, her Ralphy, and of their life together which only a week ago she had described as banal and boring—and then she looked at the Frenchman, this larger-than-life warrior called the Barbarian, Baba. He was her mirror, her male equivalent.
But he wasn’t Ralphy.
‘Sorry, you sexy beast!’ she shouted, punching off a shot. ‘But I am spoken for! I’m married!’
Baba loosed another shot from the Kord. ‘He is a lucky man, your husband! And he must be a fine fellow to capture and hold a heart as big as yours!’
‘He is!’ Mother called. ‘He certainly is!’
The larger force of Thieves was now leaping onto the back of the lead locomotive, their takeover of the megatrain now certain and all but complete, when Baba leaned suddenly forward and kissed Mother hard on the mouth and said, ‘Live for both of us then, my friend, Mother! I shall go to my grave with the taste of your lips on my mouth!’
And with those words, he leapt up onto the roof of the locomotive—totally out in the open, totally exposed—planted his feet wide and raised his mighty Kord.
Then he opened fire.
The massive machine gun blazed to life, razing the advancing horde of Thieves with an absolute torrent of sizzling bullets.
They dropped everywhere—shot to pieces or simply hurled off the moving train—but there were just too many of them for Baba to take out alone and a few managed to get off some shots that found their target: first a glancing blow to Baba’s left arm, then more substantial hits to the torso and shoulders.
One, two, then three shots hit his body, but still he kept firing.
Mother watched in admiration, wonder and despair.
The train kept rushing across the plain.
It was the fourth shot that felled Baba.
He dropped to his knees, yet still managed to get off some more shots from the Kord.
Then a bullet struck him square in the chest and he dropped to the roof of the locomotive and Mother, still on the bonnet, wounded and unable to go to his aid, shouted, ‘No!’ just as the train shot into darkness, into the tunnel that led to the submarine dock.
Baba had done what he’d set out to do.
He’d bought them enough time to get to the dock.
Now it was too late to stop the train.
The megatrain thundered through the short tunnel, picking up speed as it shot down the slope, still with a dozen Thieves on its back.
It emerged with a roar inside the wide hall that was the submarine dock where—now speeding totally out of control—it exploded straight through the guardrail separating the end of the track from the water in the dock. The lead locomotive’s pointed snowplough smashed through the wooden guardrail, blasting it into a thousand matchsticks, before the whole train just poured off the end of the track, diving—driving—into the water, one carriage after the other disappearing into the sea like a huge slithering snake. Its missile car vanished under the surface, having never been able to fire its deadly cargo.
As the locomotive had shot off the end of the tracks, Mother—still on the bonnet—had seen, of all things, the Okhotsk, half-sunk in the water, right next to her, a final bizarre sight for a truly bizarre day. Shot, exhausted and despairing at Baba’s heroic sacrifice, Mother felt the locomotive below her drop through the air.
A second later, it hit the water.
Her battle with the Army of Thieves had been fought and although she wouldn’t come out of it alive, she would at least die knowing that she had beaten the motherfuckers.
The megatrain dived into the water and sank into the darkness, never to be seen again.
While Mother, Baba and the megatrain were heading for a watery grave, Schofield was speeding across Dragon Island’s north-western plain in his jeep, angling toward the runway, now chased by two Army trucks and one motorcycle with a sidecar. Harnessed onto his back, Bertie fired back at them, while Schofield did the same, driving one-handed and firing with his Steyr TMP.
Ducking bullets, Schofield crested a hill and suddenly beheld the runway, where he saw Calderon’s second plane—an Antonov An-12, just like the first one—emerge from its hangar, wheel around on the taxiway and start rumbling down the runway, accelerating to take-off speed.
Schofield swung his jeep onto a converging course with the plane, a course that would finish at the very end of the runway.
His plan was a desperate one: he intended to drive his jeep in front of the plane, crippling its landing gear and stopping it from taking off. There was no other option: if Calderon got away, he—
A sudden volley shattered his windshield and Schofield spun to see the enemy motorcycle—with a gun-toting passenger in its sidecar—pull alongside him.
Schofield brought up his TMP but it just clicked, empty. Fortunately, at the same time, Bertie swung around and with two blistering shots nailed both the rider and the passenger and the motorbike went tumbling away, end over end.
Schofield chucked the TMP and gunned the jeep. It swung in parallel to the runway, hurtling along at almost a hundred kilometres an hour, just ahead of the rolling Antonov.
But then the Antonov surged forward . . . powering up to takeoff speed, accelerating dramatically . . .
Schofield’s jeep bounced up onto the runway, speeding as fast as it could go.
The Antonov thundered down the tarmac, picking up speed. Soon it would overtake the jeep and lift off, after which it would ignite the sky, while Dragon Island and everyone left on it would be destroyed by an angry Russian missile strike.
As he sped along, Schofield glanced forward and saw the end of the runway rapidly approaching. It was dangerously close, with nothing beyond it but sheer cliffs dropping down to the ocean.
I have to get in front of that plane . . .
He made to yank left on his steering wheel when suddenly, with a roar, the Antonov came alongside his jeep, its forward wheels lifting slowly from the runway . . .
He was too late.
No!
The plane lifted off with only twenty metres of runway to spare.
The sight of the Antonov lifting off from Dragon Island’s western runway would have been pretty impressive in and of itself, but its lift-off that day was special in one other way.
Had anyone been watching it from afar, they would have seen the plane soar magnificently into the air with a little jeep speeding along the ground beside it, trying valiantly to keep up. But as the plane took to the air, the keen observer would also have seen the man driving the jeep fire something up at the departing plane: a device with a trailing cable.
Speeding along in the jeep with the wind assaulting his face and the roar of the Antonov assailing his ears, Schofield stood and fired his Magneteux’s grappling hook up at the departing plane.
The Magneteux’s arrow-like head lodged in the plane’s fuselage up near its nose and as the Antonov lifted off, Schofield was yanked up into the air with it, clinging to the Magneteux’s cable.
As he was swept up into the air, hanging from the rising plane, his jeep went flying off the end of the runway, over the cliff, dropping in a great soaring arc into the ocean far below.
The Antonov soared skyward at a steep angle, with Shane Schofield dangling from it by his Magneteux’s cable.
Schofield had already done the maths in his head: the gap in the gas cloud would be perhaps seventy kilometres wide, so the Antonov would reach it in less than ten minutes. Once there, Calderon would drop a warhead into it and ignite the gas cloud.
Schofield reeled in his cable and whizzed up it, arriving near the nose of the Antonov, which, like the other one, featured a glass spotter’s dome.
Schofield swung up under the glass dome, unholstered his SIG and fired it into the glass.
He ran out of bullets after two shots, but they did enough. The dome shattered and he discarded the gun, swung himself up and clambered inside.
With freezing wind whistling all around him, Schofield stepped up into the Antonov’s forward nose area—
—to find Mario standing before him, his M9 pistol aimed at Schofield’s head.
Calderon and Typhon were nowhere to be seen. They must have been up in the cockpit directly above the nose cone. In the hold beyond Mario, Schofield saw a large object hidden underneath a tarpaulin and at the very back of the hold, near its closed ramp, the jeep Calderon had driven from the gasworks to get to the plane.
‘Mario . . .’ Schofield said, his hands spread wide. He had discarded the empty SIG when he’d climbed up through the shattered glass dome, so he was now gunless.
‘I made my choice, Scarecrow!’ Mario yelled over the wind. ‘And that means only one of us can go home!’
‘You’re a two-bit hood, Mario, unworthy of the name Marine . . .’
‘Fuck you,’ Mario shouted. ‘See you in Hell!’
He made to squeeze his trigger but, to his surprise, Schofield just stood there, hands still spread wide.
Then Schofield said something and suddenly Bertie popped up over his shoulder, his machine-gun barrel unfolding quickly.
Boom!
Mario’s chest exploded. He was literally blasted off his feet. His legs flew up into the air as his upper body went down. He dropped to the floor, unmoving, dead.
‘Hoodlums should never pick fights with soldiers,’ Schofield muttered. ‘Come on, Bertie. We got work to do.’
They dashed over Mario’s body, heading for the short flight of steel stairs that led up to the cockpit.
As Schofield had been hanging unseen from the Antonov’s nose cone by the Magneteux’s cable, Marius Calderon had been in the plane’s cockpit, staring intently at a screen.
He’d attached a spectroscopic long-path analyser to one of the cockpit’s side windows: it looked like a stubby horizontal aerial and it gave real-time analysis of the air quality around the plane.
Its results now appeared on the screen:
Calderon saw the gas cloud displayed as an encroaching blob at the top of the screen with his position shown at the centre. Every few seconds, the screen changed, showing the cloud getting closer as the plane advanced toward it.
They were currently 47 kilometres from the gas cloud, only four minutes’ travel away.
Calderon smiled.
On the floor beside him, connected to the spectroscope by some wires, sat a Russian RS-6 nuclear warhead that had been reconfigured to accommodate a red uranium sphere. Conical in shape and covered in stencilled warnings, it was an imposing device: one capable of delivering death on a massive scale.
As soon as he’d boarded the plane, Calderon had inserted the sphere into the warhead’s chamber. And now the warhead was linked to the spectroscope: once the spectroscope detected itself to be within the gas cloud, it would automatically instruct the warhead to initiate a two-minute detonation sequence, giving Calderon and Typhon time to escape before the warhead detonated.
For the explosion of the warhead would not be a small one.
It would vaporise the entire Antonov in a single fiery instant—blasting it apart as if it were made of tissue paper, before setting the gas-infused sky of the northern hemisphere alight. It was thus imperative that Calderon and Typhon be off the plane when the warhead went off, but they’d planned for that, too.
Calderon also had one last device in the cockpit: the compact black satellite dish that was the uplink. Once they were far enough away from Dragon Island, he would switch it off and leave the island to its fate.
Gunfire from the hold made him turn. ‘What was that! Get down there!’ he yelled to Typhon.
Calderon took the controls while Typhon dashed back into the hold.
Gun in hand, Typhon threw open the cockpit door to see the rear hold of the Antonov in turmoil: gusting Arctic wind whistled through it, causing tarps to billow and anything not tied down to swirl through the air. Making it seem even more bizarre, the hold was tilted sharply upward thanks to the ascending angle of the plane—
Someone tackled him from the side and Typhon went sprawling to the floor, dropping his gun, his attacker falling with him.
Typhon stood to see Shane Schofield rising to his feet a few yards away.
‘You just keep turning up,’ Typhon said as they circled each other. ‘You really are something . . .’
‘Where did Calderon find you?’ Schofield said. ‘Chile?’
‘Leavenworth,’ Typhon said. ‘I was in the Army Rangers, but I killed a fellow Ranger who was gonna report me for an off-base incident. Calderon needed capable, patriotic men and he got me released to work for him. I brought the “Sharks” with me.’
‘Great. More patriots,’ Schofield said. ‘Bertie!’ Once again, Bertie appeared over his shoulder and—
His gunbarrel clicked, dry.
‘Damn,’ Schofield said as Typhon lunged at him and the two of them went thudding onto the back of the jeep in the rear of the hold, struggling and rolling.
Typhon unleashed some brutal punches, and for a short while, Schofield parried and evaded them, but he was beyond exhausted—from gunshot and torture wounds—and soon Typhon gained the ascendency, and started landing more and more blows.
Up in the cockpit of the plane, Calderon’s spectroscope started beeping loudly. They had entered the gas cloud:
A timer on the warhead immediately started counting down.
‘Time to fly,’ Calderon said aloud. ‘And time to say goodbye to Dragon Island. Thank you, my beloved Army. You did your job perfectly.’
With those words, he flicked a switch on the satellite uplink and every light on it went out—
—and in a room in a Russian missile launch facility in western Siberia, a console operator instantly sat upright.
‘Sir!’ he called. ‘The satellite missile-detection shield over Dragon Island just went offline!’
His commander stared at the operator’s screen for a second, then he grabbed a secure phone and relayed this information to the Russian President in Moscow.
The reply came immediately.
The missile commander hung up the phone.
‘We are authorised for nuclear launch. Target is Dragon Island. Fire.’
A few moments later, an SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile with a 500-kiloton thermonuclear warhead shot out of its silo, heading for Dragon Island. Flight time: twenty-two minutes.
All as Marius Calderon had planned.
The Antonov’s hold was now a truly crazy place: tilted at a steep upward angle with a maelstrom of wind whipping through it.
Another savage blow from Typhon sent Schofield flailing onto the back of the jeep parked at the rear of the hold. In total control, Typhon straddled him and punched him again.
As Schofield recoiled from the blow, spitting blood, he suddenly became aware of a second source of wind in the already blustery hold.
He glanced up to see that the rear ramp was opening—a sideways look revealed that Marius Calderon had entered the hold and was at the ramp controls on the side wall.
‘Why, Captain Schofield, we meet again!’ he called. ‘Your determination is truly admirable, but you are finally too late. We have arrived at the gas cloud and the warhead has been activated. It cannot be stopped now. Typhon! Finish him! We have to get that jeep out of the way!’
Calderon nodded at the tarp-covered object at the front end of the hold, hemmed in by the jeep.
‘Yes, sir!’ Typhon shouted as he gripped the weakened and battered Schofield by the throat with one hand.
He looked down at Schofield with murderous eyes. Schofield was lying defenceless on the back of the jeep, one hand hanging off it, his face dirty and bruised, his mouth dripping blood.
Typhon pulled his fist back to deliver the death blow, a blow that would drive Schofield’s nose up into his brain and kill him.
His fist came rushing down, just as Schofield reached out with his free hand and pulled on a lever by the jeep’s tyres.
The lever released some chains holding the jeep inside the hold and as Typhon’s fist came rushing down, the jeep rolled suddenly, straight out of the back of the steeply-rising plane where it dropped out into the sky, with Schofield and Typhon on it!
Marius Calderon gaped at the sudden disappearance of the jeep and his right-hand man. One second they were there, the next they were gone.
‘Fuck me,’ he gasped.
He recovered quickly: losing Typhon was a shame but not a disaster. Typhon was an excellent second-in-command, but since he knew Calderon’s real identity as a senior CIA agent, Typhon had always faced liquidation when this was all over. This had saved Calderon the effort.
As for Schofield: thank Christ. The fucking Energizer Bunny was finally gone.
Calderon kept moving. He still had a getaway to make.
The plane had just entered the gas cloud and, now flying on autopilot, it was programmed to penetrate deeper into the cloud. In less than two minutes, the warhead in the cockpit would go off.
Calderon hurried over to the tarp-covered object and threw off the tarpaulin . . .
. . . to reveal a compact mini-submarine.
It was a Russian Mir-4 Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle, a variant of the Mir-2. Only five metres long with a curved glass bubble for its bow, it was capable of holding six crew and while it was claimed by the Russians to be used only for scientific research, the Mir-4 was actually used for submarine transfers and clandestine insertions into hostile waters. This Mir-4 had been one of two submersibles that had been on the Russian freighter, the Okhotsk, when it had been taken six months ago.
With the jeep now out of the way, Calderon flicked a switch and jumped aboard the sub as it was shunted by an underfloor cable to the back of the hold, ready for release. Once it reached the end of the rear ramp, it simply tipped over the edge and like the jeep before it, dropped away into the grey Arctic sky.
Unlike the jeep, however, the Mir was fitted with four parachutes, which all blossomed above it as it fell, guiding the sub and Calderon to a gentle landing in the cold waters of the Arctic Ocean.
The mini-sub landed in the ocean with a soft splash and Calderon quickly drove it under the surface, heading away to a designated retrieval location where he would be met by a CIA Sturgeon-class submarine, his years-long mission now over save for the big bang.
Calderon had taken care of everything: the gas cloud, the warhead, the destruction of Dragon Island, his own escape.
He’d only missed one thing:
The figure dangling from the underbelly of the Antonov at the end of a Maghook: Captain Shane Michael Schofield.
As Schofield’s jeep had tipped out the back of the Antonov, it had dropped away toward the ocean with Typhon still on it, screaming. He had screamed all the way down.
But Schofield hadn’t.
As the jeep had dropped out the back of the plane, he had called upon his trusty Maghook—small compared to the Magneteux and not nearly as sexy or strong—but it was all he had.
Leaping off the falling jeep, he’d fired the Maghook back up at the plane before he fell too far and the Maghook’s bulbous magnetic head thunked against the underside of the rear ramp and held. The jeep had fallen away beneath him, but he was still in the game.
Schofield then reeled himself up using the Maghook’s internal spooler, arriving under the ramp just as a submersible of some kind came rumbling out of the hold and dropped into the sky, issuing some parachutes.
‘That son of a bitch,’ Schofield said as he climbed back up into the blustery hold, now the doomed Antonov’s only occupant. ‘But this isn’t over yet.’
Schofield hurried through the windblown hold and up into the empty cockpit.
He took it all in quickly: the autopilot, the spectroscope’s screen showing that the plane was now inside the flammable gas cloud, the fearsome warhead, and on the warhead, a timer that currently read:
00:34 . . . 00:33 . . . 00:32 . . .
‘Thirty-two seconds to the end of the world . . .’ Schofield breathed. ‘How do I get myself into these situations?’
He looked about himself for options, ideas, solutions.
He was basically on a flying bomb, one that would ignite a global atmospheric firestorm.
00:30 . . . 00:29 . . . 00:28 . . .
He stared at the warhead. Calderon had replaced all its exterior panels and they were all screwed shut. He’d never be able to extract the uranium sphere from it in time.
How do I stop this? How can I?
I can’t.
It’s too late . . .
And for the first time in his career, Schofield knew that it was true: he had finally run out of time.
Twenty-eight seconds later, the warhead detonated with all its mighty force.
The detonation of the warhead containing the red uranium sphere was devastating in its intensity. It sent out a blinding white-hot blast that expanded laterally in every direction.
Inside his Mir submersible, under the surface of the Arctic Ocean, Marius Calderon felt it. It shook his sub, even from this distance.
And then he frowned.
Deep underwater, he shouldn’t have felt the detonation. Water was an excellent buffer against concussion waves. But he had still felt it. The only way he would feel it underwater was if . . .
‘No!’ Calderon shouted in the solitude of his mini-sub. ‘No!’
For the warhead had most assuredly detonated, with the red uranium sphere inside it. The only problem was, it had not detonated in the gas-infused sky.
As Calderon had just realised, it had detonated underwater.
It was the only thing Schofield could think to do.
Roll the warhead out of the cockpit into the hold—
00:26 . . . 00:25 . . . 00:24 . . .
Then pushing it off the back of the ramp—
00:21 . . . 00:20 . . . 00:19 . . .
The warhead tumbled end over end as it fell through the sky, its timer ticking all the way down—
Before it hit the ocean’s surface with a great splash and immediately went under, sinking fast—
00:05 . . . 00:04 . . . 00:03 . . .
Where it sank and sank into the blue haze—
00:02 . . . 00:01 . . . 00:00.
Beeeeeeep!
Boom.
The explosion of the warhead under the surface of the ocean looked like the standard undersea detonation of a thermonuclear device.
After the initial white-hot blast, a great circular cloud of superheated water—packed with billions of swirling micro-bubbles—materialised and expanded, shooting out laterally before it hit the surface, sending an absolutely gargantuan geyser of water spraying up into the sky, the greatest fountain in history.
Thankfully, the warhead had sunk deep enough before it blew. The heavy weight of ocean water above it had defused its potent catalytic power and so it did not ignite the sky.
Indeed, the only person it shook was Marius Calderon.
As he climbed back into the cockpit of the Antonov and saw the great circular explosion down on the ocean’s surface, Schofield breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Battered, bloody, tortured, almost overcome with exhaustion and having lost many brave people in the process, he and his team had beaten impossible odds and stopped the Army of Thieves from setting fire to the world.
It was only then that he saw the uplink dish, sitting on the cockpit’s floor in front of him with all its lights extinguished.
It had been switched off.
‘Oh, shit . . .’ he said. ‘The Russians.’
If the Russians had detected this and launched a nuke, Dragon Island and everyone on it had less than twenty minutes to live.
Schofield turned off the autopilot and swung the plane around, banking hard and fast, heading back toward Dragon Island.