He made to swing, just as with a jarring thud, their sub hit the bottom of the Channel and both men fell to the floor.
They rose together, moving like lightning.
Zamanov leapt up and swung—just as Schofield lunged forward, ducking inside Zamanov’s swing arc, at the same time whipping something metallic from his borrowed utility vest and jamming it into the Russian’s mouth!
Zamanov didn’t have time for shock, because Schofield didn’t hesitate.
He activated the mountaineering piton—and turned his head away, not wanting to see this.
With a powerful snap! the piton’s pincer-like arms expanded, shooting instantaneously outward, searching for something to wedge themselves against.
What they found were Zamanov’s upper and lower jaws.
Schofield never saw the actual event, but he heard it.
Heard the foul crack of Zamanov’s lower jaw being stretched far further than it ever was designed to go.
Schofield turned back to see the Russian’s jaw hanging grotesquely from his face, dislocated and broken. The upper arm of the piton, however, had done more damage: it had bruised Zamanov’s brain, leaving Zamanov frozen bolt upright in mid-stance, the shock having shut down his entire body.
The Russian fell to his knees.
Schofield seized his sword, stood over the fallen bounty hunter.
Zamanov’s eyes blinked reflexively. The only sign that he was still conscious.
Schofield wanted to run him through, or even cut his head off, to do to Zamanov what he had done to others . . .
But he didn’t.
He couldn’t.
And so he just let the Russian waver where he knelt, and then he watched as a moment later Zamanov fell flat on his face with a final bloody splat.
The fight over, Schofield grabbed his dislodged earpiece, put it back in his ear—
‘Schofield! Schofield! Come in!’ Knight’s voice blared in his ear. ‘Are you alive out there!’
‘I’m here,’ Schofield said. ‘I’m on the bottom. Where are you?’
‘I’m in the other sub. Put your exterior lights on so I can see where you are.’
Schofield did so.
At which moment Knight’s voice said, ‘Oh, fuck me . . .’
‘What?’
‘Do you have power?’ Knight said quickly.
Schofield tried his instrument panel. No response. ‘I have air, but no propulsion. Why? What is it? Can’t you just come and get me?’
‘There’s no way I can make it in time.’
‘In time? In time for what? What’s the problem?’
‘It’s a . . . uh . . . very big one . . .’
‘What?’
‘Look up, Captain.’
Schofield peered up through the top dome of his mini-submarine.
And saw the hull of the supertanker—impossibly huge—gliding steadily down through the water above him, freefalling through the Channel waters like the moon falling out of the sky . . . its colossal mass heading straight for him.
Schofield swallowed at the awesome sight: 100,000 tons of pure supertanker was about to land right on top of his tiny submarine.
Its bulk was so vast, so immense, that it generated a deep vibrating rrmmmmmm as it moved down through the water.
‘Now you don’t see that every day,’ Schofield said to himself. ‘Knight!’
‘I can’t make it in time!’ Knight yelled in frustration.
‘Shit,’ Schofield said, looking left and right.
Options! his mind screamed. He couldn’t swim away from the tanker. At 1000 feet long and 200 feet wide, it was just too big. He’d never get out from under it in time.
The only other alternative was to stay here and be crushed to death.
Some choice. Certain death or certain death.
But if that was all there was, then at least he might be able to achieve something before death came.
And so on the bottom of the English Channel, Shane Schofield keyed his satellite mike.
‘Book! How are you doing over there in New York?’
‘We own the Ambrose, Scarecrow. All enemy troops are down. We’re at the control console now, and I’ve plugged the satellite uplink into it. I have the time as 1152. You’ve got eight whole minutes to disarm this thing.’
Schofield saw the supertanker falling through the water above him—a silent freefalling giant. At its current speed, it would hit the bottom in less than a minute.
‘You might have eight minutes, Book, but I don’t. I have to disarm those missiles now.’
And so he pulled his CincLock-VII unit from its waterproof pouch and hit its satellite uplink.
The unit came to life:
SAT-LINK: CONNECT ‘AMBROSE-049’--UPLINK CONNECTION MADE.
ACTIVATE REMOTE SYSTEM.
MISSILE LAUNCH SEQUENCE IN PROGRESS.
PRESS ‘ENTER’ TO INITIATE DISARM SEQUENCE.
FIRST PROTOCOL (PROXIMITY): SATISFIED.
INITIATE SECOND PROTOCOL.
The red and white circles from the New York launch ship’s missile control console appeared on Schofield’s screen.
And with the mighty hull of the Talbot thundering down through the great blue void above him, Schofield started the disarm sequence.
The supertanker was gathering speed.
Falling, falling . . .
Schofield’s moves became faster.
The supertanker was eighty feet above him.
A red circle blinked, Schofield punched it.
Sixty feet . . .
Fifty feet . . .
The noise of the falling supertanker grew louder—rrmmmmmm.
Forty feet . . .
Thirty feet . . .
Schofield hit the last red circle. The display blinked:
SECOND PROTOCOL (RESPONSE PATTERN): SATISFIED.
THIRD PROTOCOL (CODE ENTRY): ACTIVE.
PLEASE ENTER AUTHORIZED DISARM CODE.
Twenty feet . . .
The water all around his little submarine darkened dramatically, consumed by the shadow of the supertanker.
Schofield entered the Universal Disarm Code: 131071.
Fifteen feet . . .
The screen beeped:
THIRD PROTOCOL (CODE ENTRY): SATISFIED.
AUTHORIZED DISARM CODE ENTERED.
MISSILE LAUNCH ABORTED.
And as he waited for the end—the true end; the end that he physically could not escape—Schofield closed his eyes and thought about his life and people who had been in it:
He saw Libby Gant smiling that thousand-watt smile, saw her kissing him tenderly—saw Mother Newman shooting hoops on her garage basketball court, saw her big wide grin on her big wide face—and tears welled in his eyes.
That there were still missiles to disarm somehow didn’t bother Schofield. Someone else would have to solve that this time.
When it came, the end came swiftly.
Ten seconds later, the supertanker MV Talbot hit the bottom of the English Channel with an earth-shaking, earth-shuddering boom.
It landed right on top of Schofield’s stricken ASDS and crushed it in a single pulverising instant.
The thing was, Schofield wasn’t in the sub when it happened.
Seconds before the Talbot hit the bottom—when it was barely twelve feet off the seabed, its shadow looming over the mini-sub, and Schofield was lost in his thoughts—a dull metallic clunk was heard hitting the outside of his ASDS.
Schofield snapped to look out the windows and saw a Maghook attached to the metal exterior of his little submarine, its rope stretching away across the ocean floor, disappearing into the darkness to the side of the falling supertanker.
Knight’s voice exploded in his ear: ‘Schofield! Come on! Move! Move! Move!’
Schofield was electrified into action.
He took a breath and hit the ‘HATCH’ button.
The hatch irised open and water gushed into the sunken mini-submarine. It took barely two seconds for it
to completely fill the sub, and suddenly Schofield was outside, moving fast, grabbing the Maghook attached to the sub’s flank.
No sooner had he clutched it than Knight—at the other end of the rope—hit the hook’s demagnetise switch and the Maghook’s rope began to reel itself in quickly.
Schofield was yanked across the ocean floor at phenomenal speed—the falling supertanker looming above him, its great endless hull hovering over his body like the underside of a planet, while a foot below him, the sandy ocean floor zoomed by at dizzying speed.
And then abruptly Schofield emerged from beneath the supertanker, his feet sliding out from under it just as the gigantic vessel hit the bottom of the English Channel with a singular reverberating boom that sent sand and silt billowing out in every direction, consuming Schofield in a dense underwater cloud.
And waiting for him in that cloud—sitting atop the second ASDS, breathing from a new Pony Bottle and holding Gant’s Maghook in his hands—was Aloysius Knight.
He handed Schofield the Pony Bottle and Schofield breathed its air in deeply.
Within a minute, the two of them were inside Knight’s mini-sub. Knight repressurised the sub, expunged it of seawater.
And then the two warriors rose through the depths of the English Channel, a short silent journey that ended with their little yellow sub breaching the storm-riddled surface—where it was assaulted by crashing waves and the blinding glare of brilliant halogen spotlights: spotlights that belonged to the Black Raven hovering low over the water, waiting for them.
AIRSPACE ABOVE THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
1805 HOURS LOCAL TIME
(1205 HOURS E.S.T. USA)
The Black Raven shot through the sky, heading south over the English Channel.
A dripping-wet Aloysius Knight dropped into his gunner’s chair. The equally-soaked Schofield, however, never stopped moving.
Inside the Raven’s rear holding cell, he pulled out his modified Palm Pilot. There was unfinished business to attend to.
He pulled up the missile-firing list—the one that was different to Book’s earlier list. He compared the two lists.
Okay, he thought, the first three entries are the same as on Book’s list.
But not the last three: the missiles are different. And there’s that extra entry at the end.
To those last three entries, he added the GPS locations that he’d got from Book. The first two of them read:
And suddenly this list took on a whole new dimension.
The cloned missiles being fired on Beijing and Hong Kong from the MV Hopewell were clones of the Taiwanese Sky Horse ICBM. They were also armed with American warheads.
While the missiles firing from the MV Whale on New Delhi were clones of the Pakistani Ghauri-II—and the ones being fired on Islamabad were replicas of the Indian Agni-II.
‘Hot damn . . .’ Schofield breathed.
How would China react to Taiwanese nuclear strikes?
Badly.
And how would Pakistan and India react to mutual nuclear bombardment?
Very badly.
Schofield frowned.
He couldn’t understand why his list differed from Book’s.
Okay, think. Where did Book get his original list from?
From the Mossad agent, Rosenthal, who had acquired it during his many months shadowing Majestic-12.
So where did I get mine from?
Schofield thought back.
‘Oh, Jesus . . .’ he said, remembering.
He’d received it on his Palm Pilot when he and Gant had been sitting in the stone ante-room in the Forteresse de Valois, waiting while Aloysius Knight had been in Monsieur Delacroix’s office, hacking wirelessly into Delacroix’s standalone computer.
Schofield turned to Knight. ‘When you were with Delacroix at the castle, did he say anything about whose office you were in?’
Knight shrugged. ‘Yeah. He said something about it not being his office. Said it belonged to the man who owned the castle.’
‘Killian,’ Schofield said.
‘Why?’
But now Schofield understood.
‘There must have been another computer in that office. In a drawer or on a side table,’ he said. ‘You said it yourself. Your Pilot would retrieve documents from any computer in the room. When you initiated the wireless hack, you picked up documents from another computer in that office. Killian’s computer.’
‘Yeah, so?’
Schofield held up the new list. ‘This isn’t Majestic-12’s plan. Their plan involves starting a global Cold War on Terror. M-12 wants terrorist missiles striking major centres—Shahabs and Taep’o-Dongs. Which was why they left the bodies of the Global Jihad guys at the Axon plant and on the supertankers: to make the world think that terrorists stole the Kormoran ships.
‘But this list shows something else entirely. It shows that Killian’s company installed different Chameleon missiles on the Kormoran ships—not the ones Majestic-12 was expecting. Killian is planning something much worse than a global war on terrorism. He’s set it up so that each of the world’s major powers is seemingly hit by its most-hated enemy.
‘The West is hit by terrorist strikes. India and Pakistan are hit by each other. China is hit by what appear to be Taiwanese missiles.’
Schofield’s eyes widened at the realisation.
‘It’s Killian’s extra step. This isn’t M-12’s plan at all. This is Killian’s own plan. And it won’t produce any kind of Cold War at all. It’ll produce something much much worse. It’ll produce total global warfare. It’ll produce total global anarchy.’
Rufus said, ‘You’re saying that Killian has been deceiving his rich buddies on Majestic-12?’
‘Exactly,’ Schofield said.
But then, again, he remembered Killian’s words from the Forteresse de Valois: ‘Although many don’t know it yet, the future of the world lies in Africa.’
‘The future of the world lies in Africa,’ Schofield said. ‘There were African guard squads on each of the boats. Eritreans. Nigerians. Oh, shit. Shit! Why didn’t I see it before . . .’
Schofield brought up one of the other documents on his Palm Pilot:
This was the itinerary of Killian’s tour of Africa the previous year.
Asmara: the capital of Eritrea.
Luanda: the capital of Angola.
Abuja: Nigeria.
N’djamena: Chad.
And Tobruk: the site of Libya’s largest Air Force base.
Killian hadn’t been opening factories—he had been forging alliances with five key African nations.
But why?
Schofield spoke: ‘What would happen if the major powers of the world descended into anarchic warfare? What would happen elsewhere in the world?’
‘You’d see some old scores settled, that’s for sure,’ Knight said. ‘Ethnic wars would reignite. The Serbs would go after the Croats, the Russians would wipe out the Chechens, and that’s not even mentioning everybody who wants to nail the Kurds. Then there’d be the opportunists, like the Japanese in WWII. Countries seizing the opportunity to grab resources or territory: Indonesia would snatch East Timor back . . .’
‘What about Africa?’ Schofield said. ‘I’m thinking of National Security Council Planning Paper Q-309.’
‘Whoa,’ Knight said.
Schofield remembered the policy word for word. ‘In the event of a conflict involving the major global powers, it is highly likely that the poverty-stricken populations of Africa, the Middle East and Central America—some of which outnumber the populations of their Western neighbours by a ratio of 100-to-1—will flood over Western borders and overwhelm Western city centres.’
Q-309 was a policy based on history—the long history of wealthy self-indulgent elites falling to impoverished but numerically overwhelming under-classes: the fall of Rome to the barbarians, the French Revolution, and now the wealthy Western world succumbing to the sheer numbers of the Third World.
Jesus, Schofield thought.
<
br /> Anarchic global warfare would provide just such an opportunity for the Third World to rise up.
And if Killian had given forewarning to a few key African nations, then . . .
No, it’s not possible, Schofield’s mind protested. For the simple reason that Killian’s plan just didn’t seem big enough.
It didn’t guarantee total global anarchy.
And then Schofield saw the final entry on the missile list—the entry that had not been on Book II’s list at all, an entry describing a missile to be fired nearly two hours after all the others.
He brought it up on his screen:
A Jericho-2B clone, Schofield thought. The Jericho was a long-range ballistic missile belonging to Israel; and this one was armed with an American W-88 warhead.
And the target?
Using Book II’s map, Schofield plotted the GPS coordinates of the target.
His finger came down on the map . . . and as it did so, Schofield felt a bolt of ice-cold blood shoot through his entire body.
‘God save us all,’ he breathed as he saw the target.
The last clone missile—ostensibly Israeli in origin, with an American nuclear warhead on it—was aimed at a target in Saudi Arabia.
It was aimed at the holy city of Mecca.
The cockpit fell silent.
The sheer idea of it was just too great, too shocking, to contemplate. An Israeli missile armed with an American warhead striking the most sacred Muslim site on the planet on one of the most holy Muslim days of the year.
In the post-September 11 world, there could be no more provocative act.
It would ignite global chaos—no American citizen or embassy or business would be safe. In every city in every country, enraged Muslims would seek vengeance.
It would create a worldwide Muslim–American war. The first truly global conflict between a religion and a nation. Which would itself become the precursor for total global revolution—the rise of the Third World.
‘God, October 26, it’s been staring me in the face all day,’ Schofield said. ‘The first day of Ramadan. I hadn’t even thought about the significance of the date. Killian even chose the most provocative day.’
Scarecrow Page 31
