Scarecrow Returns ss-5

by Matthew Reilly

  His searching eyes found the side door, only eight feet above and behind him. Did he have time to clamber up there and toss the spheres out—

  Movement in the cockpit. The berserkers had regathered themselves. They’d be coming in seconds.

  “Fuck it,” he said aloud, aiming his pistol through the cockpit doorway.

  Only it wasn’t aimed at either of the berserkers.

  It was aimed at the landing gear retractor lever that hung from the ceiling above the pilot’s seat.

  Blam! He fired and a spark pinged off the landing gear lever and the lever swung forward.

  The result was instantaneous.

  With its landing gear retracted, the plane went over the waterfall.

  IF THE sight of the Antonov perched on the lip of the waterfall was incredible, the sight of it falling down the face of the waterfall was just astonishing.

  It fell nose-first in an almost perfect swan-dive, falling at exactly the same speed as the water falling around it, and for a moment, one might have been convinced it would swoop upward at the last second and soar to safety, but that didn’t happen.

  The Antonov hit the churning white water at the base of the mighty waterfall with a great splash and plunged underwater.

  The plane’s glass nose shot underwater, its pointed tip penetrating the surface like an Olympic diver, shooting downward in a rush of bubbles.

  It was only the wings of the plane—or more specifically, the engines on them—that brought it to a halt: a bone-jarring, deadly halt. The plane’s cockpit had traveled about twenty feet under the surface when the wing-mounted engines hit the surface and the plane’s downward journey stopped instantly.

  The experience of the two berserkers in the cockpit was utterly unique: as the plane hit the ocean’s surface, sea water rushed up at them through the shattered forward windows, a great foaming rush of it; but their downward inertia took them the other way and they were flung with terrible force down into the surging water.

  In the hold behind them, Schofield sat with his back to the plane’s steel forward wall, flat against a flight seat, with the groaning Champion gripped tightly in his arms.

  After firing into the landing-gear lever, he had leapt into the seat and quickly buckled the seat belt.

  The shuddering impact of the plane against the ocean’s surface jolted him sharply, but the seat absorbed much of the shock and the belt held him tight. Champion was almost shaken from his grip, but somehow he managed to hold her.

  But it wasn’t over yet.

  The worst was still to come, for the Antonov around him was now vertical, bobbing in the ocean water.

  Then, with horrifying speed, it began to sink.

  WATER RUSHED up into the Antonov through its shattered cockpit windows, swarming up into the plane in a great roiling, bubbling rush, as if it were a sentient creature trying to swallow the plane from the inside out.

  Schofield’s world was turned vertical—the plane was sinking nose-first, so his forward end of the hold was now the bottom end—and it was filling fast. Water swelled all around him.

  He scrambled to unlatch his seat belt, still holding the barely conscious Champion.

  As he did so, a mini-waterfall of sea water started flowing in through the open side door directly above him, raining down in an unbroken stream.

  He looked upward, at the wide square opening at the very top of the hold: the plane’s rear ramp was still open and through the opening it created, Schofield saw the gray Arctic sky.

  He took in the situation quickly:

  The wings of the plane were currently providing some buoyancy, slowing their descent a fraction, but the plane’s fate was sealed: in a few moments, as it sank further, ocean water would come gushing en masse through that upper opening. At that point, the Antonov would become little more than a metal tube in the ocean, open at both ends, and it would sink to the bottom like a stone.

  Schofield clenched his teeth. He still had a job to do: he had to dispose of the spheres.

  With Champion draped over his shoulder, he sloshed over to the netting on the port side of the hold and started climbing it, heading for the open port-side door eight feet above him.

  With every foot he climbed, the churning water at his boots chased him, rising higher, moving faster.

  The water overtook his boots, then his knees, then his waist.

  Schofield reached the door, and positioned himself to the side of its little waterfall. He looped some netting around Champion’s left arm to hold her in place, which freed up both his hands, and he opened one of his small Samsonite cases to reveal its two gleaming red-uranium spheres. He couldn’t just throw the case out; like many such containers, it was very likely buoyant.

  He grabbed one of the spheres—it was small and heavy, a deep polished maroon—and tossed it out the doorway. It fell away into the ocean, sinking quickly.

  He did the same with the second sphere. It disappeared forever, too.

  Two down. Two to go.

  Schofield discarded the first Samsonite case and lifted the second one.

  Beside him, Champion groaned something that sounded like a warning and he turned and found himself looking at point-blank range into the demented face of a berserker!

  The man had come from the cockpit, having somehow survived the fall and he came bursting across the foaming water screaming with rage, his teeth bared, his hands clawing at Schofield.

  Schofield hit him with the second case.

  The blow broke the berserker’s nose and the crazed attacker’s face sprayed blood and he went flying backward, out into the water inside the hold.

  Schofield gripped the netting by the door, tensing himself for a second attack but it didn’t come because right then the wide square opening at the upper end of the hold went under the surface of the ocean and his whole world went to shit.

  An unimaginable torrent of sea water came gushing into the hold from above.

  Several thousand gallons dropped on top of Schofield, Champion and the berserker in an instant.

  Schofield managed to cling to the hold’s side netting, and he pressed his body over Champion’s so she wasn’t ripped away from it. The berserker was less fortunate: out in the center of the hold, he was forced under by the torrent of downward-rushing sea water.

  The hold filled with water in an instant and the whole plane now went under—the Antonov had became the hollow tube of metal that Schofield had foreseen.

  The plane “soared” down through the underwater haze, seemingly gliding on its outstretched wings, heading for the bottom 1,000 feet below.

  Inside its hold, the curved walls groaned loudly as the pressure from outside increased. Long before it hit the bottom, its fuselage would crumple catastrophically inward, its ribbed metal skeleton unable to resist the pressure of the ocean.

  Holding his breath, Schofield grabbed something from Champion’s weapons belt: one of her compact scuba rebreathers that offered five minutes of air and jammed it in his mouth.

  When he had air in his own lungs, he grabbed a second mini-rebreather and stuck it in Champion’s mouth, enabling her to breathe underwater, too.

  Then he set about finishing what he had to do: hovering in the now totally flooded hold, he opened the second Samsonite case and tossed its two uranium spheres out the open side door. They sank into the void, disappearing forever.

  Once that was done, he reached up and untied something tethered to the hold’s wall beside Champion’s head.

  He grabbed Champion and, gripping her tightly, made to pull the rip cord on the object, only for someone to suddenly grab his boot!

  It was the berserker. The fucker just wouldn’t die! And now he was stopping Schofield getting out of here.

  The walls groaned. The skeleton of the plane creaked.

  In seconds, the whole thing would implode and this maniac was stopping them getting out!

  Schofield kicked at the berserker, but he couldn’t get him to release his grip.
r />   Fuck it, Schofield thought. This might do it.

  He yanked on the rip cord of the object he’d taken from the wall.

  That object was a life raft.

  As soon as Schofield pulled its rip-cord, it inflated and shot up out of the hold like a bullet, wrenching Schofield free of the berserker’s grip and he and Champion went whipping up out of the opening at the rear end of the sinking Antonov, yanked upward by the air in the fast-inflating raft.

  The raft shoomed upward, trailing bubbles, with Schofield hanging from it by one outstretched arm, gripping Champion in his spare hand.

  Seconds after they blasted out of the plane, it crumpled like a tin can, surrendering to the ocean’s brutal pressure and the berserker inside it was crushed to nothing. The tangled wreck kept sinking, disappearing into the haze.

  Aware of the effects of rising too fast through water, Schofield and Champion exhaled all the way up, until at last, the raft broke the surface.

  The waterfall and Dragon’s cliffs rose behind them. Sheer and covered in snow and ice, they would be impossible to scale.

  In the other direction, to the west, was an expanse of sea ice, shot through with ten-foot-deep leads.

  Schofield quickly pushed Champion up into the raft—she tried as best she could to help but the wound reaching through her back to her stomach was clearly very painful. He climbed in after her and started paddling for the shelter of the nearest lead before any of their enemies arrived at the cliffs and saw them.

  Within moments, they were in the shelter of the leads, and once there, Champion spat out her mouthpiece, fell back against the bow and closed her eyes, drifting out of consciousness.

  Above her, Schofield swore.

  His team was in complete disarray: Ivanov was dead, Baba too; the Kid and Mario were still at large, but now totally on their own; Mother, Zack and Emma had got away with the last two spheres, but Schofield knew that the Army of Thieves would already be hunting them. And lastly there was Champion and him: she had a gut wound—if it didn’t kill her, it would at least immobilize her—while his left hand and shoulder bore bullet wounds.

  He had lived to fight another day, only now—battered, bruised and wounded—he was a long, long way from the fight.

  CRYSTAL CITY, VIRGINIA 2230 HOURS (1130 HOURS AT DRAGON)

  DAVE FAIRFAX ushered Marianne Retter into his apartment in Crystal City and slammed the door shut behind them, breathless.

  They’d come straight here by train from the Pentagon, where they had just escaped from a group of men posing as a VIP transport team. Dave’s place in Crystal City was pretty close to the Pentagon, just one Metro stop and a reasonable walk away.

  “Okay, you are now officially a very important person,” Dave gasped. “That was just brazen. A straight-out kidnapping at the Pentagon’s front doors.”

  “Who were those guys?” Marianne asked.

  “Don’t know,” Dave said. “But they knew who you were and where you were going and they didn’t want you to get there. We gotta hurry. If they can identify me, we can’t stay here for long. But if we’re gonna keep investigating this matter, I need a computer with some serious software on it . . .”

  Dave unlocked a drawer and pulled his home laptop from it. He flipped the computer open, threw on an earpiece and started typing quickly.

  “They didn’t look foreign,” Retter said to herself, her voice analytical. “And their accents were flawless; outfits, too. Could they have been American? And while brazen, sure, they made a small mistake that most people wouldn’t have picked up. But it was a mistake of speed—they could fake everything else, ID tags, cars, but they had to get to me before they could source a car with the right wheels, which means the decision to snatch me was made in a hurry—”

  “Wait.” Dave held up a hand, touched his earpiece. “I’m tapping into encrypted radio airspace around D.C.—military, intelligence and police channels—using our names as keywords. Something like this goes wrong, people start calling their superiors over cell phones and radios . . .”

  Text scrolled out on his screen.

  “Oh, shit . . .” Dave said.

  “What?” Retter leaned forward.

  Dave nodded at the text scrolling out on the screen:

  TRACK V–DATA SYSTEM

  ECHELON SUBSYSTEM REGION: E-4 WASHINGTON D.C. AND SURROUNDS

  FREQUENCY RANGE: 462.741–464.85 MHZ

  KEYWORDS: RETTER, MARIANNE, FAIRFAX, DAVID

  KEYWORDS FOUND.

  FROM USER: A9 (CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY)

  VOICE 1: THE RETTER SNATCH AT THE PENTAGON WAS BLOWN. WHAT

  HAPPENED?

  VOICE 2: SHE IDENTIFIED US AND GOT AWAY WITH SOME GUY.

  VOICE 3: WE HAVE HIS NAME. DAVID FAIRFAX. HE’S ALSO DIA. GOT A HOME

  ADDRESS IN CRYSTAL CITY.

  VOICE 1: GET THERE NOW.

  Dave looked at Marianne. “And there you have it. You almost just got kidnapped by the CIA and we have to run right now.”

  They fled from Dave’s apartment, taking his laptop with them, and dashed to a nearby mall that stayed open till midnight. There they hid in a bookstore, in the coffee shop by the magazine racks, with a good view of the entrance.

  “Okay,” Dave said. “I think it’s time for some more information sharing between you and me.”

  “That assumes I can trust you,” Retter said.

  “Navy Cross . . .” Dave said. “On the run, too.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.”

  Dave put his laptop on the table and typed as he spoke. “Okay, me first, here’s what I know: my Marine contact is up in the Arctic Circle. He said he was about to go into battle and asked me to look up two things for him: the Army of Thieves and Dragon Island, an old and very nasty ex-Soviet base up in the Arctic.

  “My investigations into the Army of Thieves led me to you. My investigations into Dragon Island led me to this, which was why I was coming to see you. This is a list of American military and intelligence organizations who have made mention of or shown some interest in Dragon Island over the last thirty years.”

  Retter’s eyes went wide when she saw the screen. “That’s the JCIDD. It’s only accessible to the Joint Chiefs and the highest-ranking—”

  “Did I mention that I’m a code-cracker?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Any names you recognize?” he asked.

  She scanned the list on Dave’s screen:

  AGENCY

  DOC TYPE

  SUMMARY

  AUTHOR

  YEAR

  USN

  SOVIET SUB REPAIR BASES

  List of Soviet Navy ballistic-missile submarine repair facilities

  Draper, A

  1979–present

  NWS

  MACRO WEATHER SYSTEM ANALYSIS

  Analysis of jet stream wind patterns

  Corbett, L

  1982

  CIA

  POSSIBLE LOCATIONS

  Geographical options for Operation “Dragonslayer”

  Calderon, M

  1984

  CIA

  SOVIET CHEM & BIO WEAPONS DVLPT SITES

  List of known Soviet chemical and biological weapons development sites and facilities

  Dockrill, W

  1986

  USAF

  HIGH-VALUE TARGET LIST (USSR)

  List of first-strike targets in the USSR in the event of a major conflict

  Holman, G

  1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991

  NRO/USAF

  SATELLITE LOCATION LIST

  Interagency swap of GPS data concerning Russian bases

  Gaunt, K

  2001 (updated 2006)

  ARMY

  SOVIET CHEMICAL & BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS SURVEY

  List of known chemical and biological weapons kept by USSR/Russian Special Weapons Directorate

  Gamble, N

  1980–1991; 1992–present

  Retter bit her lip as she peered at the list.
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  “The usual suspects,” she said, “Army, Air Force, Navy, CIA, even the National Weather Service analyzing the jet stream. But if you look closely at it, this gives you a sort of rough history of Dragon Island.”

  “How so?” Dave asked.

  “Well, look. It starts with Dragon coming to the U.S. Navy’s attention in 1979 as a run-of-the-mill northern repair facility for the Soviet ballistic-missile fleet. Then the Weather Service found it, due to its position under the Arctic jet stream. But then it gets interesting.

  “Now, you told me earlier that the weapons base on Dragon was built in 1985. Look here: in 1986, Dragon appeared immediately on a CIA list of Soviet chemical and biological weapons sites and the Air Force’s list of high-value Soviet targets. It actually stayed on that second list until the USSR’s fall in 1992, but after that, it fell off it, no longer a high-value site. The other documents look like standard crap, like the 1984 CIA report titled POSSIBLE LOCATIONS by—wait a goddamn second—by ‘Calderon, M.’”

  “What?” Dave asked. “Who’s that?”

  “Calderon, M., is Marius Calderon,” Retter said thoughtfully. “No way . . . this is one of his schemes. Fuck me, this could be the link you’re looking for, Mr. Fairfax.”

  “What? Why? You know this guy?”

  “Do I ever. I’ve come across his name a few times in my research into the Army of Thieves. This could explain a lot.”

  Now it was Dave who leaned forward. “So who is he and why is he writing about Dragon Island in 1984, a year before the base there was even built?”

  A siren wailed outside the store, and they both spun, but it was just an ambulance, speeding away. They exhaled.

  “Marius Calderon,” Retter said, “is a hotshot at the CIA, been there since 1980 when they recruited him straight out of Army Ranger training.

  “His original area of expertise was China: Calderon was assigned to observe and analyze China following its program of economic reforms that had commenced in 1978. But he’s served in almost every corner of the CIA since: from the Activity to the Special-Ops division. Importantly for our purposes, in the late 1980s, he was an instructor at the School of the Americas, that military training academy I was telling you about that the U.S. Army ran out of Fort Benning at which . . .”