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 nose! If we are to make a last stand, it is the best place!”
“Our own private Alamo . . .” Mother said as she arrived on the forward section of locomotive 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 nose section 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 honor 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 nose section, 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 snowplow 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 nose—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 around 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 back with his Steyr TMP.
Ducking bullets, Schofield crested a hill and suddenly beheld the runway, where he saw Calderon’s second plane—an Antonov-12, just like the first one—emerge from its hangar, wheel around on the taxiway and start rumbling down the runway, accelerating to takeoff 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 seventy miles 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 it could go.
The Antonov-12 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 yards of runway to spare.
The sight of the Antonov-12 lifting off from Dragon Island’s western runway would have been pretty impressive in and of itself, but its liftoff 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 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 w
ith 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 math in his head: the gap in the gas cloud would be perhaps fifty miles 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 analyzer 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 center. Every few seconds, the screen changed, showing the cloud getting closer as the plane advanced toward it.
They were currently 30 miles 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 stenciled 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 vaporize 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 gun-barrel 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 off-line!”
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 authorized 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 defenseless 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 tires.
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.
Scarecrow Returns ss-5 Page 28
