Scarecrow ss-3

by Matthew Reilly

  The Lamborghini shot past the yellow rally car, the driver of the Peugeot looking left just in time to see the Diablo rocket by in a blur of black—at the same time as an M-67 grenade came lobbing in through his open driver's window.

  The Lamborghini shot down the road as the Peugeot erupted in a ball of flames. The flaming Peugeot promptly missed the next curve and blasted right through the guard-rail fence there and fell— a long, slow drop that ended in the Atlantic Ocean far, far below.

  Knight's Lamborghini was now twenty yards behind Schofield's WRX and the Mi-34 chopper above it.

  Knight saw that Schofield was now racing down a long straight stretch of road that ended at a tunnel at the very base of this side-road—a tunnel that gave access to an enormous boatshed.

  'Schofield!' Knight called into his radio. 'Don't shoot behind you, okay! The Lamborghini is me!'

  'The Lamborghini. Why doesn't that surprise me,' said Schofield's voice. 'Nice of you to join us. Anything you can do about this damn helicopter?'

  Knight took in the scene: saw Schofield's blue WRX up ahead, rapidly approaching the tunnel—saw the underbelly of the Mi-34 directly above and behind the WRX, saw the swaying Russian sniper dangling from it, banging and bouncing on the road right in front of his speeding Diablo.

  Chopper—sniper—tunnel, he thought.

  All he needed was an escape vehicle.

  Knight glanced at his rear-view mirror: it was filled by the grille of the first rig—it was a Mack rig, with a distinctive long-nosed bonnet—rumbling down the road behind him.

  Thank you very much.

  'Hang on, Schofield. I've got this sucker.'

  He powered forward, bringing the Lamborghini under the Mi-34 chopper, out of its sight. Then with a rather morbid bang, he charged his car right into the dangling sniper's corpse, so that the body bounced up onto his bonnet and then dropped in through the Diablo's open targa roof.

  Knight whipped out a pair of handcuffs—the bounty hunter's most valuable tool—and cuffed the dead sniper's safety harness to the steering wheel of his Lamborghini.

  He then hit the cruise control and jumped out of his seat, climbing up and out through the targa roof.

  At that moment, the big Mack rig caught up with him and rammed into the back of the Lamborghini.

  But Knight was ready for the impact, and as the two vehicles touched, he made his move—dashing across the flat rear section of the Lamborghini, firing his pistol into the windshield of the Mack

  as he did so, killing its driver, and then leaping from the rear of the Lamborghini onto the long nose of the Mack!

  Within seconds, he was through the rig's shattered windscreen and in its driver's seat, in control of the big rig—and with a front row seat for what was about to happen.

  Schofield's WRX shot into the tunnel at the base of the hill.

  The Skorpion chopper—knowing it had to go over the tunnel and recapture Schofield on the other side—lifted, or rather, tried to lift.

  But the lightweight Mi-34 chopper couldn't rise, owing to the weight of the Lamborghini now anchored to it.

  The Skorpion pilot realised the implications of this a second too late.

  The driverless Lamborghini rushed into the tunnel's arched entrance, while the chopper rushed over it, and to the pilot's horror, the vertical rope connecting the two vehicles went taut and . . . folded ... as it hit the archway.

  The Skorpion chopper and the Lamborghini came together like a pair of scissor blades.

  The Diablo was lifted completely off the ground, flying upwards, crunching into the ceiling of the tunnel, crumpling in an instant, bringing down a rain of tiles as it did so.

  For its part, the Mi-34 was yanked downward by the rope, and it slammed down into the rocks above the tunnel and exploded in a shower of fire and rubble.

  Knight shot under it all—at the wheel of the Mack rig—roaring into the tunnel, shooting past the fiery remains of his discarded Lamborghini.

  Up ahead, Schofield blasted out the other end of the same tunnel, started zooming up the hill.

  He rounded a corner, saw the upwardly-sloping road ahead— lots of sweeping bends and blind corners, and at the top of the road, the two other yellow Peugeots that had taken the high road.

  They'd gone ahead, taking the shorter route, and doubled back, so that now they were shooting down this road, on a collision course with him and Gant.

  Schofield's WRX powered up the hill, now trailed by only two vehicles, the two rigs: Knight's long-nosed Mack and the second rig, a snub-nosed Kenworth.

  But then the WRX swept around a blind corner and was abruptly confronted by another unexpected sight:

  A fighter jet had swung into a hover just out from the bend, its nose pointed menacingly downward, an arsenal of missiles hanging from its-wings.

  Schofield recognised it instantly as a Dassault Mirage 2000NTI, the French equivalent of the Harrier jump-jet. Converted from the regular Mirage 2000N, the 'II' was a hover-capable fighter stationed only on France's newest and biggest aircraft carriers. It looked a lot like a Harrier, stocky and hunchbacked, with semi-circular air intakes on either side of a two-man cockpit.

  The Mirage's guns erupted and a swarm of laser-like tracer bullets tore into the rock walls above Schofield's car.

  Schofield floored it, whipping past the hovering plane as it

  wheeled around heavily in the air, its bullet-storm chasing him, but he shot around another bend just as some of its tracers sheared off his rear bumper.

  'Here, quickly, take the wheel,' Schofield said to Gant.

  She slipped over into the driver's seat while he dipped into a pocket on his combat webbing and removed some bullets— Knight's orange-banded rounds. Bull-stoppers.

  'People, no. Fighter planes, yes,' he said as he loaded the orange bullets into his Desert Eagle's magazine, finishing at the same time as a second Mirage swooped down over the road right in front of the WRX, its guns blazing.

  But now, Schofield was ready to respond.

  He lifted himself out the passenger window, sat on its sill, and pointed his Desert Eagle dead ahead.

  The Mirage's bullets tore up the road in front of the WRX just as Schofield started firing repeatedly at the hovering plane— blam!-blam!-blam!-blam'.-blam!-blam!-blam'.-blant!-blam!—hitting it in both of its air intakes at the same time as some of the fighter's tracers sizzled in through the windscreen of his WRX.

  Schofield's gas-expanding bullets did their job.

  As the first bullets hit the Mirage's intake fans, their internal gases blasted outward, tearing the fans' blades to pieces, warping them, causing them to jam and the plane to stall and also to allow the following bullets to race fully into the jet engines themselves and detonate within the plane's highly volatile fuel injection chambers.

  Two small bullets was all it took to destroy a $600 million warplane.

  Its engines failing, the Mirage wheeled wildly around in the sky, spraying tracer bullets everywhere, before—boom!—the French fighter blasted out into a thousand pieces, showering liquid fire, before it just dropped out of the sky, landing in a crumpled smoking heap on the road 50 yards in front of the speeding WRX.

  Schofield dropped back inside the passenger window . . .

  ... to see Gant slumped against her door, blood gushing from a giant wound to her left shoulder. A two-inch-wide hole could be

  seen in the driver's seat behind her, matching the location of her wound.

  She'd been hit by one of the Mirage's tracer bullets.

  'Oh, no . . .' Schofield breathed. He dived across the seat, hit the brakes.

  The WRX squealed to a halt, just short of the wreckage of the Mirage.

  'Fox!' Schofield yelled. 'Libby!'

  Her eyes opened, heavy-lidded. 'Ow, that hurts . . .' she groaned.

  'Come on,' Schofield kicked open the door and lifted her out, carrying her in his arms. Then, into his radio: 'Knight! Where are you!'

  'I'm in the first rig. Wit
h another one close behind me. Where are—hang on, I see you.''

  'Fox has been hit. We need a ride.'

  ' When I pull up, get in fast, 'cause that other rig is going to be right on my ass.''

  And then Schofield saw Knight: saw the long-nosed Mack rig rumbling up the slope, moving quickly.

  With a loud shriek of its brakes, the Mack shuddered to a stop beside the WRX.

  Knight threw open the door, and Schofield lifted Gant and himself in. Knight jammed the truck back into gear and hit the gas a bare moment before the snub-nosed Kenworth rig appeared around the bend behind them, coming at full speed, its engine roaring.

  - The Mack jounced and bounced over the wreckage of the Mirage fighter strewn across the road, picking up speed. The second rig just barged right through the Mirage's remains before ramming hard into the back of Knight's still-accelerating rig.

  Knight, Schofield and Gant were all thrown forward by the impact.

  Knight and Schofield turned to each other and said at exactly the same time: 'There are two rally cars coming at us from in front!'

  They both paused. Mirror images.

  'What happened to her!' Knight said.

  'She got shot by a fighter plane,' Schofield said.

  'Oh.'

  The two trucks charged up the hill, their exhaust stacks belching black smoke.

  Then suddenly the two yellow rally cars that had gone ahead came into view, rounding a wide bend right in front of Knight and Schofield's rig, roaring down the same slope—both cars featuring men leaning out their passenger windows, holding AK-47 machine-guns.

  They might as well have been firing pea-shooters.

  The giant Mack rig blasted right through the left-hand Peugeot, blowing it to smithereens, while the second Axon rally car just fish-tailed out of the way, side-swiping the rock wall on the landward side of the roadway before skidding to a jarring halt, the two rigs rumbling past it.

  The Mack reached the top of the hill and rejoined the flatter main road at a fork junction.

  The snub-nosed Kenworth was right behind it, closely followed by the last-remaining Peugeot. Rejoining the chase, the rally car leapt up onto the main road a split second before—SLAM!—the entire fork junction erupted in a cloud of dirt, hit by a shell from the ever-present French destroyer.

  The two big rigs flew around a bend, the ocean dropping away to their left, when suddenly they were confronted by the yawning entrance to another cliff-side tunnel. This tunnel bent away in a long curve to the right, hugging the cliff-face, and was clearly longer than any of the previous tunnels.

  The Mack thundered into the tunnel doing ninety, just as behind it, the Peugeot pulled alongside the Kenworth and the gunman in the rally car's window unleashed a volley of fire at the Mack's rearmost tyres.

  The Mack's tyres were blasted apart, started slapping against the roadway, and the big rig's rear-end started fishtailing wildly.

  Which was when the Kenworth rig made its move, and powered forward.

  'They're coming alongside us!' Schofield yelled.

  In the confines of the tunnel, the snub-nosed rig pulled up next to the Mack's right-hand flank.

  'I'll take care of it,' Knight said. 'Here, take the wheel.'

  With that, Knight jumped out of the driver's seat and charged aft into the Mack's sleeping compartment where he quickly fired two shots into its rear window, a window which opened onto the rig's flat trailer-connection section. Within seconds he had disappeared out through the window, into the roaring wind.

  The two rigs rushed through the curving tunnel side-by-side, whipping past its ocean-side columns.

  Schofield drove, glancing at the wounded Gant beside him. She was hit badly this time.

  There came a loud aerial boom from somewhere nearby, and Schofield snapped round to see the second Mirage fighter whip past the blurring columns on his left, shooting ahead of the chase.

  Not a good sign, he thought.

  And then the snub-nosed rig came fully alongside his own on the right. He saw two ExSol men inside its cabin, and as it drew level with the Mack, he saw the gunner climb quickly across the driver and throw open the door closest to the Mack.

  He was going to come across.

  Schofield raised his Desert Eagle pistol in response—click.

  No ammo left.

  'Crap!'

  The Executive Solutions man leapt across the gap between the two speeding semi-trailer rigs, landing on the passenger step of Schofield's Mack. He raised his machine-gun, pointing it in through the window, an unmissable shot—

  —at the same time as Schofield drew his Maghook from his thigh holster, aimed it at the thug and pulled the trigger—

  Ppp-fzzz . . .

  The Maghook didn't fire. It just emitted a weak fizzing sound. It was out of propulsion gas.

  'Goddamn it!' Schofield yelled. 'That never happens!'

  But now he was out of options: he and Gant were sitting ducks.

  The ExSol man in the window saw this, and he leered, his finger squeezing on his trigger.

  At which moment he was squashed like a pancake as the Kenworth rig—his rig—rammed viciously into the Mack, hitting it so hard that both trucks were lifted momentarily off the road!

  The hapless mercenary simply exploded, his body popping in a burst of red, his eyes bugging before he dropped out of Schofield's view and fell to the rushing roadway beneath the two rigs.

  And as the man dropped from sight, he revealed the new driver of the snub-nosed Kenworth rig—Aloysius Knight.

  For when the ExSol mercenary had jumped over from the doorway of the Kenworth to the doorway of the Mack, another figure had crossed over in the other direction, from the rear section of the Mack to the rear section of the Kenworth rig.

  Knight.

  Now the two rigs raced side-by-side through the long curving tunnel, pursued only by the last yellow Peugeot.

  But with its blown-open rear tyres, Schofield's Mack was dangerously unstable. It slipped and slid wildly, trying to get traction.

  Schofield keyed his radio. 'Knight! I can't hold this truck! We have to come over to you!'

  'All right, I'll come in closer. Send your lady over.'

  The Kenworth swung in next to the Mack, rubbing up against its side.

  Schofield quickly secured the Mack's steering wheel in place with his seatbelt. Then he shuffled over, kicked open the passenger door, and started to help Gant move.

  At the same time, Knight opened his driver's side door and extended his spare hand.

  Abruptly, gunfire.

  Smacking into both trucks' frames. But it was just wild fire from the trailing Peugeot.

  Schofield made the transfer, handed Gant over to Knight—who pulled her across the gap into the Kenworth's cab, before laying her gently on the passenger seat.

  With Gant safely across, Schofield started to step across the gap__

  —just as a shocking burst of a zillion tracer bullets ripped horizontally through the air in front of him, creating a lethal laser-like barrier, cutting him off from Knight and Gant's rig.

  Schofield snapped to look forward and saw the source of this new wave of gunfire.

  He saw the end of the curving tunnel, saw the road bend away to the right beyond it, and saw, rising ominously into the air just out from the turn, the second Mirage 2000N-II fighter, its six-barrelled mini-gun blazing away.

  And then, to Schofield's horror, the line of sizzling tracer rounds swung in toward his rig and—baml-baml-baml-baml-bami-baml-baml-baml-baml-baml-baml—an unimaginable barrage of bullets slammed into the metal grille of the Mack, hammering it with a million pock-marks.

  The Mack's engine caught fire, hydraulic fluid sprayed everywhere, and suddenly Schofield could see nothing through his windshield. He pumped the brakes—no good; they were history. Tried the steering wheel—it worked only slightly, enough for him to say to the fighter plane:

  'If I'm going down, you're going down with me.'

  Th
e Mack careered down the length of the tunnel, together with the Kenworth.

  And still the Mirage's withering fire didn't stop.

  The two rigs hit the end of the tunnel—separated now and Aloysius Knight had no choice but to take the bend to the right, while Schofield's Mack—its bonnet blazing, its rear tyres sliding— could do nothing but rush straight ahead, ignoring the corner.

  Schofield saw it all before it happened.

  And he knew he could do nothing.

  'Good God . . .' he breathed.

  A second later, the speeding Mack truck missed the corner completely and blasted right through the guard-rail fence and shot out into the clear afternoon sky, heading straight for the hovering Mirage fighter.

  The Mack truck soared through the air in a glorious arc, nose high, wheels spinning, its path through the sky traced by the line of black smoke issuing out from its flaming bonnet.

  But its arc stopped abruptly as the massive trailer rig slammed at tremendous speed into the Mirage fighter hovering just out from the cliff-side roadway.

  The truck and the plane collided with astonishing force, the Mirage lurching backwards in mid-air under the weight of the mighty impact.

  Already on fire, the Mack completely blew up now, its flaming bonnet driving into the nose of the hovering French fighter. For its part, the Mirage just rocked—then swayed—and then exploded, blasting out in a brilliant blinding fireball.

  Then it dropped out of the sky, falling four hundred feet straight down the cliff-face with the remains of the Mack truck buried in its nose, before it smashed into the waves below with a single gigantic splash.

  And in the middle of it all, in the middle of the tangled mechanical mess, without a rope or a Maghook to call on, was Shane M. Schofield.

  Knight and Gant saw it all from their rig as they sped away along the winding cliff-side road.

  They saw Schofield's Mack blast through the guard-rail and crash into the hovering Mirage after which came the fiery explosion and the long drop to the ocean below.

  No-one could have survived such an impact.

  Despite her wounds, Gant's eyes widened in horror. 'Oh God, no. Shane . . .' she whispered.