Scarecrow by Matthew Reilly

  The Black Raven hovered level with the flight deck of the Richelieu, raining gunfire and missiles down on the fighter planes parked there.

  Four missile smoke-trails extended out from the Sukhoi’s wings and then separated to pursue different targets.

  One Rafale fighter on the deck was instantly blasted to pieces, while two anti-aircraft missile stations were obliterated. The fourth missile whizzed into the main hangar bay and rammed into an AWACS plane, destroying it in a billowing explosion.

  Inside the Raven, Rufus flew brilliantly.

  In the gunner’s seat behind him sat Knight, swivelling around in the plane’s 360-degree revolving rear chair, lining up targets and then blazing away with the Raven’s guns.

  ‘Mother! You ready?’ Knight called.

  Mother stood in the converted bomb bay behind the cockpit—armed to the teeth: MP-7, M-16, Desert Eagle pistols; she even had one of Knight’s rocket launcher packs strapped to her back.

  ‘Fuckin’-A.’

  ‘Then go!’ Knight hit a button.

  Whack!

  The floor of the bomb bay/holding cell snapped open and Mother dropped down through it, whizzing down on her Maghook’s rope.

  Inside the French aircraft carrier’s control tower, chaos reigned.

  Comm-techs were shouting into their radio-mikes, relaying information to the captain.

  ‘—damn thing got under our radars! Must have some sort of stealth mechanism—’

  ‘—They’ve hit the anti-aircraft stations on the flight deck—’

  ‘—Get those fighters to the catapults now!’

  ‘Sir! The Triomphe says it has a clear shot . . .’

  ‘Tell it to fire!’

  In response to the order, an anti-aircraft missile streaked out from one of the destroyers in the carrier group—heading straight for the Black Raven.

  ‘Rufus! I hope you fixed our electronic countermeasures when we were in Archangel!’

  ‘Taken care of, Boss.’

  The missile zoomed towards them at phenomenal speed.

  But at the last possible moment, it hit the Raven’s electronic jamming shield and veered wildly away . . .

  . . . and slammed into the outer hull of the aircraft carrier!

  ‘Escorts! Cease fire! Cease fire!’ the captain yelled. ‘That plane is too close to us! You’re hitting us! Electronics Department—find out what its jamming frequency is and neutralise it! We’ll have to destroy it with fighters.’

  Inside the main hangar bay of the carrier, Schofield was still quasi-crucified in front of the thrusters of the parked Rafale fighter.

  Abruptly, the deck around him banked steeply as the immense carrier wheeled around in the face of the Black Raven’s surprise assault.

  Lefevre and the French generals were now all on radios, looking for answers.

  All, that is, except for the Army General in the cockpit of the Rafale.

  After the initial distraction, he now glared back at Schofield. He wasn’t going to miss this opportunity.

  He reached for the ‘AFTERBURN’ switch again, gripped the control stick just as—sprack!—a bullet entered his ear and the cockpit around him was sprayed with his brains.

  In all the confusion, no-one had noticed the shadowy figure that had landed on the open-air starboard elevator adjoining the main hangar, a figure that had whizzed to the bottom of a vertical rope like a spider on a thread, a figure bearing arms.

  Mother.

  Carrying an MP-7 in one hand and an M-16 in the other, Mother stormed through the hangar bay towards Schofield.

  She was like an unstoppable force of nature.

  The squad of French paratroopers that had been guarding Schofield came at her from all sides—from behind vehicles, from around parked fighter jets.

  But Mother just strode forward, nailing them left, right and centre, never once losing her stride.

  She loosed two shots to the left—hit two paratroopers in their faces. Swung right—firing her M-16 pistol-style—and another three bad guys went down.

  A paratrooper rose from the wing of a Rafale above her and Mother just somersaulted, firing as she rolled, peppering him with bloody holes.

  She threw two smoke grenades next, and in the haze that followed, she moved and hunted like a vengeful ghost.

  Four French paratroopers went down, sucked into the smoke-haze—so, too, the French Admiral. Not even the spy, Lefevre, could escape her. A four-bladed shuriken throwing knife whistled out of the smoke near him and entered his Adam’s apple. He would die slowly.

  Then suddenly, Mother burst out of the cloud haze right next to Schofield on his forklift.

  ‘Hey, Scarecrow. How’s it hanging?’ she said.

  ‘Feeling much better now that you’re here,’ Schofield said.

  Two of Knight’s pitons made short work of his handcuffs. In seconds he was on solid ground again, free.

  But before Mother could hand him some guns, Schofield dashed over to Lefevre’s body lying on the ground nearby.

  He picked up something from the ground beside the dying Frenchman, returned to Mother’s side. She handed him an MP-7 and a Desert Eagle.

  ‘Ready to do some damage?’ she asked.

  Schofield turned to her, his eyes catching the RPG pack on her back.

  ‘I’m ready to do some serious damage,’ he said.

  They ran towards a jeep parked nearby.

  In rapid two-by-two catapult launches, four state-of-the-art Rafale fighters shot down the runway of the Richelieu and took off.

  They wheeled around in the sky above the carrier, turning back in deadly formation, heading for the hovering Black Raven.

  ‘They’re coming!’ Rufus yelled.

  ‘I see them!’ Knight called.

  He whirled around in his revolving seat, hammering on his triggers like a kid playing a video game.

  Two Rafales shot toward them, cannons blazing.

  A phalanx of orange tracer bullets sizzled through the air all around the Raven. The Raven banked and rolled in the sky, dodging the tracers, at the same time returning fire from its own revolving belly-mounted gun.

  Then the first two planes overshot them—twin sonic booms. But that was only the first act, a distraction to hide the main show.

  For the other two French fighters had swung around low, skimming over the ocean waves from the other direction, coming at the Sukhoi from below and behind.

  Still hovering above the carrier’s starboard elevator, the Sukhoi swivelled in mid-air, faced these two new planes head-on.

  ‘Damn it,’ Rufus said, eyeing his countermeasures screen. ‘The bastards are screwing with our jamming frequency . . . it’s flicking on and off. We’re losing missile jam.’

  The two new Rafales fired two missiles each.

  Knight blasted away with his cannons at the missiles, hit two of them, but the other two missiles ducked and rose and swerved too well.

  ‘Rufus . . . !’

  The missiles roared toward them.

  Rufus saw them coming, and a moment before it was too late, saw the answer.

  The missiles rushed forward, zooming in for the kill . . .

  . . . just as Rufus swung the Black Raven inside the massive doorway that opened off the aircraft carrier’s starboard elevator, manoeuvring his airborne fighter inside the ship’s main hangar!

  The missiles—unlike the shots from the destroyer, Le Triomphe—were fitted with electronic detection systems that didn’t allow them to strike their own carrier. As such, they ditched into the ocean, detonating in twin hundred-foot geysers.

  Inside the carrier’s tower, radar operators stared at their screens in confusion, shouted into their radio-mikes:

  ‘—Where the fuck did it go?—’

  ‘—What? Say again—’

  ‘What happened?’ the captain asked. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Sir. They’re inside us!’

  The Black Raven now hovered inside the cavernous hangar of the French
aircraft carrier.

  ‘I like your style, Rufus,’ Knight said as he started firing indiscriminately at the array of parked planes, helicopters and trucks.

  Like a giant bird trapped inside a living room, the Black Raven powered over the interior of the hangar, overturning entire planes with its backwash, flinging fuel trucks into the walls.

  It shoomed across the hangar causing untold mayhem and destruction, its two high tail fins even scraping against the ceiling once.

  Knight called into his radio: ‘Mother! Where are you?’

  A lone jeep shot towards the aft end of the elongated hangar bay, driving at full speed, zooming under tilting planes and bouncing fuel trucks, with Mother at the wheel and Schofield crouched in the back.

  Mother yelled. ‘I’m at the other end of the hangar bay, trying to avoid your mess!’

  ‘Do you have Schofield?’

  ‘I’ve got him.’

  ‘Want us to pick you up while we’re in here?’

  Mother turned to Schofield, bent over in the back with her—or rather, Knight’s—RPG pack. ‘You wanna be picked up in here?’

  ‘No! Not yet!’ he yelled. ‘Tell Knight to get outside. He doesn’t want to be in here in the next two minutes! In fact, he doesn’t want to be anywhere near this ship! Tell him we’ll meet him outside!’

  ‘Copy that,’ Knight said, moments later.

  He turned. ‘Rufus! Time to bail!’

  ‘You got it, Boss!’ Rufus said. ‘Now, where is that other . . . ah,’ Rufus said, spotting a second open-air elevator on the opposite side of the hangar bay.

  He powered up the Sukhoi, brought her swooping across the interior of the hangar bay, the roar of her engines drowning out all other sound, before—shoom—the Raven blasted out through the port-side elevator and into blazing sunlight.

  Meanwhile, in the back of his speeding jeep, Schofield rummaged through the RPG pack that Mother had brought.

  It was indeed Knight’s Russian-made RPG pack—which meant it contained a disposable rocket launcher and various explosive-tipped rocket charges.

  He found the one he was looking for.

  The notorious Soviet P-61 Palladium charge.

  A Palladium charge—comprising a palladium outer shell around a liquid core of enhanced hydrofluoric acid—has only one purpose: to take out civilian nuclear power plants in a terrible, terrible way.

  Nuclear weapons require a core consistency of 90% enhanced uranium. The nuclear reactors in civilian power plants, on the other hand, have a core consistency of around 5%; while reactors on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers hover at around 50%—as such, neither of these reactors can ever create a nuclear explosion. They can leak radiation—as happened at Chernobyl—but they will never create a mushroom cloud.

  What they do release every single second, however, are massive quantities of hydrogen—highly flammable hydrogen—an action which is nullified by the use of ‘recombiners’ which turn the dangerous hydrogen (H) into very safe water (H2O).

  Mixing palladium with hydrogen, however, has the opposite effect. It multiplies the deadly hydrogen, producing vast quantities of the flammable gas which can then be triggered by the addition of a catalyst like hydrofluoric acid.

  As such, the P-61 charge operates as a two-stage detonator.

  The first stage—the initial blast—mixes Palladium with hydrogen, multiplying the gas at a phenomenal rate. The second stage of the weapon ignites that gas with the acid.

  The result is a colossal explosion—not quite as big as a nuclear blast, but perhaps the only explosion in the world big enough to crack the reinforced hull of an aircraft carrier.

  ‘There!’ Schofield yelled, pointing at two gigantic cylindrical vents at the aft end of the hangar bay, fan-covered vents which expelled excess hydrogen out the rear port flank of the carrier. ‘The reactor’s exhaust vents!’

  The jeep whipped through the hangar bay, weaving past flaming fighter jets.

  Schofield stood up in the rear section of the jeep, hoisted the RPG launcher onto his shoulder, aimed it at a gigantic fan set into the side of the exhaust stacks.

  ‘As soon as I fire, Mother, hit the gas and head for the ascending ramp! We’re gonna have about thirty seconds between the first stage and the second stage. That means thirty seconds to get off this boat!’

  ‘Okay!’

  Schofield peered down the sights of the launcher. ‘Au revoir to you, assholes.’

  Then he jammed his finger down on the trigger.

  The launcher fired, sending its Palladium-tipped RPG rocketing into the upper reaches of the hangar, a dead-straight smoke-trail extending through the air behind it.

  The Palladium charge smashed through the fan in the right-hand exhaust vent and disappeared inside it, heading downward, searching for heat.

  No sooner was it away than Mother floored the jeep, wheeling it around in a tight circle before disappearing into the tunnel-like ascension ramp that allowed vehicle access from the hangar to the upper flight deck.

  Round and round the jeep went, rising upwards.

  As it circled higher, tyres squealing, there came an awesome muffled boom from deep within the bowels of the aircraft carrier.

  The Palladium charge had hit its target.

  Schofield hit his stopwatch: 00:01 . . . 00:02 . . .

  In the air above the Richelieu, the Black Raven was still engaged in the dogfight of its life with the four French Rafale fighters.

  It banked hard, screaming through the air, and took one of the Rafales out with its last remaining missile.

  But then Rufus heard a shrill beeeeeeeeep from his console.

  ‘They’ve fully hacked our countermeasure frequency!’ he called. ‘We just lost missile shield completely!’

  At that moment, another of the Rafales got on their tail and the two planes roared over the ocean together, the Rafale trailing the Sukhoi, blazing away at it with orange tracers.

  As the Raven rushed forward, Knight swung around in his revolving gunner’s chair and opened fire on the trailing plane with the Raven’s underslung revolving gun, raking the French fighter’s cockpit with a withering rain of fire, shattering its canopy, ripping the pilot to bits, causing his plane to plough into the sea with a jarring explosive splash.

  ‘Boss!’ Rufus called suddenly. ‘I need guns forward! Now!’

  Knight spun. What he hadn’t seen was that this trailing Rafale had been driving the Raven toward . . . the other two French fighters!

  The two waiting Rafales launched one missile each—

  —twin fingers of smoke lanced into the air, arcing in towards the Black Raven’s nose—

  —but Rufus rolled the sleek black plane, flying it on its side just as he engaged his custom-fitted—and very rare—secondary countermeasures: a system known as ‘Plasma Stealth’ that enveloped the entire aircraft in a cloud of ionised gas particles.

  The two missiles went berserk, splitting in a V-shape to avoid the ion cloud around the Sukhoi, and the Raven bisected them at blinding speed—leaving one missile to ditch wildly into the sea and the other to wheel around in the sky.

  But the Raven was still on a collision course with the two incoming Rafales.

  Knight swung forward, opened fire—and destroyed the left-hand wing of one Rafale a moment before the Raven overshot the two French fighters with a deafening roar.

  There was only one Rafale left now, but not for long. A moment after it passed Knight’s plane, the last French Rafale was hit by its own missile—the one that had gone rogue after being assailed by the Sukhoi’s Plasma Stealth mechanism.

  Knight and Rufus turned to see the final explosion, but as they did so, there came another noise from across the waves—a deep ominous boom from within the aircraft carrier.

  ‘Faster, Mother. Faster,’ Schofield eyed his stopwatch:

  00:09 . . .

  00:10 . . .

  The jeep shot up the circular ramp, kicking up sparks against the ramp’s close steel walls.


  Abruptly, the entire carrier banked sharply, turning to port, tilting the whole world thirty degrees.

  ‘Keep going!’ Schofield yelled.

  The first-stage blast of the Palladium charge had knocked out the Richelieu’s hydrogen recombiners: that was the ominous boom.

  Which meant that uncontrolled hydrogen was now building inside the carrier’s cooling towers at an exponential rate. In exactly 30 seconds the second stage of the palladium charge would detonate, igniting the hydrogen and bringing about aircraft carrier Armageddon.

  00:11

  00:12

  The jeep burst out from the ascension ramp into sunlight, bounced to a halt.

  There was pandemonium on the flight deck.

  Smoking planes, charred anti-aircraft guns, dead sailors. One Rafale fighter—nose down, its front wheels destroyed—blocked the Richelieu’s No. 2 take-off runway. The fighter must have been just about to take off when the Black Raven had hit it with a missile.

  Schofield saw it instantly.

  ‘Mother! Head for that broken fighter!’

  ‘That thing ain’t gonna fly, Scarecrow! Not even for you!’ Mother yelled.

  00:15

  00:16

  Amid the chaos, the jeep skidded to a halt beside the destroyed Rafale fighter. Mother was right. With its nose down and its front wheels crumpled, it wasn’t going anywhere.

  00:17

  00:18

  ‘I don’t want the plane,’ Schofield said. ‘I want this.’

  He jumped out of the jeep, reached down and grabbed the catapult hook that lay on the runway in front of the destroyed plane. The small, trapezoidal catapult hook had formerly been attached to the front wheels of the plane. Normally you would attach it to the steam-driven catapult mechanism that ran for the length of the flight deck in order to get your plane to take-off speed in the space of 90 metres.

  Schofield, however, wedged the catapult hook crudely under the front axle of his jeep and then clipped the other end of the hook to the deck catapult.

  00:19

  00:20

  ‘Oh, you cannot be serious . . .’ Mother said, eyeing the empty runway in front of their jeep—a runway that simply stopped at the bow horizon of the ship. The catapult’s rails stretched away for the length of the flight deck like a pair of railway tracks heading toward a cliff edge.