Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves by Matthew Reilly
They looked back in horror at the grim face of the man whose torture they had cheered only a short while ago.
Schofield shot them where they stood until there was no member of the Army of Thieves left alive on the balcony.
His enemies dead, Schofield raced to Mother’s side.
As he arrived at her body, hanging motionless from the forklift, to his great surprise, he saw her head move slightly, as if cocking to one side.
‘Mother?’ he said, unsure. It could have been a post-death reflex.
‘Scarecrow?’ Her voice was muffled by the wooden box over it. ‘No way. Was all that gunfire yours?’
Schofield hurriedly lowered the forklift, bringing Mother and Baba down to the floor, where he quickly shot open their handcuffs and hastily removed the boxes from their heads.
Mother’s box came off first.
Two dead rats tumbled out of it . . . headless. Their necks ended in ragged bloody stumps. Their heads had been wrenched off.
Mother’s teeth, Schofield saw, were bloody.
‘Oh, Mother . . .’ he said, clutching her in a firm embrace.
‘Ozzy fucking Osbourne’s got nothing on me,’ she said, hugging him back. ‘Anyone can bite the head off a bat onstage. Try biting the heads off two wild fucking rats while they’re trying to get at you! Now that takes balls.’
Zack came over and removed Baba’s box and, just like Mother’s, out of it dropped two headless rats.
The Frenchman spat out some tiny rat bones. ‘Eugh! The fur gets between your teeth!’
‘That was your plan?’ Schofield said to Mother. ‘Fake your death and maybe make a move when they dumped your body?’
‘Hey. Last I saw, you’d been crispy-fried and told me to fight on after your death. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.’
‘Nice plan, actually.’
Mother shrugged. ‘When they put those boxes on our heads, I said to Baba, “Do what Ozzy Osbourne would do and then play dead.” Luckily, Baba is a man of fine musical taste and understood what that meant.’
Schofield smiled. ‘I love you to death, Mother. And you’re growing on me, too, Baba.’
Baba nodded at Schofield’s weapons. ‘And I know those guns, monsieur. A fine woman owns them. Is she alive?’
‘For now, yes, but we can talk about that later. This resurrection isn’t over yet. We gotta stop those bastards firing another missile.’
As he turned to move, Schofield saw Zack crouching a short distance away. He was bent over the remains of Bertie.
Schofield came over.
Bertie lay on the floor, horrifically mutilated. His entire lower half—his wheels and motor—had been blown apart by the grenade blast. It was now a tangled mess. His upper half was still intact and his internal battery was evidently still working, too: both his cannon and his stalk-mounted lens kept roving around, searching bravely for enemies even though he could no longer move.
‘How is he?’ Schofield asked.
‘He wants to keep fighting, but he isn’t going anywhere anymore.’
Schofield looked down at the little robot. ‘That little guy brought me back from the dead. He stays with me.’
Schofield quickly grabbed an object off the nearby corpse of an Army of Thieves man. Then he picked up Bertie—what was left of him—and did something that made Zack smile.
‘Hey, nice . . .’ Zack said.
Last of all, Schofield went over to Mobutu’s body and took his Maghook back. When he had it, he nodded at the exit door. ‘This way.’
They all hurried for the door.
Mother and Baba were at the rear of the group. They crouched to grab an AK-47 each from a couple of dead Thieves, plus some spare clips and also an earpiece radio each.
As she hurried after Schofield, Mother looked back at the carnage behind them: nearly forty bloody corpses.
‘Mental note,’ she said softly to Baba. ‘Never ever make the Scarecrow angry.’
Flanked by Mother, Baba and Zack, Schofield blew the lock on the exterior door of the gasworks and peered outside—in time to see Calderon, flanked by Big Jesus and half a dozen men, striding off toward the missile battery.
A short distance ahead of them was Typhon, carrying the Samsonite case with the spheres in it. He was about to cross the high bridge that gave access to the missile battery.
Without warning, Calderon turned and saw Scarecrow and at his shout, his men opened fire on Schofield and his people, trying to keep them at bay long enough for Typhon to get to the missile battery with the spheres.
Schofield immediately saw that he was too late.
He couldn’t overcome Calderon’s men and stop Typhon.
‘Damn it,’ he said. ‘There’s no way we can—’
He cut himself off as he saw the tiny figure in the distance, seemingly sitting at the far end of the high bridge that Typhon was now in the process of crossing, a figure Schofield recognised.
He never finished his sentence, for it was at that exact moment that the explosion came and the missile battery blew sky high.
The entire missile battery went up in a great billowing fireball, right in front of Typhon.
A rolling series of explosions went off as, one after the other, the six transport erector launchers on the flat-topped rocky mount blew apart, their gas tanks rupturing, the missiles on their backs either shattering to pieces or being flung off the mount by the force of the blasts.
The only explanation Schofield had for the blast was the tiny figure he’d glimpsed sitting at the end of the road bridge.
It had been the Kid, just sitting there on the roadway. The blast, when it went off, had consumed him and now he was nowhere to be seen.
Schofield recalled seeing Mario earlier, before his torture. Betraying his team and siding with Calderon, Mario claimed he had shot the Kid in the head.
Schofield couldn’t know for sure, but he suspected that Mario—more mechanic than rifleman and a low-level hoodlum to boot—had made the mistake of many a criminal thug: he had shot the Kid in the forehead and walked away.
The thing was, contrary to popular belief, a forehead shot is the most unlikely headshot to kill someone. Through millennia of evolution, the bone of the forehead, the brain’s primary protective barrier, is the thickest and strongest part of the human skull. Experienced criminal killers always fire two shots into the back of the head, where the skull is much softer: the so-called execution-style killing. Snipers will aim for the temple or, if they can, the eye. But with a shot to the forehead, if the victim can get to a hospital in a reasonable time, the wound is actually very survivable.
The Kid had evidently survived.
Long enough to complete his mission, if slowly.
Schofield pictured him, bleeding from the forehead and moving with difficulty, planting his grenades around the missile site, placing them on gas tanks for maximum effect, and then when it was done, slumping on his ass on the roadway, waiting for the end to come.
It had come in spectacular fashion.
When Marius Calderon saw his missile battery go up in flames, his mouth fell open.
He shook the shock away. He hadn’t come this far without contingency plans and he still had a few of those.
‘Big Jesus!’ he yelled, handing the burly Thief one of the spheres. ‘Get to the train! Roll it out and use its mobile missile launcher to ignite the atmosphere! Typhon! Come with me!’
‘Yes, sir!’ Big Jesus hurried back toward the gasworks, unslinging the Kord, accompanied by six other Thieves, their AK-47s raking Schofield’s door, keeping him and his people pinned down inside.
But they didn’t try to enter the gasworks. Big Jesus and his team ran right past the door—pummelling it with gunfire—and hurried around the northern corner of the gasworks.
They were heading for the railway platform’s outer entrance.
After they were gone, Schofield cracked open his door and saw Calderon.
The CIA man was leaping into a jeep?
‘Now where is he going?’ Mother said.
‘He’s hedging his bets,’ Schofield said. ‘He sent those assholes to the train to fire off a sphere on a carriage-mounted missile. If they succeed, he wins. But if they fail, he still has one sphere left, and if he has another plane he can use—’
‘He does,’ Zack said. ‘In one of the hangars. Emma and I were hiding in it when we were caught. It looked just like the one you drove off the waterfall. Had a whole lot of stuff in the hold, all covered up.’
‘Did it now?’ Schofield paused, thinking. ‘I’m guessing that apart from the missiles on that train, he’s all out of missiles. The only other choice he has left is flying that last sphere directly into the gas cloud and releasing it like a bomb. What the—’
As he said this, Schofield had been peering out through the doorway, watching Calderon’s jeep.
To his surprise, the jeep skidded to a halt beside the cable car terminal overlooking the islets to the north. Typhon leapt out of the jeep and ran inside, appearing a minute later on the roof of the terminal.
Schofield watched him intently. ‘No . . . no way . . .’
On the roof of the terminal, partially hidden behind a low wall, Typhon crouched for a few seconds and then rose holding something in his hands: a compact and very modern black satellite dish.
The curved dish was square in shape and made of a metal mesh.
Typhon didn’t waste any time. Moments later, he appeared on the ground level again, leapt back into Calderon’s jeep and the jeep sped off.
Schofield’s eyes narrowed.
His mind was whirring now, connecting dots. Things were moving way too quickly and he was struggling to keep everything clear in his head, when suddenly he saw it, saw it all.
‘I think I just figured out what Calderon’s exit strategy is,’ he said.
‘I thought you already figured that out? It’s his second plane,’ Mother said.
‘No, the exit strategy for his entire plan, a secret CIA plan that’s been in operation for over twenty years,’ Schofield said. ‘It’s his final exit strategy, one that leaves no trace of the Army of Thieves and thus no witnesses.’
Schofield gritted his teeth, looked around for a nearby vehicle, and spotted one, a jeep. ‘I have to stop him taking off in that plane or else this whole island and everyone on it is history.’
‘What!’ Mother said.
‘Are you serious?’ Baba said.
‘Trust me. There’s no time to explain. Right now, I need you two to take care of that train. Do whatever you have to do to stop them launching a missile from it. I’ll take Zack and go after Calderon and his plane. Zack—’
He turned.
Zack was nowhere to be seen.
He was gone.
‘Now where the hell did he go?’ Mother said.
Schofield gazed back into the gasworks and thought of Emma. ‘I have an idea, but that’s Zack’s fight. I wish we could help him, but if we don’t stop Calderon now, a whole lot more people will die. Now go. You take the train. I’ll take the plane.’
And with those words, they split up—Mother and Baba dashed back inside the gasworks, heading for the railway platform, while Schofield leapt onto the nearby jeep and gunned it off the mark, speeding as fast as he could in the direction of the runway in a last desperate attempt to stop Marius Calderon.
Zack crept silently across the bottom level of the gasworks, wending his way through the maze of industrial-sized piping. He passed hissing valves and vats of steaming liquids. On the sides of all the vats were warning labels written in Russian. The only text he recognised was on one huge vat marked ‘TEB’ followed by a warning in bold red letters.
He was following Bad Willy.
As he’d stood with Schofield, Mother and Baba at the exit door, he had glanced back inside the gasworks—and glimpsed Willy, with Emma, down on the bottom level.
During the mayhem of Schofield’s resurrection, Zack had hit the ground and covered his head with his hands. He hadn’t seen where Bad Willy had gone with Emma.
But now he knew.
When Schofield and Bertie had started firing, Bad Willy must have dived with Emma—his hard-earned prize—down a nearby ladder and hidden with her down on the lower level.
As soon as he’d seen them in the gasworks, Zack had taken off after them, not even bothering to tell Schofield and the others where he was going. Nothing they could have said would have stopped him anyway. They could save the world, but it would mean nothing to Zack if Emma was defiled by Bad Willy before then.
And so he’d grabbed a pistol from beside the corpse of an Army of Thieves man and hurried down to the lower level and commenced his pursuit.
Mother and Baba raced through a different section of the gasworks, the uppermost level, heading for the massive train parked at the railway siding on the northern side of the vast space.
As she ran, Mother saw the megatrain start to move. Big Jesus and his six-man team were all over it, AKs in hand.
The train was only five cars long, but each car was huge, oversized in the extreme. There was an armoured locomotive at each end, then a double-levelled cargo carriage—capable of conveying jeeps, trucks and other large loads—then in the middle, a long flatbed car on which sat two huge SS-23 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, currently lying horizontally side-by-side on big hydraulic risers.
‘The Russians built many train-launched missile systems,’ Baba said as he ran. ‘But the train needs to be stationary in order to fire the missile, otherwise it will misfire.’
Mother said, ‘So they need to drive the train out of this building and then stop it to fire the missile?’
‘Correct.’
Mother pursed her lips again. ‘Think, Mother. What would Scarecrow do?’
‘What?’
‘Never mind,’ she said, as it hit her. ‘He wouldn’t let them stop the train. He’d keep it moving. Come on, Baba. We gotta get aboard, seize control of the lead locomotive and keep that train moving.’
Schofield sped along in his stolen jeep, skirting the massive moat surrounding the disc tower, heading toward the runway.
With him was Bertie, but in a most unusual configuration—the configuration that had made Zack smile.
Bertie was mounted on Schofield’s back, clipped securely to it by virtue of the flamethrower harness Schofield had taken from the dead Army of Thieves man in the gasworks. The harness’s four main carabiner clips—usually used to hold a tank on the user’s back—had clipped perfectly to points on Bertie’s metal exoskeleton so that now he sat on Schofield’s back, piggyback style.
Bertie’s stalk-mounted eye looked out eagerly over Schofield’s right shoulder, panning left and right, while his M249 cannon poked out over Schofield’s left shoulder.
Schofield drove hard.
He saw Calderon’s jeep heading round the wide circular moat, making for the steep road that led to the runway.
There hadn’t been time to tell the others about the significance of Calderon’s short stop at the cable car terminal.
The satellite dish that Typhon had grabbed was the uplink—the satellite uplink keeping Dragon Island safe from Russian and American nuclear missile strikes.
When he had first arrived on Dragon via that very same cable car terminal, Schofield had scanned the area for the uplink in the hope of disabling or destroying it, but it had been hidden, as it turned out, right above his head.
Typhon’s recent snatching of the uplink, however, had terrible ramifications.
Calderon and his key lieutenant were getting away from Dragon Island, leaving their fake terrorist army behind. Presumably, the Army of Thieves believed he would come back for them once the sky was alight.
But he wouldn’t be coming back at all, Schofield realised.
No. Watching from hi
Russian Missile Command, still monitoring Dragon with their own satellites, would immediately detect that the defensive uplink was down and, enraged at Calderon’s previous reversal of one of their nuclear missiles, immediately fire a nuke on Dragon.
Calderon would destroy China, while he would get away with his small leadership group and his fake terrorist Army would be annihilated by the Russian nuclear missile. The world would be irrevocably changed, the blame would be laid on the mysterious terrorist group, and Calderon would make a clean getaway, unconnected to any of it.
Mission accomplished.
Which was why Schofield had to stop Calderon’s plane. If he could keep Calderon on Dragon Island, Calderon wouldn’t switch off the uplink, as it would mean condemning himself to death—
Gunfire hit Scarecrow’s jeep.
Schofield spun to see an Army of Thieves troop truck thundering along behind him, with men hanging off it, firing.
‘Bertie! Take them out!’
‘Yes, Captain Schofield.’
As Schofield kept looking forward, driving hard, weaving and swerving, Bertie swivelled both his eye and his cannon around and loosed two booming shots.
The first shot hit the truck’s grille, puncturing the radiator, causing it to release a hissing plume of steam; the second hit its front left tyre, causing the truck to wobble, then fishtail, then skid out of control before it tumbled onto its side, spilling men everywhere.
Schofield smiled grimly. While deafening, it was like having eyes—and a gun—in the back of your head.
‘Good robot,’ he said.
Up ahead, he saw Calderon’s car take the left-hand fork and shoot down the steep road leading to the airfield. He made to follow, but some Army of Thieves sentries quickly stepped out onto the road there and unleashed a heavy rain of gunfire. One man had a flamethrower and sent forth a blazing tongue of fire.
Schofield swore. He couldn’t run that blockade.
So, without any loss of speed, he yanked his steering wheel right and took off up the right-hand fork. He could still reach the runway by going the long way, around the higher ground to the north.