Scarecrow (43 page)

‘Oh, crap,' Knight said.

Over to their right, six of Demon Larkham's men were climbing out of the water into two motorised lifeboats.

They were coming for them.

‘Captain Schofield!' Knight called. ‘Are you done yet?'

‘Almost . . . !' Schofield yelled, his eyes locked on the screen.

00:00:51

00:00:50

00:00:49

The two IG-88 lifeboats swung over to the starboard side of the water-filled hold, picked up the Demon and the remaining IG-88 force—sixteen men in total.

Then they charged toward Schofield and the missile control console.

Knight and Mother fired.

The two IG-88 boats blasted across the water, skimming through the forest of slanted missile silos, firing as they sped.

In the meantime, Schofield was still in his own world, punching red and white circles.

00:00:41

00:00:40

00:00:39

Then he hit the final white circle and the screen changed to:

 

SECOND PROTOCOL (RESPONSE PATTERN): SATISFIED.

THIRD PROTOCOL (CODE ENTRY): ACTIVE.

PLEASE ENTER AUTHORIZED DISARM CODE.

‘All
right
,' Schofield said. The Universal Disarm Code. The sixth Mersenne prime was still written on his hand: 131071.

He started punching the numerical keypad on the CincLock unit when without warning the lifeboat beneath him moved and—

Beep!

The screen squealed in protest.

 

FIRST PROTOCOL (PROXIMITY): FAILED.

ALL PROTOCOLS REACTIVATED.

‘What!' Schofield snapped his eyes up to find Knight gunning their lifeboat
away
from the missile console, while Mother fired off their stern at two pursuing IG-88 boats.

They weaved in between the missile silos.

‘Sorry, Captain!' Knight yelled. ‘But we had to go! We were dead if we stayed there!'

‘Yeah, well we have to get back within range of that console in about ten seconds! Because I need at least twenty-five seconds to complete the response pattern!'

Bullet geysers raked the water all around their speeding lifeboat.

00:00:35

00:00:34

00:00:33

Knight brought the lifeboat round. ‘How close do you have to be!'

‘Sixty feet!'

‘All right!'

Bullets whizzed past their ears, pinged off the missile silos.

Knight swung their boat around and brought it into a wide circular path around the steel island that was the control console, a circle that included the occasional weaving run in amongst the forest of silos.

00:00:27

00:00:26

00:00:25

Schofield's screen beeped to life.

 

FIRST PROTOCOL (PROXIMITY): SATISFIED.

INITIATE SECOND PROTOCOL.

The light-response display began—which meant so did Schofield's screen-tapping.

Mother kept firing at the IG-88 boats behind them.

Knight drove with one hand, fired with the other, careful to keep their boat within sixty feet of the control console.

00:00:16

00:00:15

00:00:14

But then the IG-88 boats, now aware of the circular path Knight was taking, split up.

One of them pivoted in the water, and took off in the opposite circular direction: the effect being that the first IG-88 boat was now driving Schofield's boat toward the second one.

Oblivious to the chase, Schofield's hands moved more quickly now.

Red-white-white . . .

Tap-tap-tap . . .

00:00:11

00:00:10

00:00:09

Knight saw IG-88's plan. He fired at the oncoming boat's driver.

Blam!-blam!-blam!
 . . .

Miss-miss-miss . . .

00:00:08

00:00:07

00:00:06

Schofield's hands were a blur now, tapping smoothly left and right.

Mother hit one of their pursuers. But then roared as she took a sizzling-hot round to her shoulder.

00:00:05

00:00:04

00:00:03

They came on collision course with the second IG-88 boat, Knight still firing at its driver.

Blam!-blam!-blam!
 . . .

Miss-miss . . .

Hit.

00:00:02

The driver flopped and fell, dead. The IG-88 boat peeled away, and Knight kept his boat within the 60-foot zone of the console.

00:00:01

And Schofield's hand movements changed slightly. Instead of tapping circles, it looked as if he was entering a—

00:00:00

Too late.

 

None of the Chameleon missiles, however, fired.

The countdown timer on the console was frozen at:

00:00:00.05

The seconds may have hit zero, but the very last second—calculated in blurring digital hundredths—had yet to fully expire when Schofield had punched in the Universal Disarm Code and hit ‘
ENTER
'.

The screen now read:

 

THIRD PROTOCOL (CODE ENTRY): SATISFIED.

AUTHORIZED DISARM CODE ENTERED.

MISSILE LAUNCH ABORTED.

Schofield breathed a sigh of relief.

No missiles had launched.

London, Paris and Berlin were safe.

It was then, however, that the open starboard side door of the MV
Talbot
went slowly under the waterline.

SHOOOOOOM!!!

The roar was absolutely deafening.

It was, literally, like the opening of the floodgates.

Like an invading army overwhelming its enemy's lines, an unimaginable quantity of seawater came gushing in over the threshold of the
Talbot
's wide starboard-side doorway.

A
wall
of water—a super tidal wave of unstoppable, ravenous liquid.

The result was instantaneous.

The entire supertanker rolled dramatically,
righting itself
as the inrushing water from the starboard side began to balance off against the inflow from port.

This righting of the
Talbot
, however, had one very important side-effect: it served to disengage the
Talbot
from the bow of the
Eindhoven
. And with the loss of its grip on the other supertanker, the
Talbot
lost its only means of staying afloat.

And so it began to sink—at speed—into the depths of the English Channel.

For Schofield, Knight and Mother, in their lifeboat on the water's surface inside the missile hold, the noise was all-consuming.

The roar of the waterfall flooding into the hold echoed throughout the ship. Waves crashed against steel walls. Whirlpools formed.

And the water level rose at frightening speed.

Indeed, to Schofield, it seemed as if the ceiling was lowering itself toward them. Quickly.

Within moments, they found themselves speeding along the surface
halfway up
the gigantic missile silos, 20 feet below the steel catwalks suspended from the roof.

In addition to this, with the breaching of the star-board-side door, Demon Larkham and his IG-88 men broke away from their chase, heading instead for the various ladders that led to the hold's ceiling.

‘Damn, he's good,' Knight said. ‘The Demon's heading topside, for the foredeck. He's going to cover all the hatches. Then he just waits for us to come up—which we'll have to do eventually.'

‘Then we have to find another way out,' Schofield said. ‘All I need now is to get away from this ship and find a safe place to hole up while I disarm the missiles aimed at America.'

Schofield pulled out his Palm Pilot to see which was the next Kormoran ship to launch.

He called up the bundle of documents that he had seen on the Pilot before:

He clicked on the abbreviated launch list. The full list came up:

He saw the familiar list.

It was the same as the one Book II had decrypted before. He saw the GPS locations of the first three boats:
Talbot, Ambrose
and
Jewel
.

The
Ambrose
was next: set to fire at 12 noon from GPS co-ordinates
28743.05,4104.55.

That's right
, he remembered.
New York.

Wait a second
, his mind stopped short.

This list was different to Book's list.

He looked at it more closely.

Some of the missiles on the lower half of the list had been altered.

Book's list had featured only two varieties of missile: the Shahab and the Taep'o-Dong.

Yet this one featured several others in their place: the Sky Horse (from Taiwan), the Ghauri-II (Pakistan), the Agni-II (India) and the Jericho-2B (Israel).

It also, Schofield saw, had an
extra
launch vessel on it—the last entry, the
Arbella
—set to fire more than two hours after the first group of missiles.

This wasn't even mentioning another disturbing fact: the Taiwanese and Israeli missiles on this list were armed with
American
nuclear warheads, the powerful W-88—

A withering volley of bullets smacked the water next to Schofield. He hardly noticed.

When he looked up, he saw that Knight had brought their lifeboat alongside a ladder leading up to a ceiling catwalk. Once upon a time that catwalk had been suspended eighty feet above the floor of the hold. Now it was barely
eighteen
feet above the fast-rising water level.

On it, however, sixty yards away in
both
directions and closing fast, were two four-man teams of IG-88 troops. They had just burst down through hatches in the ceiling and were now charging down the length of the catwalk from either end, firing hard, their bullets hitting the girders all around Schofield's boat.

Ping!-ping!-ping!-ping!-ping!

‘Bastard!' Knight yelled. ‘He's not waiting for us to come up. He's forcing us up!'

Mother lifted Schofield up by the collar. ‘Come on, handsome, you can get back to your computer later.' She hauled him out of the lifeboat and up the ladder, covering him with her body.

They climbed the ladder quickly, shooting as they did so, reached the catwalk, where they were met by a million impact sparks.

Mother took up a covering position while Knight led Schofield aft.

Ping!-ping!-ping!-ping!-ping!

Bullets were spraying everywhere.

Knight and Schofield fired at the IG-88 men coming from the stern-end of the catwalk. Schofield went dry.

‘Are we actually going anywhere in particular!' he yelled.

‘Yes! To a safe place!' Knight called, still firing. ‘A place where you can do your disarming thing, and where, at the same time, we can all get out of this sinking death-trap! Here!'

Knight cut sharply right, running past a small maintenance shack erected at a T-junction of this catwalk and another, emerging behind the shack to behold—