Scarecrow (53 page)

The sun shone brightly over the BBQ underway in Mother's backyard.

It was a Sunday and a small but very close crowd had gathered for a casual get-together.

Mother's trucker husband Ralph was there—tending to the sausages with an oversized spatula. Their nieces were inside, miming to Britney Spears's latest hit.

David Fairfax sat in a deck chair under the clothesline, nursing a beer, swapping stories with Book II and Mother about their adventures the previous October: tales of chases in parking lots near the Pentagon, office towers in London, Zulu bounty hunters, British bounty hunters, and their mirror-image assaults on supertankers on either side of the United States.

They also talked about Aloysius Knight.

‘I heard the government cleared his record, cancelled the bounty and took him off the Most Wanted List,' Fairfax said. ‘They even said he could come back to Special Forces if he wanted to.'

‘So has he?' Book II asked.

‘I don't even think he's come back to the States,' Fairfax said. ‘Mother? What do you know about Knight?'

‘He phones every now and then,' she said, ‘but no, he hasn't come back to the States. If I were him, I don't know if I would either. As far as Special Forces is concerned, I don't think Knight is a soldier anymore. I think he's a bounty hunter now.'

Thinking about Knight made Mother look over her shoulder.

Over in a corner of the yard, by himself, sat Schofield—clean-shaven and wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of reflective Oakleys. He sipped on a Coke, staring up into the sky.

He had hardly spoken to anyone since he had arrived, which was not unusual these days. Gant's death in France had hit him hard. He'd been on indefinite leave ever since, and didn't look like coming back to active duty any time soon.

Everyone gave him a bit of space.

But just then, as Ralph was sizzling the onions, the doorbell rang.

Courier delivery. For the attention of Shane Schofield. Care of Mother's address.

A large cardboard envelope.

Mother took it to Schofield in the yard. He opened it. Inside the envelope was a lone gift-shop card with a cheesy cartoon of a cowboy that read: ‘
YOUR NEW LIFE BEGINS TODAY, BUCKAROO
!'

Inside it was a handwritten message:

 

SCARECROW,

 

I'M SORRY I COULDN'T MAKE IT TODAY, BUT A NEW JOB CAME UP.

 

HAVING SPOKEN WITH MOTHER RECENTLY, I REALISED THAT THERE IS SOMETHING I SHOULD HAVE TOLD YOU FOUR MONTHS AGO.

 

DID YOU KNOW THAT, STRICTLY SPEAKING, MY CONTRACTUAL COMMITMENT TO MY EMPLOYER TO KEEP YOU ALIVE EXPIRED WHEN YOU DISARMED THAT MISSILE OVER MECCA. MY TASK WAS TO KEEP YOU ALIVE ‘UNTIL 12 NOON, 26 OCTOBER OR UNTIL SUCH TIME AS CAPTAIN SCHOFIELD'S REASON FOR ELIMINATION HAS BEEN UTILISED TO ITS FULLEST POTENTIAL.'

 

I HAVE NEVER GONE BEYOND THE LETTER OF A CONTRACT BEFORE. TO BE HONEST, I ACTUALLY THOUGHT ABOUT LEAVING YOU IN THAT DUNGEON—AFTER ALL, BY THEN, YOUR REASON FOR ELIMINATION HAD INDEED BEEN UTILISED TO THE FULLEST.

 

BUT AFTER WATCHING THE WAY YOUR MEN—AND YOUR WOMEN—STOOD BY YOU OVER THE COURSE OF THAT AWFUL DAY, AFTER OBSERVING THE LOYALTY THEY HAD TO YOU, I CHOSE TO STAY AND FIGHT BY YOUR SIDE.

 

LOYALTY IS NOT SOMETHING THAT SIMPLY HAPPENS, CAPTAIN. IT IS ALWAYS PREDICATED BY AN INDEPENDENT SELFLESS ACT: A SUPPORTIVE WORD, A KINDLY GESTURE, AN UNPROVOKED ACT OF GOODNESS. YOUR MEN ARE LOYAL TO YOU, CAPTAIN, BECAUSE YOU ARE THAT RAREST OF MEN: A GOOD MAN.

 

PLEASE LIVE AGAIN. IT WILL TAKE TIME. BELIEVE ME, I KNOW. BUT DO NOT ABANDON THE WORLD JUST YET—IT CAN BE A TERRIBLE PLACE, BUT IT CAN ALSO BE A BEAUTIFUL PLACE, AND NOW MORE THAN EVER IT NEEDS MEN LIKE YOU.

 

AND KNOW THIS, SHANE ‘SCARECROW' SCHOFIELD. YOU HAVE WON MY LOYALTY, A FEAT WHICH NO MAN HAS ACHIEVED FOR A VERY LONG TIME.

 

ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, IF YOU NEED HELP, JUST MAKE THE CALL AND I'LL BE THERE.

 

YOUR FRIEND,

 

THE BLACK KNIGHT

 

P.S. I AM SURE SHE IS WATCHING OVER YOU RIGHT NOW.

Schofield folded up the card.

And stood up.

And started walking out of the yard and down the driveway, heading for his car out on the street.

‘Hey!' Mother called, concerned. ‘Where are you going, champ?'

Schofield turned to her and smiled—a sad but genuine smile. ‘Thank you, Mother. Thank you for worrying about me. I promise, you won't have to do it for too much longer.'

‘What are you doing?'

‘What am I doing?' he said. ‘I'm going to try and start living again.'

The next morning he appeared at the personnel offices of Marine Headquarters in the Navy Annex building in Arlington.

‘Good morning, sir,' he said to the Colonel in charge. ‘My name is Captain Shane Schofield. The Scarecrow. I'm ready to get back to work.'

 

AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY

THE WRITING OF
SCARECROW

 

[WARNING—Some of the later questions in this interview address plot points in
Scarecrow
. Be careful if you are reading them before you read the book!]

 

What were you trying to achieve with this new novel?

 

From the very beginning, I was aware that
Scarecrow
would be closely compared to my other books. This is natural—hey, as soon as you write
two
books, people automatically compare them and decide which is their favourite. With that in mind, what I really wanted was for
Scarecrow
to be seen as a new
kind
of Matthew Reilly novel, a faster book, a book that was more densely packed with plot: a book that was a stylistic leap forward from my previous efforts. I'm hoping people will see
Contest, Ice Station, Temple
and
Area 7
as ‘Matthew Reilly Version 1.0' and
Scarecrow
as the beginning of ‘Matthew Reilly Version 2.0'.

 

It's funny, in the interview at the back of
Area 7
, I mentioned that I wanted to create a new level of speed and pace in my next book—and then I'd meet people at book signings and they'd say ‘How are you possibly going to make it
faster
?' I like to think that
Scarecrow
has lived up to the promise of being faster and completely out-of-control!

 

How have you tried to achieve this?

 

Mainly by combining action and exposition—I wanted my characters to be running away from the bad guys
while
they were figuring stuff out. A lot of thrillers have rest breaks between the action scenes during which the author spells out the plot. I wanted to fuse the action and the plot advancement together. The result is that
Scarecrow
is about the same length as
Area 7
, but has a lot more happening in it.

 

What was the inspiration for the bounty hunters in
Scarecrow
?

 

It's odd, you know, but for me bounty hunters have only ever appeared in two storytelling spheres: westerns and the original
Star Wars
trilogy (I haven't read any of Janet Evanovich's books, but I believe her lead character is a bounty hunter).

 

The idea of international bounty hunters, with their own planes and units and even submarines, was something I adapted from the (real-life) concept of mercenary forces: private armies that sell themselves and their hardware to the highest bidder. In Australia, such forces got a lot of press when Papua New Guinea engaged a mercenary army a few years ago; I also read about them operating in Sierra Leone, helping the government stay in power in exchange for diamonds.

 

In addition to this, I have always been intrigued by the concept of the Wild West freelance bounty hunter, a concept which was adapted to a sci-fi environment in the
Star Wars
trilogy, in particular
The Empire Strikes Back
. Indeed, this is why Demon Larkham's gang—the InterContinental Guards, Unit 88, or ‘IG-88'—is proudly named after the obscure bounty hunter of the same name in
The Empire Strikes Back
. (For those who don't know, IG-88 was the very tall robot bounty hunter who stands in the background as Darth Vader offers a reward for the bounty hunter who finds the
Millennium Falcon
. IG-88 utters no dialogue, nor does he actually move, but he became one of those cult
Star Wars
action figures—probably because he was always the one left on the shelf!).

 

In any case, the idea of these elite hunters-of-men really appealed to me, and I wanted to fashion a story whereby my hero, Shane Schofield—an able warrior himself—was being pursued by the best manhunters on the planet. And thus
Scarecrow
was born.

 

Speaking of bounty hunters, you introduce in
Scarecrow
a character named Aloysius Knight, a.k.a. the Black Knight. What lay behind his creation?

 

I had a lot of fun creating Aloysius Knight. From the start, he was designed to be Schofield's darker shadow, his amoral twin (he even has an eye dysfunction to match Schofield's). I wanted him to be the equal of Schofield in battle skills, but darker, more ruthless—as shown, for example, when we first meet him at Krask-8, when he kills the pleading mercenary in cold blood.

 

But most of all, I wanted Knight to be a guy whose reputation preceded him. The men of ExSol are worried that he's coming to Siberia. David Fairfax discovers that he's the second-best bounty hunter in the world—at a time when Knight is standing right in front of Schofield.

 

As a writer, it's very liberating to create characters such as Knight—it's the same with Mother—because you can do all sorts of things with him. For the simple reason that there are no boundaries. Characters like Knight and Mother are not governed by socially acceptable norms, and so are fun to write about. They swear, they kill bad people, they do crazy things. But having said that, there is one special thing common to both Mother and Knight: their loyalty to their friends—Mother to Schofield, and Knight to his pilot, Rufus. However wild and crazy they may be, they stand by their friends.

 

As an interesting aside, Knight is named after St Aloysius (pronounced
allo-wishus
) Gonzaga, a Jesuit saint and the namesake of my old high school, St Aloysius' College, in Sydney.

 

[THIS QUESTION CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS]

Okay. To the big question: how could you kill Gant! Seriously,
Scarecrow
sees some of the biggest ‘character moments' you've written. What made you make those choices?

 

You cannot believe how hard that scene was for me to write. Unlike other characters who have met their end in my previous books, Gant had been with me for two-and-a-half books, and I virtually considered her a member of the family. I've never considered myself to be an emotional, fall-in-love-with-my-characters kind of writer, but I remember vividly the day I wrote that terrible scene—I recall physically standing up from my computer and saying (aloud, to my empty office) ‘Can I really do this?'

 

And so I thought about it. A lot. But then I said to myself ‘No. This is what makes my novels different to other kinds of books. No character is safe. I've got to hold my nerve.'

 

It took me another day before I could sit down and actually type the scene, but I did. In the end, though, this is the essential feature of the action-thriller novel—the reader must believe that the hero and his friends
might not make it
.

 

Ultimately, however, it was a ‘character motivation' thing that made me go through with killing Libby Gant. I decided that I wanted to see what would happen to the hero, Schofield
,
if such a terrible thing happened. What that led to was one of my favourite scenes in all of my books: the fistfight between Schofield and Mother (I don't know about you, but ever since I created them, I have wondered who would win a fight between Schofield and Mother: in the end, the answer is Schofield).

 

How do you interact with your military advisors?

 

This is a good question. My two military guys, Paul Woods and Kris Hankison, are two of the most knowledgable men I've ever known. And their input into my books has been beyond value, for the simple reason that no matter how much research you do on a given topic, someone ‘in the industry' will always be able to give you that little bit of nuance, that little bit extra. That is what Paul and Kris do for me on military matters.

 

That said, sometimes the dictates of my story mean that I have to say to them, ‘Sorry, guys, but I'll have to invoke poetic licence on this point.' A good example is the big MOAB bomb in
Scarecrow
. MOABs are actually satellite-guided, but my story required Gant to place a laser inside the Karpalov Coalmine. So, despite the protests of the guys, I made the MOAB laser-guided.

 

The best thing about my military advisors is that they have a keen sense of the tone of my books—they know that my novels are outrageous and over-the-top. So they accept that I sometimes have to bend the truth (and, hell, the laws of physics!) for the sake of a roller-coaster story.

 

Matthew. The French. They were the bad guys in
Ice Station
. And now
Scarecrow
. What have you got against the French?

 

Ha! Er, yes, the French do cop a bit of a pasting in
Scarecrow
. You have to understand, though, that I don't dislike France. Not at all!

 

What it boils down to is this: I write fiction. And I'm always looking for new dastardly villains. Back in the days of the Cold War, authors could just make the Soviet Union the evil bad guy. But that doesn't apply anymore. The world has changed. The way I see it—and as I suggested in
Ice Station
—international alliances are more fickle than we imagine. And France, more than any other major Western nation, has been a vocal and active opponent of United States hegemony. Since Shane Schofield is American, France is often at cross-purposes with him.