Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (21 page)

On that screen, in silent black-and-white, he saw the elevator’s doors open and saw Shane Schofield enter it. Then he saw Schofield aim his MP-7 directly up at him and fire.

The image cut to hash.

The laboratory at the summit of the shorter spire was a circular space with windows facing every direction. It had a commanding view of Dragon Island, blocked only by the grey concrete column of the taller spire that stood a short way to the east. In the lab’s centre was a compact structure that contained a kitchen, a toilet, a closet, a little bunkroom with two cots and the elevator: the only point of access to the lab.

Inside the lab were two Army of Thieves technicians—men who had been selected for this task because of their engineering backgrounds—and the Russian scientist who had allowed the Army of Thieves onto Dragon Island, Igor Kotsky.

Kotsky was a big lump of a man, overweight and pear-shaped, with a hunched, stooping stance, combed-over thinning hair and venal eyes. He often perspired greatly, as he did now.

The three men stood before a large incubating chamber. The chamber housed the six uranium spheres and had just completed its twelve-hour priming cycle.

With the techs was a small guard team of three Army troops. These men were regular Army of Thieves men who had thought guarding the lab was an easy assignment. They’d spent the last few hours lounging around, smoking.

Now, at Typhon’s command, they leapt to their feet and aimed their guns at the elevator as it arrived with an ominous
ping!

In the tower’s command centre, the Lord of Anarchy gazed at Shane Schofield’s military record. It appeared on a screen beside a CCTV image of the men gathered in the sphere lab, waiting tensely.

The Lord of Anarchy spoke to the picture of Schofield on the screen: ‘Captain. Even if you get the spheres, how will you get them off this tower, let alone off this island?’

In the shorter spire’s lab, the elevator doors opened.

The waiting Army guards opened fire. The walls of the little elevator were shredded with bullet holes, a wave of fire that no human being could possibly survive.

They stopped firing.

The smoke cleared. The elevator was empty.

There was no-one in it—

Then a floor hatch in the elevator popped open and Shane Schofield emerged from it, MP-7 firing.

The three guards fell and within seconds Schofield was standing in the doorway of the elevator with the dead men at his feet and his guns pointed at the horrified figures of Igor Kotsky and the two Army of Thieves technicians.

‘Step away from the priming unit,’ he commanded.

Schofield hurried to the incubating chamber, holstering one of his guns. It opened with a hiss and he beheld the six gleaming spheres, sitting in two neat rows of three. They were deep maroon in colour, the colour of blood, with gleaming polished sides; and they really were small, the size of golf balls.

They looked perfect. Perfect and potent.

Schofield didn’t care for that. He just started grabbing them and stuffing them into three small purpose-built Samsonite cases sitting nearby; cases that the two Army of Thieves technicians had themselves been about to place the spheres into. The cases were specially designed to carry two spheres each in snug velvet-lined recesses.

Schofield clipped two of the small cases to his weapons belt and carried the third in his spare hand.

He looked at Kotsky and the terrified technicians as he raised a small handheld remote.

‘You might want to hold on to something.’ He thumbed the switch on the remote.

There was movement all around the tower now.

The two crane-bridges that gave access to it touched down and Army men hurried across them in large numbers, racing toward the shorter spire.

One Osprey banked around the mighty tower, sweeping in toward the tanker truck that hung suspended across the moat, while the other one—the one Baba had hammered with his Kord earlier—had limped back to the helipad where it now sat, its wounded engine still belching thick black smoke.

On the tanker truck, Mother and Baba were making their own hurried escape plans.

Baba attached his ascender to one of the cables leading back up to the outer rim just as gunfire from the Osprey started raining down on them.

‘Do you think your man made it?’ he shouted to Mother.

She glanced up at the shorter spire. ‘We’ll find out in a couple of seconds! Go!’

Gripping the ascender, Baba whizzed up the cable, while Mother opened fire on the Osprey with her G36.

Admirable as her effort was, her bullets sparked ineffectually off the gunship and the big Osprey swooped into a hover right in front of her, its cannons rotating into position to return fire.

Mother’s jaw dropped. ‘Oh, fuck me, I’m dead . . .’

Baba reached the rim of the massive moat, where Zack and Emma met him, driving the second truck from the garage, the cement mixer. Veronique Champion arrived a few seconds later, skidding to a halt in a newly-stolen jeep.

They saw the Osprey facing off against Mother down below them.

Baba said, ‘Do not watch. This will not be pretty.’

Without warning there came a mighty explosion.

At first it was difficult to tell where it had come from. It hadn’t come from the summit of the shorter spire. Nor had it come from anywhere near the Osprey and Mother, the crane-bridges or the rim of the moat.

No, it erupted—a sudden powerful blast—from the
base
of the short spire, from the point where it rose from the disc-shaped body of the tower, from the point where Schofield had planted a wad of PET plastic explosive beside the elevator earlier.

The fireball sent a cloud of concrete blasting out from the northern side of the spire’s base, carving a great chunk out of it . . .

. . . causing
the whole short spire
to topple like a slow-falling tree.

It was an absolutely incredible sight.

The spire—with the glass-enclosed lab at its summit—seemed to fall in horrifying slow motion, tipping from its destroyed base, falling northward.

It finished its terrible fall with a bone-crunching, earth-shuddering impact, a colossal crash of concrete on concrete: the spire’s long slender body crashing down against the flat upper surface of the main disc.

The spire’s glass-enclosed lab smashed down against the very edge of the disc—not far from the cables holding up Mother’s tanker truck—every single one of its windows shattering with the mighty impact, sending glass spraying out in every direction.

A cloud of concrete dust flew up around the whole mess and when it cleared, the spire could be seen lying on its side, looking like a dead snake: its once straight and vertical column now broken and horizontal; its glass lab was wrecked beyond repair, resting crumpled on its side.

As he gazed out at it through the dome of his command centre, the Lord of Anarchy found it hard to believe that anyone inside the lab could have survived such a fall.

Unless they had been prepared for it
, he thought.

And there he was.

A tiny figure came hurrying out of the shattered side-turned lab, carrying some small black cases, and running for the cables holding up the tanker truck.

Shane Schofield.

Of course, it hadn’t exactly been easy for Schofield.

After depositing the six spheres into the three little Samsonite cases, Schofield had raced round to the
southern
side of the lab, to the elevator’s doors. On the way, he’d grabbed the two mattresses from the cots in the bunkroom and laid them vertically against the elevator’s door. Then he’d pressed himself against the mattresses and held on tight as the cluster of PET explosives he’d placed at the base of the spire went off.

The explosives detonated and the spire fell northward and he rode it all the way down on its southern side. When the lab hit the disc and every window in it shattered as one, Schofield’s body slammed against the two mattresses which lay flat against the now-horizontal elevator door, softening the blow, sort of. Shards of glass had rained down all over his body but luckily nothing bigger than that hit him.

He was shaken and dazed, which was more than the two techs could say. They’d been crushed under the falling lab. The fate of the Russian traitor, Kotsky, had been worse. He’d been flung by the force of the fall clear out of the lab and Schofield had last seen him flying through the windows, screaming all the way to his death at the bottom of the concrete moat.

Schofield didn’t care.

He couldn’t stop. He had to keep moving.

He hustled out of the destroyed lab, covered in concrete dust, heading out into the Arctic chill once again.

As for Mother, the spectacular fall of the shorter spire had saved her life.

It came crashing down just above the hovering Osprey, causing the Osprey’s pilot, Hammerhead, to take evasive action and bank away from it. Concrete dust billowed out all around Mother and the Osprey, obscuring the air around both of them for a few precious moments.

Mother heard the Osprey’s rotors roaring as it banked around her. It would be back in a few seconds—

A sudden thump made her turn and she saw Scarecrow standing on the roof beside her, with two Samsonite cases clipped to his gun-belt and a third in his hand. He’d just whizzed down a cable from the edge of the disc using his ascender as a descender.

Mother yelled, ‘Christ, this is the craziest snatch’n’grab I’ve ever seen!’

‘It’s desperation over style, Mother.’ He hurried over to the tail end of the suspended tanker truck, to the two cables that rose up from it to the rim of the massive moat.

‘But did you have to destroy everything?’ she shouted.

‘I haven’t destroyed
everything
yet. Hurry up, this isn’t over! This way!’

He reached for the Magneteux at the rear of the truck.

‘But you didn’t bring the ascender!’ Mother shouted.

‘We’re not using the ascender this time! Hold on to me!’

Mother knew not to argue. She just looped her arms around Scarecrow’s waist and held tight. As she did so, the dust cloud parted and she saw the Osprey materialise behind them, hovering in the void, guns poised.

‘Scarecrow!’

‘Just hang on!’ With his other hand, Schofield grabbed the French Magneteux that Baba had looped around the rung-ladder of the truck and—

—pressed the unspool switch.

The French Maghook unspooled a fraction and the result was instantaneous: it came free of the tanker’s rear ladder.

Which meant the tanker truck was now no longer suspended between the rim and the tower, and Schofield and Mother swooped away from the tower, swinging
northward
on that Magneteux’s cables—while the tanker truck, still dangling from the other pair of cables attached to the main tower, swung
southward
, where it smashed into the right wing of the hovering Osprey!

The Osprey rocked in mid-air, like a boxer recoiling from a punch. The swinging truck had shattered its starboard wing, and it dropped out of the sky, wheeling out of control before crashing down against the bottom of the moat, where it exploded spectacularly.

For their part, Schofield and Mother’s swing ended with them slamming at speed into the outer wall of the concrete moat. They bounced off the wall, but somehow managed to hang on.

Schofield then reeled in the Magneteux and they whizzed up the side of the chasm, where Zack, Emma, Champion and Baba awaited them in the cement mixer and the stolen jeep.

‘Alors!’ Baba exclaimed. ‘This is my kind of mission!’

‘Holy fucking shit, dude,’ Zack said, surveying the destruction all around them.

Schofield didn’t stop moving. He climbed into the back of the jeep with Baba and threw the Magneteux to Champion, saying: ‘Drive! We’re not out of this yet. We have to get to the coast and throw these spheres into the sea.’

‘Why can’t we just throw them into the bay from the cable car terminal?’ Zack asked.

‘Water’s too shallow there. They could find the spheres easily with divers. We need to dispose of them in deeper water—’

Gunfire cut him off.

Four troop trucks filled with Army men were hurtling toward them from both crane-bridges.

Schofield yelled, ‘Mother! Take the wheel of that cement mixer and lead the way! You’re our blocker! Get us to the airstrip! Hopefully Ivanov has found us a plane!’

They sped off the mark, heading for the runway.

Dragon Island’s airstrip was situated on a plain of lower ground to the west of the main complex.

Getting to it meant driving down a steep bitumen road that swept around the north-western side of the crater containing the main tower.

With four Army trucks behind them, Schofield’s two vehicles—the cement mixer and the jeep—raced down the steep slope at reckless speed. Gunmen on the various towers they passed fired at them, their bullets strafing the road all around the fleeing vehicles. A couple of the mixer’s tyres were hit and punctured and it began to slip and slide wildly as it sped down the narrow cliff-side road.

A couple of Army of Thieves men in jeeps tried to cut them off by parking their jeeps across the roadway, but Mother drove the cement mixer like a rampaging NFL blocker: she just ploughed straight through the roadblocks, the heavy cement mixer smashing the jeeps out of the way, sending one flying off the edge of the road and crunching the other one against the rocky cliff on the inner side.

More Army of Thieves troops joined the chase. Five, six, then seven trucks containing armed men now pursued the two fleeing vehicles. Schofield and Baba fired back at them while Champion drove hard. Bullets flew every which way. A stray one hit a jerry can full of gasoline mounted on the back of the jeep and it caught fire.

Schofield ducked away from the spraying blaze and keyed his radio. ‘Dr Ivanov! We’ve got the spheres but we also have an entire army on our tail! Our vehicles have taken heavy fire and I don’t think they’ll make it to the coast! Do you have a plane ready?’

‘
Yes, Captain!
’ Ivanov’s voice replied. ‘
I am in an Antonov-12 in the first hangar.
’