Scarecrow Returns

PROLOGUE

THE ISLAND OF THE DRAGON

OSTROV ZMEY

ARCTIC OCEAN

4 APRIL, 0500 HOURS

THE PLANE hurtled down the airstrip, chased by furious machine-gun fire, before it lifted off with a stomach-lurching swoop and soared out over the vast expanse of Arctic sea ice that stretched away to the north.

The plane’s pilot, a 60-year-old scientist named Dr. Vasily Ivanov, knew he wouldn’t get far. As he’d lifted off, he’d seen two Strela-1 anti-aircraft vehicles—amphibious jeep-like vehicles that were each mounted with four 9M31 surface-to-air missiles—speeding down the runway behind him, about to take up firing positions.

He had perhaps thirty seconds before they blasted him out of the sky.

Ivanov’s plane was an ugly Beriev Be-12, a genuine 1960s Soviet clunker. Many years ago, as a young recruit in the Soviet Air Defense Force, Ivanov had flown this very kind of plane, before his talents as a physicist had been spotted and he had been reassigned to the Special Weapons Directorate. On one recent occasion when he had sat as a passenger in the freezing hold of this plane, he’d actually thought that the Beriev and he were very similar. They were both ageing workhorses from a bygone era still toiling away: the Beriev was an old forgotten plane used to shuttle old forgotten teams like his to old forgotten bases in the north; Ivanov was just old, his bushy Zhivago-style mustache growing grayer every day.

He also never imagined he’d actually pilot a Beriev again, but his team’s arrival at the island that morning had not gone according to plan.

Ten minutes earlier, after an overnight flight from the mainland, the Beriev had been making a slow circuit over Ostrov Zmey, a remote island in the Arctic Circle.

A medium-sized semimountainous island, Ostrov Zmey—Dragon Island—had once held the highest security classification in the Soviet Union alongside nuclear research bases like Arzamas-16 at Sarov and bio-weapons centers like the Vektor Institute in Koltsovo. Now its massive structures lay dormant, kept alive by rotating skeleton crews like Ivanov’s from the Special Weapons Directorate. Ivanov and the twelve Spetsnaz troops on the Beriev with him had been arriving for their eight-week stint guarding the island.

When they’d arrived, everything had appeared normal.

As winter faded and the Arctic saw the sun for the first time in months, the sea ice around Dragon had started to break up. The vast frozen ocean stretching north to the pole looked like a pane of smoked glass that had been hit with a hammer—a thousand cracks snaked through it in every direction.

Yet the cold still lingered. The complex at Dragon remained covered in a thin layer of frost.

Despite that, it looked magnificent.

The base’s striking central tower still looked futuristic thirty years after it had been built. As tall as a twenty-story building, it looked like a flying saucer mounted on a single massive concrete pillar. Two slender high-spired mini-towers were perched atop the main disc, as was the base’s squat glass-domed command center.

The towering structure gazed out over the entire island like some kind of space-age lighthouse. Looming to the east of it were the two mighty exhaust vents. Where the tower exuded grace and sophistication, the vents expressed nothing except brute strength and power. They were the same shape as the cooling towers one saw at a nuclear power plant but twice the size.

The once-great base bore the usual signs of a skeleton crew: pinpoints of light in various places—offices, guardhouses, on the disc-shaped-tower itself.

It was also a fortress. Well defended by both its construction and the landscape, a small force like Ivanov’s could protect it against any kind of attack. You’d need an army to take Dragon Island.

As his plane had arrived at the island and overflown it, from his seat in the hold Ivanov had seen a steady plume of shimmering gas issuing from the massive exhaust vents, rising into the sky before being blown south. This was odd but not alarming; probably just Kotsky’s team venting excess steam from the geothermal piping.

Upon landing on the island’s airstrip, Ivanov’s team of Spetsnaz guards had disembarked the Beriev and made their way toward the hangar, where Kotsky himself had been standing, waving. Ivanov had lingered behind in the Beriev with a young private he’d ordered to help him carry the new Samovar-6 laser-optic communications gear he’d brought along.

That small delay had saved their lives.

Ivanov’s Spetsnaz team had been halfway across the tarmac, totally exposed, when they had been cut down by a sudden burst of machine-gun fire from a force of unseen assailants who had evidently been lying in wait.

Ivanov had dived into the pilot’s seat and, calling on the skills of his past life, gunned the engines and got the hell out of there—which was how he came to be fleeing Dragon Island.

Ivanov keyed the plane’s radio and shouted in Russian, “Directorate Base! This is Watcher Two—!”

Electronic hash assaulted his ears.

They’d jammed the satellite.

He tried the terrestrial system. No good. Same thing.

Breathing fast, he reached around and grabbed the Samovar radio pack on the seat behind him, the new hardware he’d brought to Dragon Island. It was a laser-optic transmission system that was designed to make secure contact with its satellite not through radio waves but through a direct line-of-sight laser. It had been developed specifically to be immune to the usual jamming techniques.

Ivanov thunked the high-tech radio on the dashboard, pointed its laser sighter up at the sky and turned it on.

“Directorate Base, this is Watcher Two! Come in!” he yelled.

A few moments later, he got a reply.

“Watcher Two, this is Directorate Base. Encryption protocols for the Samovar-6 system are not yet fully operational. This transmission could be detected—”

“Never mind that! Someone’s at Dragon! They were waiting for us and attacked my team as soon as they disembarked from the plane! Shot them all to bits on the tarmac! I managed to take off and am now being fired upon—”

As he said this, Ivanov once again saw the gaseous plume rising from the island’s massive vents and his blood went cold.

Mother of God, he thought.

“Base,” he said. “Perform a UV-4 scan of the atmosphere above Dragon. I think whoever’s there has started up the atmospheric device.”

“They did what . . .”

“I can see a vapor plume rising from the towers.”

“Good Lord . . .”

Ivanov made to say more, but suddenly the Beriev was hit from behind by a 9M31 surface-to-air missile fired by one of the Strelas. The entire tail section of the old plane disintegrated in an instant and the plane plunged out of the sky.

A few seconds later, the Beriev hit the sea ice and nothing more was heard from Vasily Ivanov.

His distress call to the Russian Army’s Signals Directorate, however, was heard by one other listener.

A KH-12 “Improved Crystal” spy satellite operated by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.

The message was downloaded and decoded by an automated system according to standard protocols—intercepts of Russian military signals were picked up all the time—but when the keywords DRAGON, UV-4 SCAN and ATMOSPHERIC DEVICE were all found in the same transmission, the message was immediately forwarded to the highest levels of the Pentagon.