Scarecrow Returns

THE FOUR aircraft were two V-22 Ospreys and two AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters, all of which had been stolen from the Marine Corps staging base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, five months earlier.

The Ospreys were, quite simply, aerial beasts. With tiltable rotors, they were capable of both swift airplane-like flight and helicopter-like hovering. And these Ospreys were the variant known as the “Warbird”: they were armed to the teeth. They each had not one but two 20mm six-barreled M61 Vulcan cannons, door-mounted .50-caliber AN/M2 machine guns and missile pods slung under both wings. The Warbird was the mother of all gunships—big and strong, yet also fast and maneuverable—and the Army of Thieves had two of them.

The two Cobras weren’t shy either: they carried slightly smaller M134 sixbarreled miniguns underneath their sharply pointed noses.

The two Ospreys thundered over the ice plain, flanked by the Cobras, sweeping over the network of watery leads, rushing toward the crashed Beriev.

A short distance from the crash site, one of the big Ospreys broke away from the other three aircraft and zoomed off to the north-west. The remaining three attack aircraft kept coming straight for the Beriev.

“Base, this is Hammerhead,” the pilot of the Osprey that had stayed on course said into his mike.

While he wore a Marine Corps tactical flight helmet and a Marine Corps winter-warfare parka, he was not a United States Marine.

Flowing tattoos lined his neck and lower jaw—images of snakes, skulls and thorny vines. In addition to the Marine parka, he wore Uzbek gloves and Russian boots. The eight armed and similarly tattooed men sitting in the hold behind him had the broad faces, dark eyes and olive skin of native Chileans. They, too, wore a hodgepodge of Arctic gear, including Marine Corps parkas, and they held AK-47 assault rifles in their laps with easy familiarity.

“We’re coming up on Ivanov’s plane,” Hammerhead said. “The drone spotted two people approaching it. They must’ve come by boat through the leads, so the tower-radars on Dragon couldn’t spot them.”

A calm voice replied in the pilot’s ear.

“Just as we suspected. It’s the American testing team.” The speaker grunted a short, cruel laugh. “The Pentagon must be desperate if it’s sending product testers against us. Take out Ivanov’s plane with missiles, then find this test team and kill them all.”

Inside the Beriev’s cockpit, Schofield and Mother were moving frantically now.

Mother released the young Russian private from his flight seat and they shimmied out the smashed cockpit windows.

Schofield slid to Vasily Ivanov’s side and had just started to extract Ivanov from his flight seat when, through the lopsided cockpit windshield, he saw one of the Cobras loose a pair of heat-seeking missiles.

The two missiles looped through the air, zeroing in on the stricken plane.

Scarecrow yelled, “Bertie! Missile scrambler! Now!”

Outside the Beriev, Bertie replied, “Missile scrambling initiated.” He then emitted a powerful burst of short-range electronic jamming.

Almost immediately the two missiles peeled away and slammed into the ice plain a short distance from the Beriev in twin explosions of fire and ice.

Schofield struggled with Ivanov’s seat belt. It was jammed with frost.

“Mother!” he called. “Get back to the boats! Before that Osprey lands and unloads ground troops!”

“What about you?” Mother shouted back.

“I gotta get this guy out! I’ll catch up! Now, go!”

Mother bolted, hauling the dazed young Russian private with her. As they ran across the fifty yards of open ground between the Beriev and the lead containing their boats, the second Cobra tried to loose another missile, but this one also went haywire and smashed into the ice.

“Cobras, forget it. They’ve got anti-missile countermeasures,” the pilot named Hammerhead said. “I’m going to unload the ground team. You take care of those two runners.”

The Osprey powered ahead of the two Cobras, uptilted its rotors and swung into a hover.

As it did so, its side doors were pulled open from within and drop ropes were tossed out. Within seconds, eight heavily armed men in black balaclavas and Marine Corps parkas were sliding down the ropes and hitting the ground one after the other.

They fanned out in perfect formation, AK-47s up, moving in on the crashed Beriev.

At the same time, one of the Cobras pivoted in the air and aimed its M134 at the fleeing figures of Mother and the Russian private.

The minigun whirred to life, barrels spinning, and unleashed a thunderous burst of hypermachine-gun fire.

The ice behind Mother’s running feet leapt upward as bullets strafed it.

“Dive!” she yelled to the young private limping along beside her.

They dived forward, toward the ladder hooks looped over the edge of the ice, chased by bullets.

Mother hit the ice on her belly and slid forward like a batter trying to steal second, before she hit the edge and went flying off it into open space, falling suddenly as she felt a bullet slap against the sole of her left boot. She dropped in a clumsy heap onto the first boat waiting at the base of the ladder.

Behind her, the Russian private did the same, but he was a split second behind Mother and that made a world of difference to the result.

As he slid over the lip, he was literally ripped apart by the hail of bullets. Blood-fountains spurted all over his body, but propelled by his own dive, his corpse continued off the edge and, like Mother, it also dropped into the first AFDV, right next to Emma Dawson, who screamed at the sight of the bullet-riddled body that thudded down next to her like a slab of meat on a butcher’s block. It was no longer recognizable as a human being.

Mother gasped, out of breath. “Mother fucker, that was close! Oh, Jesus, Scarecrow . . .”

The roar of the hovering Osprey was deafening. A tornado of ice and snow swirled around the Beriev.

Inside the crashed plane’s cockpit, Schofield splashed some water from his canteen onto Ivanov’s buckle and the frost melted and the seat belt unjammed. Schofield yanked the Russian from his flight seat.

“Come on, buddy,” he said, peering outside and seeing the eight-man balaclava-and-parka-wearing force approaching the Beriev from the south. He glanced eastward.

“Mother, you okay?”

“I’m clear, but my guy’s toast. What about you?”

“On my way—uh-oh . . .”

One of the balaclava-clad men dropped to a prone position, took aim down the sights of a very powerful bipod-mounted machine gun and squeezed the trigger—

—Braaaaaaaaack!

The gunman was himself thrown backward by a terrible burst of machine-gun fire.

Schofield snapped up to see—of all things—Bertie’s gun-barrel smoking.

“Oh, good robot,” he said. “Good robot.”

Bertie lay down some more deadly fire and the other attackers variously dived for cover behind the Beriev itself or returned fire at Bertie. Bullets bounced off the little robot’s metal flanks while Bertie just kept panning left and right, emitting short controlled bursts.

But then while Bertie was facing right, Schofield glimpsed another enemy commando to their left—appearing between the Beriev and the lead containing their escape boats—as he swung a Russian-made RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher onto his shoulder.

The man was only just in Scarecrow’s field of vision. Schofield had to peer up through the cracked windshield of the Beriev just to see him. The angle was too narrow to fire at the man and, in any case, Schofield didn’t have anything to match the firepower of an RPG.

He looked about himself for options.

Wait a second . . .

The parka-clad commando peered down the sight of his rocket launcher, steadied it on his shoulder—as inside the cockpit of the Beriev, Shane Schofield pushed Ivanov backward and said, “Cover your ears!”

Then Scarecrow yanked on the ejection lever of the Beriev’s co-pilot’s seat.

A gaseous whoosh filled the cockpit as a section of the plane’s roof was jettisoned and the co-pilot’s seat blasted out of the Beriev. Since the plane was lying on its side, the flight seat rocketed laterally through the air, shooting low over the ground on a flat horizontal trajectory before it struck the RPG-wielding commando with terrible force, square in the chest, cracking every one of his ribs before sending him flying backward, all but breaking the man in two.

Vasily Ivanov’s eyes boggled as he looked out through the newly opened hole in the roof of the cockpit and saw the dead commando on the ice plain.

“You see that?” Schofield yelled to Ivanov as the other parka-clad commandos opened fire again. “Cause that’s how we’re getting out of here, too! Is that flightsuit you’re wearing good in Arctic waters?”

“It is designed to survive in icy water for a short time, yes,” Ivanov stammered.

“Good enough.” Schofield reached out through the smashed cockpit windshield with one hand, yanked Bertie back inside, and handed him to Ivanov. “Here, hold my robot!” Schofield then sat on the remaining pilot’s seat and pulled Ivanov onto his own lap. “Now hold on to your breakfast.”

Then, with all three of them sitting on the pilot’s seat, Schofield pulled that seat’s ejection lever.

The flight seat shot out of the Beriev—with Schofield, Ivanov and Bertie on it—blasting through the ring of enemy commandos surrounding the plane!

The seat flew—on its side—a foot above the ice plain, the world around it blurring with speed, the force of its screamingly-fast lateral flight pushing Schofield and Ivanov down into it.

After about forty yards of this kind of flight, the speeding flight seat hit the ground where it bounced twice like a skimming stone before shooting clear off the lip of the ice floe and out over the watery alleyway—out over the stunned faces of Mother and the others still in the two assault boats.

Having cleared the lip, the flight seat arced downward and speared down into the freezing water of the lead, entering it with an almighty splash.

“What was that?” Chad asked, astonished.

“That was the Scarecrow,” Mother said, shoving the Kid out of the driver’s saddle, taking the controls and gunning the engine. “Hang on, people! We gotta grab him!”