Scarecrow Returns

UNDERWATER SILENCE.

As the flight seat shot under the water’s surface, Scarecrow and Ivanov separated, floating apart in the ice-blue haze. Bertie’s flotation balloons activated immediately on contact with the water and Schofield saw the little robot float up and away to the surface.

Scarecrow felt the sting of the water against his face, the only part of his body not covered by his drysuit. It was outrageously cold, like daggers of ice.

The impact with the water had flipped his reflective glasses onto his forehead, and as he hovered there in the clear blue water of the Arctic, he was enveloped by eerie silence.

But not total silence. An odd thrumming could be heard.

It was then that Schofield realized that he was not alone.

There was something in front of him.

Something impossibly huge, black and enormous, hovering there in the void like a leviathan of the deep. Only it wasn’t an animal of any sort. It was man-made, mechanical.

It was a submarine.

A screaming sense of déjà-vu overcame Schofield.

This had happened to him once before, during that mission in Antarctica, when he had come face-to-face with a French nuclear ballistic-missile submarine. On that occasion, he had managed to destroy the submarine in question. It was one of the events that had made him a marked man by the French.

No. It couldn’t possibly be French—

And then Schofield saw the markings on the sub’s dome-shaped bow, saw the distinct blue-white-and-red flag painted on it.

Yes, it could. This submarine was French.

In the meta-time in which the brain operates, Schofield’s mind rapidly connected some dots.

The wrist guard’s proximity sensor had picked up this submarine only minutes ago—which meant the sensor might not have been broken earlier in their trip and may actually have picked up the same submarine back then—the sub had followed them here—which meant it was a good guess that the sub wasn’t part of what was happening at Dragon Island—indeed, it was a better guess that this sub, this French sub which appeared to be following his team, probably had no idea at all what was going on at Dragon.

This French submarine, he realized with a shock, was up in the Arctic trying to find him.

Gazing at the gigantic submarine, Schofield suddenly noticed that there were three smaller submersibles mounted on its back, compact Swimmer Delivery Vehicles—similar to his AFDVs but smaller—carrying three frogmen apiece and which were at that very moment lifting off from the sub and coming toward Schofield.

It was an assassination squad.

A French hit team, coming for him, and yet totally unaware that they’d walked into a far more deadly firestorm.

Schofield swam for the surface.

Schofield burst up from the icy water and found himself treading water beside Ivanov and Bertie—the little robot was floating happily thanks to his flotation balloons, his fat tires propelling him slowly but valiantly toward Schofield.

“Captain Schofield, do you require assistance? My buoyancy features can keep you afloat till our colleagues arrive.”

Just then, like a shark rising from the depths, the first French SDV breached the surface ten yards from Scarecrow, Ivanov and Bertie.

One frogman drove while two more held short-barreled FAMAS assault rifles, raised and ready to fire—

With a roar, something slammed into the first French SDV, sending all three of the frogmen on it flying into the water.

It was Mother’s assault boat and it crunched over the top of the smaller French submersible, breaking it clean in two, before Mother swung her AFDV to a perfect halt beside Schofield.

“Haul them out!” she yelled to the Kid, Emma and Zack in the rear tray.

Schofield scooped up Bertie while the Kid and the two civilians grabbed him and within seconds he and the robot were in the boat. A moment later, Ivanov was, too.

“Go, go!” Schofield yelled. “This place is about to get really crowded and this might be our one and only chance to get out of here in one piece!”

That was the understatement of the year.

For in the next moment, several things happened at once:

First, the other two French submersibles surfaced, revealing more armed frogmen on their backs.

But then a Cobra thundered by overhead from the direction of the crashed Beriev, rotors thumping, minigun blazing, strafing the world. The skinny attack chopper’s wave of bullet-impacts traced a line across the water’s surface—a line that cut right across one of the newly surfaced French submersibles, ripping the three frogmen on it to shreds.

That first Cobra was quickly followed by the second AH-1, which swooped into a deadly hover low over the water, right in front of Mother’s boat! It pivoted in the air, leveling its minigun at them.

“Fuck me . . .” Mother breathed.

The only weapon they had that possessed anywhere near enough firepower to threaten the Cobra was the grenade launcher on Mother’s G36 which right now lay at her feet, out of reach, and—

Schofield didn’t stop to think about it.

He quickly snatched up Bertie, held the little robot up in front of him and instead of pulling a trigger—because Bertie didn’t have one—yelled: “Bertie! Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Bertie’s M249 came to stunning life.

Each shot emitted a deep puncture-like whump—whump!-whump!-whump!—yet the recoil was largely contained by Bertie’s internal compensator. The shots hit their mark. They erupted all over the Cobra’s body: cracking its canopy, slamming into its engine housing where it ruptured something, causing a thick plume of black smoke to stream out from the Cobra’s exhaust and the chopper banked wildly away, wounded but not defeated.

Mother yelled, “Scarecrow! What now! Which way do we go?”

That was the question, Schofield thought. In the cacophony of clattering gunfire, booming robots and thumping choppers, he tried to think clearly.

We need to talk to this Russian guy, get some intel and make a decent plan. We don’t have much time but—he recalled the old military maxim—a good plan with less time is better than a bad plan with more time. Maybe we can double back north, regroup a little, and then head for Dragon—

He turned to face the intersection that led back north when a monstrous whooshing noise filled the air and, right in his path, the giant black hull of the French submarine exploded up out of the water, breaching the surface spectacularly.

The bulbous nose of the sub rose a full thirty feet into the air before it slammed back down onto the surface with a colossal splash that sent huge waves rolling out in every direction, causing Schofield’s two low-slung boats to rock wildy.

Schofield’s face fell.

It was completely blocking their path. They couldn’t go north.

Then, with a deafening roar, the V-22 Osprey shoomed overhead, cutting a beeline for the massive French submarine.

It’s going for the more dangerous prey first, Schofield realized. Once it takes out the sub, it can come after us at its leisure.

With its rotors tilted upward, the Osprey did a low banking pass over the sub, in the process dropping two Mark 46 Mod 5A anti-submarine torpedoes from its wing-mounts.

The torpedoes hit the water with twin splashes and immediately zeroed in on the submarine. The Mark 46 is a fine torpedo: reliable, accurate and deadly. Fired from this range, the French sub would have no time to launch any countermeasures and the Mark 46s wouldn’t miss.

Sure enough, a few seconds later, they hit.

It sounded like the end of the universe: two terrific and immense explosions.

The massive French submarine was almost lifted completely out of the water by the blast. A geyser of whitewater sprayed a hundred feet into the air and rained down on the entire area. As the sub bucked skyward, its midsection cracked and folded, wrenched open like a beer can, and as the great sub lunged back down into the foaming water—fatally wounded, its innards literally ripped open—it immediately began to sink.

The rain of spray fell on Schofield’s thunderstruck face.

The scene before him simply defied belief:

The French submarine—smoking and flaming, its bow tilting unnaturally upward—was sinking. Cries and shouts rang out from inside it. And all the while the Osprey hovered over it, pummeling it with relentless gunfire, taking down the sailors who scrambled out of the conning tower, fleeing one form of death only to step into the line of fire of another.

Then there were the two Cobra attack choppers: the wounded, smoking one had backed off a little but the unhurt one was hovering low over the ice-walled intersection, nailing the three frogmen on the third and last French submersible, strafing their defenseless bodies with minigun fire, flinging them into the water, turning the hapless frogmen—killers who had walked into a much bigger firefight—into convulsing fountains of bloody pulp.

“Captain!” a voice called from behind Schofield. “Captain!”

Schofield turned.

It was the Russian, Ivanov.

“We can go south from here without having to land on Dragon Island! There are a couple of small islets near the main island we can land on, if only briefly!”

“Good enough for me.” Schofield turned. “Mother—!”

He stopped short.

He saw the wounded Cobra chopper pivoting in the air a short distance away, turning its brutal minigun on the last three French frogmen in the water—the frogmen from the submersible that Mother had run over as it had approached Schofield; only now they were treading water, totally exposed, at the mercy of the smoking Cobra.

And something inside Schofield clicked.

Whoever was flying these Cobras and the Osprey were cold bastards, and even if these French assholes had been coming to kill him, they didn’t deserve to be killed like fish in a barrel. And in the back of his mind he thought that these French troops, if rescued, might even be of some help . . .

And so Schofield scooped up Mother’s G36, shucked its underslung grenade launcher and jammed down on the trigger.

A zinc-tipped anti-tank grenade zoomed out from the launcher and, trailing a dead-straight smoke tail behind it, rocketed inside the Cobra’s already-smoking exhaust and detonated.

The Cobra exploded.

It simply burst outward in a flaming fireball, spraying fragments of metal before it just dropped out of the sky and splashed into the icy Arctic water in front of the stunned French frogmen.

Mother called, “Oh, yeah, now you like those optional extras, don’t you!”

“Quiet, you!” He turned to face Mario and Chad in the other AFDV. “Mario! Chad! Get over here! Help us pick up these frogmen and then let’s get the hell out of here!”

“What are you—?” Mother frowned, but Schofield just yelled, “Do it!”

The two American speedboats came to fast halts beside the three stunned frogmen. They were quickly yanked out of the water: two went into the rear tray of Mario and Chad’s boat, while the third, a big fellow, dropped into Schofield’s rear tray, his wetsuit dripping.

“Bonjour,” Schofield said. “Welcome to our nightmare. Mother! South, now! Zack!”

The bespectacled geek looked up, alarmed, clearly not expecting to be called upon. Schofield pointed at the wrist guard on Zack’s left forearm.

“You’re gonna be our guide! Use the satellite imaging! Get us through this maze to the islets north of Dragon!”

Zack looked down at his wrist guard: its display now showed a zoomed-out image of the labyrinth of ice-walled leads in which they found themselves.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. And you’ll have to get it exactly right or we all die,” Schofield said, taking the handlebars from Mother and handing back her G36. “You guide, I’ll drive, Mother will shoot. Let’s do it!”

He gunned the thrusters and the AFDV leapt off the mark, kicking up a tail of spray as it peeled out, closely followed by the second American assault boat.

They sped south, leaving the sinking French submarine behind them, and headed in the direction of Dragon Island.