Scarecrow Returns

BEAR ISLET

4 APRIL, 1000 HOURS

ONE HOUR TO DEADLINE

GUN UP and moving fast, Schofield led his people into the realm of the polar bears.

It was a huge laboratory, easily 70 yards across, with a circular upper level that ringed a 20-foot-deep pit. Schofield and his team were now on that upper level, and, looking down into the pit, Schofield saw ten large (and open) cages embedded in its outer walls: cages, he presumed, that had once held the polar bears. The whole lab was covered by a translucent geodesic dome—made of many triangular panels and girders—that sprang across the wide space without the aid of a single support pillar.

Two narrow and rail-less retractable bridges extended from opposite rims of the wide pit to an elevated platform in its middle. The platform had a waist-high console on it and a hatch in its floor. Schofield noticed that the platform’s curved cylindrical wall was made of thick reinforced glass and that it encased a ladder within it; where the ladder met the floor of the pit, a curved glass door gave access to the pit itself. That was how the Soviet scientists had once entered the pit safely: via the platform and its internal ladder.

And the whole place was absolutely filthy.

It stank of bear shit, urine and rotting flesh—the smell of a carnivore’s lair. Some of the panels of the geodesic dome had been shattered, allowing snow to penetrate the lab and form high mounds all around the pit. Through some of the holes in the roof, Schofield could see the sky.

What had once been a shining state-of-the-art laboratory was now the picture of neglect; a frost-covered, rusting, stinking, freezing dump.

The only apparent exit, Schofield saw, was a door on the far southern side of the lab, but thanks to high mounds of snow on both the eastern and western rims of the pit, the only way to get to that door was via the two retractable bridges that extended across the pit.

The four mangy polar bears all turned as one as Schofield’s gunfire shattered the glass door. Gathered by the snow-mound on the western side of the pit, they watched with great interest as eleven human beings stepped out into the foul lab.

The alpha male rose onto its hind legs and bellowed loudly, issuing a challenge. A younger adolescent bounded toward them, teeth bared.

“Go! Onto the bridges! Get to that door on the other side!” Schofield pushed everyone past him as he eyed the approaching bear. He raised his Desert Eagle and fired it twice above the bear’s head.

The big pistol’s booming shots rang out in a wide space. The bear slowed a little but kept advancing.

As he took off after the others, Schofield glanced back inside the dock behind them—

—in time to see a small cylindrical object pop up out of the rectangular pool, tossed up by someone underneath the surface. It hovered in the air for the briefest of moments and at the zenith of its arc, Schofield saw it clearly.

It looked like a standard M67 frag grenade, only it had an odd silver band painted around it. Whatever kind of grenade it was, it had been thrown up by the incoming force to open the way for a sub-surface entry.

“Grenade!” he yelled. “Take cover!”

Everyone dived behind something: the doorframe, a crate, a barrel. Schofield himself ducked behind the doorway next to the Kid.

The only thing that didn’t take cover was the unfortunate adolescent bear.

The grenade went off.

The grenade’s deafening blast was followed by a wave of superheated silver liquid that came blasting out through the dock’s doorway.

The adolescent bear was hit full-on by the liquid blast, and it started wailing immediately, clutching at its eyes, the shaggy fur on its limbs, face and belly splattered with the hot viscous silver goo.

As the bear shrieked, a sizzling sound caught Schofield’s attention.

The doorframe beside his head was melting. A dollop of silver acid slid slowly down the steel frame, dissolving the frame as it went.

“An acid grenade,” he said to the Kid. “It’s like a frag, only worse. It’s not designed to kill, just to maim and incapacitate, so that we stop to help the wounded—”

It was then that the bear really started wailing, and it was perhaps the most horrific cry Schofield had ever heard.

The silver acid had started eating through the bear’s skin and the poor animal was in absolute agony. Its pelt was peeling off its flesh. Then its belly melted all the way through and its intestines began to ooze out of it, spilling out onto the floor with a foul slopping noise.

Terrified and confused, the shrieking bear scratched at its face with its claws, only to scratch off the skin, revealing bone, tendons and flesh. It was a sickening sight.

The bear fell to its knees.

Boom!

It dropped dead, shot through the head by Shane Schofield. A mercy killing.

“Move, people!” he yelled. “The bad guys will be here in approximately three seconds!”

They arrived in four.