Scarecrow Returns

THE ANTONOV soared skyward at a steep angle, with Shane Schofield dangling from it by his Magneteux’s cable.

Schofield had already done the math in his head: the gap in the gas cloud would be perhaps fifty miles wide, so the Antonov would reach it in less than ten minutes. Once there, Calderon would drop a warhead into it and ignite the gas cloud.

Schofield reeled in his cable and whizzed up it, arriving near the nose of the Antonov, which, like the other one, featured a glass spotter’s dome.

Schofield swung up under the glass dome, unholstered his SIG and fired it into the glass.

He ran out of bullets after two shots, but they did enough. The dome shattered and he discarded the gun, swung himself up and clambered inside.

With freezing wind whistling all around him, Schofield stepped up into the Antonov’s forward nose area—

—to find Mario standing before him, his M9 pistol aimed at Schofield’s head. Calderon and Typhon were nowhere to be seen. They must have been up in the cockpit directly above the nose-cone. In the hold beyond Mario, Schofield saw a large object hidden underneath a tarpaulin and at the very back of the hold, near its closed ramp, the jeep Calderon had driven from the gasworks to get to the plane.

“Mario . . .” Schofield said, his hands spread wide. He had discarded the empty SIG when he’d climbed up through the shattered glass dome, so he was now gunless.

“I made my choice, Scarecrow!” Mario yelled over the wind. “And that means only one of us can go home!”

“You’re a two-bit hood, Mario, unworthy of the name Marine . . .”

“Fuck you,” Mario shouted. “See you in Hell!”

He made to squeeze his trigger but, to his surprise, Schofield just stood there, hands still spread wide.

Then Schofield said something, and suddenly Bertie popped up over his shoulder, his machine-gun barrel unfolding quickly.

Boom!

Mario’s chest exploded. He was literally blasted off his feet. His legs flew up into the air as his upper body went down. He dropped to the floor, unmoving, dead.

“Hoodlums should never pick fights with soldiers,” Schofield muttered. “Come on, Bertie. We got work to do.”

They dashed over Mario’s body, heading for the short flight of steel stairs that led up to the cockpit.

As Schofield had been hanging unseen from the Antonov’s nose-cone by the Magneteux’s cable, Marius Calderon had been in the plane’s cockpit, staring intently at a screen.

He’d attached a spectroscopic long-path analyzer to one of the cockpit’s side windows: it looked like a stubby horizontal aerial and it gave real-time analysis of the air-quality around the plane.

Its results now appeared on the screen:

Calderon saw the gas cloud displayed as an encroaching blob at the top of the screen with his position shown at the center. Every few seconds, the screen changed, showing the cloud getting closer as the plane advanced toward it.

They were currently 30 miles from the gas cloud, only four minutes’ travel away.

Calderon smiled.

On the floor beside him, connected to the spectroscope by some wires, sat a Russian RS-6 nuclear warhead that had been reconfigured to accommodate a red-uranium sphere. Conical in shape and covered in stenciled warnings, it was an imposing device: one capable of delivering death on a massive scale.

As soon as he’d boarded the plane, Calderon had inserted the sphere into the warhead’s chamber. And now the warhead was linked to the spectroscope: once the spectroscope detected itself to be within the gas cloud, it would automatically instruct the warhead to initiate a two-minute detonation sequence: giving Calderon and Typhon time to escape before the warhead detonated.

For the explosion of the warhead would not be a small one.

It would vaporize the entire Antonov in a single fiery instant—blasting it apart as if it were made of tissue paper, before setting the gas-infused sky of the northern hemisphere alight. It was thus imperative that Calderon and Typhon be off the plane when the warhead went off, but they’d planned for that, too.

Calderon also had one last device in the cockpit: the compact black satellite dish that was the uplink. Once they were far enough away from Dragon Island, he would switch it off and leave the island to its fate.

Gunfire from the hold made him turn. “What was that! Get down there!” he yelled to Typhon.

Calderon took the controls while Typhon dashed back into the hold.

Gun in hand, Typhon threw open the cockpit door to see the rear hold of the Antonov in turmoil: gusting Arctic wind whistled through it, causing tarps to billow and anything not tied down to swirl through the air. Making it seem even more bizarre, the hold was tilted sharply upward thanks to the ascending angle of the plane—

Someone tackled him from the side and Typhon went sprawling to the floor, dropping his gun, his attacker falling with him.

Typhon stood to see Shane Schofield rising to his feet a few yards away.

“You just keep turning up,” Typhon said as they circled each other. “You really are something . . .”

“Where did Calderon find you?” Schofield said. “Chile?”

“Leavenworth,” Typhon said. “I was in the Army Rangers, but I killed a fellow Ranger who was gonna report me for an off-base incident. Calderon needed capable, patriotic men and he got me released to work for him. I brought the ‘Sharks’ with me.”

“Great. More patriots,” Schofield said. “Bertie!” Once again, Bertie appeared over his shoulder and—

His gun-barrel clicked, dry.

“Damn,” Schofield said as Typhon lunged at him and the two of them went thudding onto the back of the jeep in the rear of the hold, struggling and rolling.

Typhon unleashed some brutal punches, and for a short while, Schofield parried and evaded them, but he was beyond exhausted—from gunshot and torture wounds—and soon Typhon gained the ascendency and started landing more and more blows.

Up in the cockpit of the plane, Calderon’s spectroscope started beeping loudly. They had entered the gas cloud:

A timer on the warhead immediately started counting down.

“Time to fly,” Calderon said aloud. “And time to say goodbye to Dragon Island. Thank you, my beloved Army. You did your job perfectly.”

With those words, he flicked a switch on the satellite uplink and every light on it went out—

—and in a room in a Russian missile launch facility in western Siberia, a console operator instantly sat upright.

“Sir!” he called. “The satellite missile-detection shield over Dragon Island just went off-line!”

His commander stared at the operator’s screen for a second, then he grabbed a secure phone and relayed this information to the Russian President in Moscow.

The reply came immediately.

The missile commander hung up the phone.

“We are authorized for nuclear launch. Target is Dragon Island. Fire.”

A few moments later, an SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile with a 500-kiloton thermonuclear warhead shot out of its silo, heading for Dragon Island. Flight time: twenty-two minutes.

All as Marius Calderon had planned.