Scarecrow

MATTHEW REILLY

For Natalie, again

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I don't know about you, but when I read a book, usually most of the names on the 'Acknowledgements' page mean very little to me. They're either friends of the author, or people who helped the author with research or getting published.

But let me tell you, profound and public thanks is exactly what these people deserve.

In my previous books, I have written on the 'Acknowledgements' page these words: 'to anyone who knows a writer, never underestimate the power of your encouragement.'

Believe me, writers—indeed, all creative people—live off encouragement. It drives us, propels us onward. One encouraging word can outshine a thousand critical comments.

And so while you, dear reader, may not recognise all of the following names, each in their own way encouraged me. This book is the richer for their help.

So.

On the friendship side:

Thanks, again, to Natalie Freer for her companionship and her smile and for reading the book in 60-page chunks once again; to John Schrooten, my mum and my brother, Stephen, for telling me what they really thought. And to my dad for his quiet support.

To Nik and Simon Kozlina for taking me out for coffee when I needed it and to Bee Wilson for those dinners every Wednesday night. And to Daryl and Karen Kay, and Don and Irene Kay, for being keen test subjects, hard-nosed engineers and good friends.

On the technical side:

Special thanks to the remarkable Richard Walsh from BHP Billiton for taking me on a fantastic tour of a coalmine down at Appen—the mine scenes in this book are so much more authentic for that experience! And thanks to Don Kay for arranging the introduction.

And of course, once again, sincere thanks to my amazing American military advisors, Captain Paul Woods, US Army, and

Gunnery Sergeant Kris Hankison, USMC (retired). It's incredible what these two guys know—as such, any mistakes in the book are mine and were made over their objections!

And again, to everyone at Pan Macmillan, thank you for another great effort. They're a wonderful crew at Pan Macmillan: from editorial to publicity to the sales reps out on the road.

To anyone who knows a writer, never underestimate the power of your encouragement.

M.R.

TURNING AND TURNING IN THE WIDENING GYRE,

THE FALCON CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER; THINGS FALL APART; THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD; MERE ANARCHY IS LOOSED UPON THE WORLD . . .

W. B. YEATS The Second Coming

ALL OF THE BRAVE MEN ARE DEAD.

RUSSIAN MILITARY PROVERB

PROLOGUE

THE RULERS OF THE WORLD

LONDON, ENGLAND

20 OCTOBER, 1900 HOURS

There were 12 of them in total.

All men.

All billionaires.

Ten of the 12 were over 60 years of age. The other two were in their thirties, but they were the sons of former members, so their loyalty was assured. While membership of the Council was not strictly conditional on heredity, over the years it had become commonplace for sons to replace their fathers.

Otherwise membership was by invitation only and invitations were rarely given—as one would expect of such an august collection of individuals.

The co-founder of the world's largest software company.

A Saudi oil magnate.

The patriarch of a Swiss banking family.

The owner of the world's biggest shipping company.

The world's most successful stock trader.

The Vice-Chairman of the US Federal Reserve.

The newly-inherited heir to a military construction empire that built missiles for the United States Government.

There were no media barons on the Council—since it was widely known that their fortunes were largely based on debt and fluctuating

share prices. The Council controlled the media simply by controlling the banks that fed the media barons their money.

Likewise, there were no national leaders—as the Council well knew, politicians possess the lowest form of power: transient power. Like media barons, they are beholden to others for their influence. In any case, the Council had made and unmade presidents and dictators before.

And no women.

It was the Council's view that there was—as yet—no woman on the planet worthy of a seat at the table. Not the Queen. Not even the French make-up heiress, Lillian Mattencourt, with her $26 billion personal fortune.

Since 1918, the Council had met twice a year, every year.

This year, however, it had been convened nine times.

This was, after all, a special year.

While the Council was a somewhat secretive group, its meetings were never held in secret. Secret meetings of powerful people create attention. No. It had always been the Council's opinion that the best-kept secrets existed out in the open, witnessed by the world but never actually seen.

As such, Council meetings were usually held during major international gatherings—the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; various World Trade Organisation meetings; the Council had even met once at Camp David, when the President wasn't there.

Today it met in the grand executive boardroom of the Dorchester Hotel in London.

The vote was taken and the decision was unanimous.

'Then it is agreed,' the Chairman said. 'The hunt will commence tomorrow. The list of targets will be released tonight through the usual channels, and bounties will be paid to those contractors who present to Monsieur J. P. Delacroix of AGM-Suisse the accustomed form of proof that a particular target has been eliminated.

'There are fifteen targets in total. The bounty for each has been set at US$18.6 million.'

An hour later, the meeting ended, and the members of the Council adjourned for drinks.

On the boardroom table behind them lay their meeting notes. Of the notes sitting in front of the Chairman's seat, one page lay face-up.

On it was a list of names.

Name

Nat.

Org.

1.

ASHCROFT, William H.

UK

SAS

2.

CHRISTIE, Alec P.

UK

MI-6

3.

FARRELL, Gregory C.

USA

Delta

4.

KHALIF, Iman

AFGH

Al-Qaeda

5.

KINGSGATE, Nigel E.

UK

SAS

6.

McCABE, Dean P.

USA

Delta

7.

NAZZAR, Yousef M.

LEBN

HAMAS

8.

NICHOLSON, Francis X.

USA

USAMRMC

9.

OLIPHANT, Thompson J.

USA

USAMRMC

10.

POLANSKI, Damien G.

USA

ISS

11.

ROSENTHAL, Benjamin Y.

ISR

Mossad

12.

SCHOFIELD, Shane M.

USA

USMC

13.

WEITZMAN, Ronson H.

USA

USMC

14.

ZAWAHIRI, Hassan M.

SAUDI

Al-Qaeda

15.

ZEMIR, Simon B.

ISR

IAF

It was, to put it mildly, a singularly impressive list.

It featured members of the world's elite military units—the British SAS, the US Army's Delta Detachment and the Marine Corps.

The Israeli Air Force made an appearance, as did intelligence agencies like the Mossad and the ISS—the Intelligence and Security Service, the new name for the CIA. Plus members of the terrorist organisations HAMAS and Al-Qaeda.

It was a list of men—special men, brilliant at their chosen deadly professions—who had to be removed from the face of the earth by 12 noon, October 26, US Eastern Standard Time.

FIRST ATTACK

SIBERIA

26 OCTOBER 0900 HOURS (LOCAL TIME)

E.S.T. (NEW YORK, USA) 2100 HOURS (25 OCT)

Modern international bounty hunters bear many similarities to their forebears in the Old American West.

There are the lone wolf bounty hunters—usually ex-military types, freelance assassins or fugitives from justice themselves, they are lone operators known for their idiosyncratic weapons, vehicles or methods.

There are the organisations—companies that make the hunting of fugitive human beings a business. With their quasi-military infrastructures, mercenary organisations are often drawn to participate in international human hunts.

And, of course, there are the opportunists— special forces units that go AWOL and undertake bounty hunting activities; or law enforcement officials who find the lure of a private bounty more enticing than their legal obligations.

But the complexities of modern bounty hunting are not to be discounted. It is not unknown for a bounty hunter to act in concert with a national government that wants to distance itself from certain acts. Nor is it unknown for bounty hunters to have tacit agreements with member states for sanctuary as payment for a previous 'job'.

For, in the end, one thing about them is clear: international borders mean little to the international bounty hunter.

United Nations White Paper: Non-Government Forces in UN Peacekeeping Zones,

OCTOBER 2001 (UN PRESS, NEW YORK)

AIRSPACE ABOVE SIBERIA

26 OCTOBER, 0900 HOURS LOCAL TIME

(2100 HOURS E.S.T USA, 25 OCT)

The aeroplane rocketed through the sky at the speed of sound.

Despite the fact that it was a large plane, it didn't show up on any radar screens. And even though it was breaking the sound barrier, it didn't create any sonic booms—a recent development in wave-negativing sensors took care of that.

With its angry-browed cockpit windows, its black radar-absorbent paint and its unique flying-wing design, the B-2 Stealth Bomber didn't normally fly missions like this.

It was designed to carry 40,000 pounds of ordnance, from laser-guided bombs to air-launched thermonuclear cruise missiles.

Today, however, it carried no bombs.

Today its bomb bay had been modified to convey a light but unusual payload: one fast-attack vehicle and eight United States Marines.

As he stood in the cockpit of the speeding Stealth Bomber, Captain Shane M. Schofield was unaware of the fact that, as of six days previously, he had become a target in the greatest bounty hunt in history.

The grey Siberian sky was reflected in the silver lenses of his wraparound anti-flash glasses. The glasses concealed a pair of vertical scars that cut down across Schofield's eyes, wounds from a

previous mission and the source of his operational nickname: Scarecrow.

At five-feet-ten-inches tall, Schofield was lean and muscular. Under his white-grey Kevlar helmet, he had spiky black hair and a creased handsome face. He was known for his sharp mind, his cool head under pressure, and the high regard in which he was held by lower-ranking Marines—he was a leader who looked out for his men. Rumour had it he was also the grandson of the great Michael Schofield, a Marine whose exploits in the Second World War were the stuff of Marine Corps legend.

The B-2 zoomed through the sky, heading for a distant corner of northern Russia, to an abandoned Soviet installation on the barren coast of Siberia.

Its official Soviet name had been 'Krask-8: Penal and Maintenance Installation', the outermost of eight compounds surrounding the Arctic town of Krask. In the imaginative Soviet tradition, the compounds had been named Krask-1, Krask-2, Krask-3 and so on.

Until four days ago, Krask-8 had been known simply as a long-forgotten ex-Soviet outstation—a half-gulag, half-maintenance facility at which political prisoners had been forced to work. There were hundreds of such facilities dotted around the former Soviet Union—giant, ugly, oil-stained monoliths which before 1991 had formed the industrial heart of the USSR, but which now lay dormant, left to rot in the snow, the ghost towns of the Cold War.

But two days ago, on October 24, all that had changed.

Because on that day, a team of thirty well-armed and well-trained Islamic Chechen terrorists had taken over Krask-8 and announced to the Russian government that they intended to fire four SS-18 nuclear missiles—missiles that had simply been left in their silos at the site with the fall of the Soviets in 1991—on Moscow unless Russia withdrew its troops from Chechnya and declared the breakaway republic an independent state.

A deadline was set for 10 a.m. today, October 26.

The date had meaning. October 26 was a year to the day since a

force of crack Russian troops had stormed a Moscow theatre held by Chechen terrorists, ending a three-day siege, killing all the terrorists and over a hundred hostages.

That today also happened to be the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a traditional day of peace, didn't seem to bother these Islamist terrorists.

The fact that Krask-8 was something more than just a relic of the Cold War was also news to the Russian government.

After some investigation of long-sealed Soviet records, the terrorists' claims had proved to be correct. It turned out that Krask-8 was a secret that the old Communist regime had failed to inform the new government about during the transition to democracy.

It did indeed house nuclear missiles—sixteen to be exact; sixteen SS-18 nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles; all contained in concealed underground silos that had been designed to evade US satellite detection. Apparently, 'clones' of Krask-8—identical missile-launch sites disguised as industrial facilities—could also be found in old Soviet client states like the Sudan, Syria, Cuba and Yemen.

And so, in the new world order—post-Cold War, post-September 11—the Russians had called on the Americans to help.

As a rapid response, the American government had sent to Krask-8 a fast-and-light counter-terrorist unit from Delta Detachment—led by Specialists Greg Farrell and Dean McCabe.

Reinforcements would arrive later, the first of which was this team, a point unit of United States Marines led by Captain Shane M. Schofield.

Schofield strode into the bomb bay of the plane, breathing through a high-altitude face-mask.

He was met by the sight of a medium-sized cargo container, inside of which sat a Fast Attack 'Commando Scout' vehicle. Arguably the lightest and fastest armoured vehicle in service, it looked like a cross between a sports car and a Humvee.

And inside the sleek vehicle, strapped tightly into their seats, sat seven Recon Marines, the other members of Schofield's team. All were dressed in white-grey body armour, white-grey helmets, white-grey battle dress uniforms. And they all stared intently forward, game faces on.

As Schofield watched their serious expressions, he was once again taken aback by their youth. It was strange, but at 33 he felt decidedly old in their presence.

He nodded to the nearest man. 'Hey, Whip. How's the hand?'

'Why, er, it's great, sir,' Corporal Whip Whiting said, surprised. He'd been shot in the hand during a fierce gun battle in the Tora Bora mountains in early 2002, but since that day Whip and Schofield hadn't worked together. 'The docs said you saved my index finger. If you hadn't told them to splint it, it would have grown in a hook shape. To be honest, I didn't think you'd remember, sir.'

Schofield's eyes gleamed. 'I always remember.'

Apart from one member of the unit, this wasn't his regular team.

His usual team of Marines—Libby 'Fox' Gant and Gena 'Mother' Newman—were currently operating in the mountains of northern Afghanistan, hunting for the terrorist leader and longtime No. 2 to Osama bin Laden, Hassan Mohammad Zawahiri.

Gant, fresh from Officer Candidate School and now a First Lieutenant, was leading a Recon Unit in Afghanistan. Mother, an experienced Gunnery Sergeant who had helped Schofield himself when he was a young officer, was acting as her Team Chief.

Schofield was supposed to be joining them, but at the last minute he'd been diverted from Afghanistan to lead this unexpected mission.

The only one of his regulars that Schofield had been able to bring with him was a young sergeant named Buck Riley Jnr, call-sign 'Book II'. Silent and brooding and possessed of an intensity that belied his 25 years, Book II was a seriously tough-as-nails warrior. And as far as Schofield was concerned, with his heavy-browed face and battered pug nose, he was looking more and more like his father—the original 'Book' Riley—every day.

Schofield keyed his satellite radio, spoke into the VibraMike strapped around his throat. Rather than pick up actual spoken words, the vibration-sensing microphone picked up the reverberations of his voice box. The satellite uplink system driving it was the brand-new GSX-9—the most advanced communications system in use in the US military. In theory, a portable GSX-9 unit like Schofield's could broadcast a clear signal halfway around the world with crystal clarity.

'Base, this is Mustang 3,' he said. 'Sitrep?'

A voice came over his earpiece. It was the voice of an Air Force radio operator stationed at McColl Air Force Base in Alaska, the communications centre for this mission.

'Mustang 3, this is Base. Mustang 1 and Mustang 2 have engaged the enemy. Report that they have seized the missile silos and inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy. Mustang 1 is holding the silos and awaiting reinforcements. Mustang 2 reports that there are still at least twelve enemy agents putting up a fight in the main maintenance building.''

'All right,' Schofield said, 'what about our follow-up?'

'An entire company of Army Rangers from Fort Lewis is en route, Scarecrow. One hundred men, approximately one hour behind you.''

'Good.'

Book II spoke from inside the armoured Scout vehicle. 'What's the story, Scarecrow?'

Schofield turned. 'We're go for drop.'

Five minutes later, the box-shaped cargo-container dropped out of the belly of the Stealth Bomber and plummeted like a stone towards the Earth.

Inside the container—in the car resting inside it—sat Schofield and his seven Marines, shuddering and jolting with the vibrations of the terminal-velocity fall.

Schofield watched the numbers on a digital wall-mounted altimeter whizzing downwards:

50,000 feet. . .

45,000 feet. . .

40,000 . . . 30,000 . . . 20,000 . . . 10,000 . . .

'Preparing to engage chutes at five thousand feet. . .' Corporal Max 'Clark' Kent, the loadmaster, said in a neutral voice. 'GPS guidance system has us right on target for landing. External cameras verify that the LZ is clear.'

Schofield eyed the fast-ticking altimeter.

8,000 feet.

7,000 feet. . .

6,000 feet. . .

If everything went to plan, they would land about fifteen miles due east of Krask-8, just over the horizon from the installation, out of sight of the facility.

'Engaging primary chutes . . . now,"¹Clark announced.

The jolt that the falling container received was shocking in its force. The whole falling box lurched sharply and Schofield and his Marines all shuddered in their seats, held in by their six-point seat belts and rollbars.

And suddenly they were floating, care of the container's three directional parachutes.

'How're we doing, Clark?' Schofield asked.

Clark was guiding them with the aid of a joystick and the container's external cameras.

'Ten seconds. I'm aiming for a dirt track in the middle of the valley. Brace yourselves for landing in three . . . two . . . one . . .'

Whump!

The container hit solid ground, and suddenly its entire front wall just fell open and daylight flooded in through the wide aperture and the four-wheel-drive Commando Scout Light Attack Vehicle skidded off the mark and raced out of the container's belly into the grey Siberian day.

The Scout whipped along a muddy earthen track, bounded on both sides by snow-covered hills. Deathly grey tree skeletons lined the slopes. Black rocks stabbed upward through the carpet of snow.

Stark. Brutal. And cold as hell.

Welcome to Siberia.

As he sat in the back of the Light Attack Vehicle, Schofield spoke into his throat-mike: 'Mustang 1, this is Mustang 3. Do you copy?'

No reply.

'I say again: Mustang 1, this is Mustang 3. Do you copy?'

Nothing.

He did the same for the second Delta team, Mustang 2. Again, no reply.

Schofield keyed the satellite frequency, spoke to Alaska: 'Base, this is 3. I can't raise either Mustang 1 or Mustang 2. Do you have contact?'

'Ah, affirmative on that, Scarecrow,' the voice from Alaska said. 'J was just talking to them a moment ago—'

The signal exploded to hash.

'Clark?' Schofield said.

'Sorry, Boss, signal's gone,' Clark said from the Scout's wall console. 'We lost 'em. Damn, I thought these new satellite receivers were supposed to be incorruptible.'

Schofield frowned, concerned. 'Jamming signals?'

'No. Not a one. We're in clear radio airspace. Nothing should be affecting that signal. Must be something at the other end.'

'Something at the other end . . .' Schofield bit his lip. 'Famous last words.'

'Sir,' the Scout's driver, a grizzled old sergeant named 'Bull' Simcox, said, 'we should be coming into visual range in about thirty seconds.'

Schofield looked forward, out over Simcox's shoulder.

He saw the black muddy track rushing by beneath the Scout's armoured hood, saw that they were approaching the crest of a hill.

Beyond that hill, lay Krask-8.

At that same moment, inside a high-tech radio receiving room at McColl Air Force Base in Alaska, the young radio officer who had been in contact with Schofield looked about himself in confusion. His name was Bradsen, James Bradsen.

A few seconds before, completely without warning, the power to the communications facility had been abruptly cut.

The base commander at McColl strode into the room.

'Sir,' Bradsen said. 'We just—'

'I know, son,' the CO said. 'I know.'

It was then that Bradsen saw another man standing behind his base commander.

Bradsen had never seen this other man before. Tall and solid, he had carrot-red hair and an ugly rat-like face. He wore a plain suit and his black eyes never blinked. They just took in the entire room with a cool unblinking stare. Everything about him screamed 1SS.

The base commander said, 'Sorry, Bradsen. Intelligence issue. This mission has been taken out of our hands.'

The Scout attack vehicle crested the hill. Inside it, Schofield drew a breath. Before him, in all its glory, lay Krask-8. It stood in the centre of a wide flat plain, a cluster of snow-covered

buildings—hangars, storage sheds, a gigantic maintenance warehouse, even one 15-storey glass-and-concrete office tower. A miniature cityscape.

The whole compound was surrounded by a 20-foot-high razor wire fence, and in the distance beyond it, perhaps two miles away, Schofield could see the northern coastline of Russia and the waves of the Arctic Ocean.

Needless to say, the post-Cold War world hadn't been kind to Krask-8.

The entire mini-city was deserted.

Snow covered the complex's half-dozen streets. Off to Schofield's right, giant mounds of the stuff slouched against the walls of the main maintenance warehouse—a structure the size of four football fields.

To the left of the massive shed, connected to it by an enclosed bridge, stood the office tower. Enormous downward-creeping claws of ice hung off its flat roof, frozen in place, defying gravity.

The cold itself had taken its toll, too. Without an anti-freeze crew on site, nearly every window pane at Krask-8 had contracted and cracked. Now, every glass surface lay shattered or spider-webbed, the stinging Siberian wind whistling through it all with impunity.

It was a ghost town.

And somewhere underneath it all lay sixteen nuclear missiles.

The Scout roared through the already blasted-open gates of Krask-8 at a cool 80 kilometres an hour.

It shot down a sloping road toward the complex, one of Schofield's Marines now perched in the 7.62mm machine-gun turret mounted on the rear of the sleek armoured car.

Inside the Scout, Schofield hovered behind Clark, peering at the young corporal's computer screen.

'Check for their locators,' he said. 'We have to find out where those D-boys are.'

Clark tapped away at his keyboard, bringing up some computer maps of Krask-8.

One map showed the complex from a side-view:

Two clusters of blinking red dots could be seen: one set on the ground floor of the office tower and a second set inside the massive maintenance shed.

The two Delta teams.

But something was wrong with this image.

None of the blinking dots was moving.

All of them were ominously still.

Schofield felt a chill on the back of his neck.

'Bull,' he said softly, 'take Whip, Tommy and Hastings. Check out the office tower. I'll take Book II, Clark and Rooster and secure the maintenance building.'

'Roger that, Scarecrow.'

The Scout rushed down a narrow deserted street, passing underneath concrete walkways, blasting through the mounds of snow that lay everywhere.

It skidded to a halt outside the gargantuan maintenance warehouse, right in front of a small personnel door.

The rear hatch of the Scout was flung open and immediately

Schofield and three snow-camouflaged Marines leapt out of it and bolted for the door.

No sooner were they out than the Scout peeled away, heading for the glass office tower next door.

Schofield entered the maintenance building gun-first.

He carried a Heckler & Koch MP-7, the successor to the old MP-5. The MP-7 was a short-barrelled machine pistol, compact but powerful. In addition to the MP-7, Schofield carried a Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol, a K-Bar knife and, in a holster on his back, an Armalite MH-12 Maghook—a magnetic grappling hook that was fired from a double-gripped gun-like launcher.

In addition to his standard kit, for this mission Schofield carried some extra firepower—six high-powered Thermite-Amatol demolition charges. Each handheld charge had the explosive ability to level an entire building.

Schofield and his team hurried down a short corridor lined with offices, came to a door at its end.

They stopped.

Listened.

No sound.

Schofield cracked open the door—and caught a glimpse of wide-open space, immense wide-open space . . .

He pushed the door wider.

'Jesus . . .'

The work area of the maintenance warehouse stretched away from him like an enormous hangar bay, its cracked-glass roof revealing the grey Siberian sky.

Only this was no ordinary hangar bay.

Nor was it any ordinary old 'maintenance shed' for a penal colony.

Taking up nearly three-quarters of the floorspace of this massive interior space was a gigantic—gigantic—rectangular concrete pit in the floor.

And mounted at Schofield's end of the pit, raised off the floor on a series of concrete blocks, was a 200-metre-long submarine.

It looked awesome.

Like a giant on its throne, surrounded by a complex array of structures that belonged to people of a vastly smaller size.

And all of it covered in a crust of ice and snow.

Cranes and catwalks criss-crossed over the top of the sub, while thin horizontal walkways connected it to the concrete floor of the shed. A single vertiginous gangway joined the three-storey-high conning tower of the submarine to an upper balcony level.

Blinking away the strangeness of the sight, Schofield's mind processed this new information.

First, he recognised the submarine.

It was a Typhoon.

The Typhoon class of submarines had been the jewel in the crown of the USSR's ocean-going nuclear arsenal. Despite the fact that only six had ever been built, the long-nosed ballistic missile subs had been made famous in novels and Hollywood movies. But while the Typhoons looked sexy, they had been terribly unreliable, requiring constant upgrades and maintenance. They remain the largest submarines ever built by man.

This one, Schofield saw, had been having work done to its forward torpedo bays when Krask-8 had been abandoned—the outer hull around the Typhoon's bow torpedo tubes lay ripped open, taken apart plate-by-plate.

How a Typhoon-class sub came to be inside a maintenance shed two miles inland from the Arctic Ocean was another question.

A question that was answered by the remainder of the maintenance building.

Beyond the Typhoon's enormous dry-dock—indeed, cutting the dry-dock off from the rest of the pit—Schofield saw a large vertical plate-steel sea gate.

And beyond the sea gate was water.

A wide rectangular indoor expanse of partially-frozen water, held out from the dry-dock by the dam-like sea gate.

Schofield guessed that beneath that pool of water lay some kind of underground cave system that stretched all the way to the coast—allowing submarines to come into Krask-8 for repairs, away from the prying eyes of American spy satellites.

It all became clear.

Krask-8—two miles inland from the Arctic coast, listed on maps as a forced-labour facility—was a top-secret Soviet submarine repair facility.

Schofield, however, didn't have time to ponder that issue, because it was then that he saw the bodies.

They lay over by the edge of the dry-dock pit: four bodies, all dressed in US Army snow fatigues, body armour and . . .

... all shot to hell.

Blood covered everything. It was splashed across faces, splattered over chests, spread out across the floor.

'Motherfucker,' Clark breathed.

'Christ, man, these were friggin' D-boys,' Corporal Ricky 'Rooster' Murphy said. Like Schofield—and maybe in imitation of him—Rooster wore silver anti-flash glasses.

Schofield remained silent.

The uniforms on the corpses, he saw, had been customised: some of the men had removed their right-hand shoulderplates, others had cut off the sleeves of their snow gear at the elbows.

Customised uniforms: the signature of Delta.

Two more bodies lay down in the pit itself—30 feet below floor level—also shot to shit.

Hundreds of ejected shell casings lay in a wide circle around the scene. Fire from the Delta men. By the look of it, Schofield saw, the D-boys had been firing in nearly every direction when they'd gone down . . .

Whispered voices.

'How many in total?'

'Just the four in here. Blue Team reports four more in the office tower.'

'So which one is Schofield?'

'The one in the silver glasses.' 'Snipers ready. On my mark.'

One of the bodies caught Schofield's attention.

He froze.

He hadn't seen it at first, because the body's upper half had been hanging over the edge of the dry-dock pit, but now he saw it clearly.

Alone among the six dead bodies, this man's head had been cut off

Schofield grimaced at the sight.

It was absolutely disgusting.

Ragged threads of flesh hung from the corpse's open neck; the twin pipes of the oesophagus and the windpipe lay exposed to the open air.

'Mother of God,' Book II breathed, coming up alongside Schofield. 'What the hell happened here?'

As the four tiny figures of Schofield and his Marines examined the death scene down on the floor of the dry-dock hall, no fewer than twenty pairs of eyes watched them.

The watchers were arrayed around the hall, at key strategic points—men dressed in identical snow fatigues but carrying a variety of weapons.

They watched in tense silence, waiting for their commander to give the kill signal.

Schofield crouched beside the headless body and examined it.

D-boys didn't wear ID tags or patches, but he didn't need to see a tag or a patch to know who this was. He could tell by the physique alone.

It was Specialist Dean McCabe, one of the Delta team leaders.

Schofield glanced around the immediate area. McCabe's head was nowhere in sight. Schofield frowned at that. The Delta man's head had not only been cut off, it had been taken—

'ScarecrowV a voice exploded in his earpiece. 'This is Bull. We're over in the office tower. You're not going to believe this.'

'Try me.'

'They're all dead, all the Delta guys. And Scarecrow . . . Farrell's head has been fucking cut off

An ice-cold charge zoomed up Schofield's spine.

His mind raced. His eyes scanned the hall all around him—its cracked glass windows and ice-faded walls blurring in a kaleidoscope of motion.

Krask-8. Deserted and isolated . . .

No sign of any Chechen terrorists since they'd got here . . .

Radio contact with Alaska lost. . .

And all the D-boys dead . . . plus the bizarre extra feature of McCabe's and Farrell's missing heads.

And it all crystallised in Schofield's mind.

'Bull!' he hissed into his throat-mike. 'Get over here right now! We've been set up! We've just walked into a trap!'

And at that moment, as he spoke, Schofield's searching eyes settled on a small mound of snow in a corner of the immense dry-dock hall—and suddenly a shape huddled behind the snow-mound came into sharp focus, revealing itself to be a carefully-camouflaged man dressed in snow-fatigues and pointing a Colt Commando assault rifle directly at Schofield's face.

Damn.

And with that the twenty assassins arrayed around the hall opened fire on Schofield and his men and the dry-dock facility became a battlefield.

Schofield ducked reflexively just as two bullets swooshed low over his head.

Book II and Clark did the same, diving in amongst the Delta bodies on the ground as a rain of bullets sparked against the floor all around them.

The fourth Marine, Rooster, wasn't so lucky. Perhaps it was the reflective glasses he wore—making him look like Schofield—or perhaps he was just unlucky. Nevertheless, a hailstorm of rounds pummelled his body, cut it to ribbons, making him dance even though he was dead.

'Into the pit! Now!' Schofield yelled, practically crash-tackling Clark and Book II out of the line of fire and rolling the three of them off the edge of the dry-dock pit just as it was assaulted by a thousand bullet sparks.

As Schofield and the others dropped down into the dry-dock pit, they did so under the watchful eye of the commander of the heavily-armed force surrounding them.

The commander's name was Wexley—Cedric K. Wexley—and in a previous life he had been a major in the elite South African Reconnaissance Commandos.

So this is the famous Scarecrow, Wexley thought, watching Schofield move. The man who defeated Gunther Botha in Utah. Well, if nothing else, his reflexes are good.

Before his own fall from grace, Wexley had been a shining star in the Reccondos, chiefly because he had been a devoted follower

of apartheid. Somehow, he had survived the transition to democracy, his racist tendencies going unnoticed. And then he had killed a black soldier in boot camp, beat him to death during hand-to-hand training. He had done it before, but this time it was noticed.

And when soldiers like Cedric Wexley—psychopaths, sociopaths, thugs—were discharged from the legitimate armed forces, they invariably ended up in the illegitimate ones.

Which was how Wexley came to be in command of this unit: a Special Ops team belonging to one of the world's pre-eminent mercenary organisations—the highly corporate, South African-based 'Executive Solutions' or 'ExSoP.

While ExSol specialised in Third World security missions-like propping up African dictatorships in exchange for diamond-mining royalties—it also, when the logistics allowed, engaged in the more lucrative international bounty hunts that occasionally arose.

At nearly $19 million per head, this was the most lucrative bounty hunt ever, and thanks to a well-placed friend on the Council, Executive Solutions had been given the inside running to claim three of those heads.

Wexley's radio operator came up beside him. 'Sir. Blue Team has engaged the Marines in the office tower.'

Wexley nodded. 'Tell them to return to the dry-dock via the bridge when they're done.'

'Sir, there's another thing,' the radio man said.

'Yes?'

'Neidricht up on the roof says he's picked up two incoming signals on the external radar.' There was a pause. 'Judging by the signatures, he thinks it's the Hungarian and the Black Knight.'

'How far out are they?'

'The Hungarian's about fifteen minutes away. The Knight is further, maybe twenty-five.'

Wexley bit his lip.

Bounty hunters, he thought. Fucking bounty hunters.

Wexley hated bounty hunt missions precisely because he hated bounty hunters. If they didn't beat you to the target, the little fuckers would let you do all the dirty work, stalk you all the way back to the proof-station, steal the target out from under you and then claim the money for themselves.

In an up-front military exchange, the winner was the last man standing. Not so in a bounty hunt. In a bounty hunt, the winner was the one who presented the prize back at base—however he might have obtained it.

Wexley growled. 'The Hungarian I can handle, he's a brute. But the Black Knight. . . he'll almost certainly be a problem.'

The ExSol commander looked down at the submarine pit. 'Which means we'd better make this quick. Get this Schofield asshole, and bring me his fucking head.'

Schofield, Book II and Clark dropped down the wall of the dry-dock pit.

They fell for a full thirty feet, before—whump—they landed heavily on the two Delta bodies slumped at the bottom.

'Come on, move! Move! Move!' Schofield pulled the other two underneath the big black Typhoon sub, mounted on its blocks in the pit.

Each block was about the size of a small car and made of solid concrete. Four long rows of the blocks supported the massive submarine, creating a series of narrow right-angled alleyways underneath the Typhoon's black steel hull.

Schofield spoke into his throat-mike as he zig-zagged through the dark alleyways: 'Bull! Bull Simcox! Do you copy!'

Bull's voice, fast and desperate: 'Scarecrow, shit! We're under heavy fire over here! All of the others are down and I'm ... I'm hit bad! I can't—oh, fuck—no!—'

There was a brief crack of gunfire at the other end and then the signal cut to hash.

'Shit,' Schofield said.

Then, abruptly, there came several soft whumps from somewhere behind him.

He spun—MP-7 up—and through the forest of fat concrete blocks, saw the first set of enemy troops drop into the pit on ropes.

With Book II and Clark behind him, Schofield weaved his way through the shadowy alleyways under the Typhoon, ducking enemy fire.

Their pursuers had now entered the dark concrete maze as well—maybe ten men in total—and they were systematically moving forward, covering the long alleyways with heavy fire, herding Schofield and his men toward the sea-gate-end of the dry-dock.

Schofield watched his enemies as they moved, analysed their tactics, eyed their weapons. Their tactics were standard. Basic flushing stuff. But their weapons . . .

Their weapons.

'Who are these guys?' Book II said.

Schofield said, 'I have an idea, but you're not going to like it.'

'Try me.'

'Check out their guns.'

Book II took a quick look. Some of the white-masked men held MP-5s while others carried French-made FAMAS assault rifles or American Colt Commandos. Others still held old AK-47s, or AK-47 variants like the Chinese Type 56.

'See the guns?' Schofield said as they moved. 'They've all got different kinds of weapons.'

'Damn it,' Book II said. 'Mercenaries.'

'That's what I'm thinking.'

'But why?'

'Don't know. At least not yet.'

'What are we going to do?' Clark asked desperately.

'I'm working on it,' Schofield said, gazing up at the thick steel hull above them, looking for escape options.

With his back pressed against a concrete block, he poked his head around one of the outer corners and looked all the way down the dry-dock pit—and saw the high steel sea gate that separated the pit from the ice-covered pool of water at the eastern end of the hall.

The mechanics of the dry-dock leapt into his mind.

To get an enormous Typhoon into the dock, you lowered the sea gate, flooded the dry-dock, and sailed your sub into it. Then you raised the sea gate again and drained the dry-dock, lowering the sub onto the concrete blocks in the process and giving yourself a clean and dry environment to work on the submarine.

The sea gate . . .

Schofield eyed it closely, thought of all the water being held back behind it. Looked the other way: toward the bow of the sub, and saw it.

It was their only shot.

He turned to the others. 'You guys got Maghooks on you?'

'Er, yeah.'

'Yes.'

'Get ready to use 'em,' Schofield said, looking down at the great steel sea gate, three storeys high and 90 feet wide. He drew his own Maghook from his back-mounted holster.

'We going that way, sir?' Clark asked.

'Nope. We're going in the other direction, but to do that we need to blow open that sea gate.'

'Blow open the sea gate?' Clark gasped, looking at Book.

Book II shrugged. 'This is standard. He destroys things—'

Just then, an unexpected volley of bullets raked the concrete blocks all around them. It had come from the direction of the sea gate.

Schofield ducked for cover, peered out, and saw that ten more mercenary soldiers had dropped into the pit at that end.

Christ, he thought, now they were stuck in the pit between two sets of bad guys.

The new group of mercenaries began to advance. 'Screw this,' he said.

Cedric Wexley watched the dry-dock pit from high above.

He saw his two squads of mercenaries closing in on Schofield and his men from both sides.

A cold smile cracked his face.

This was too easy.

Schofield grabbed two Thermite-Amatol demolition charges from his combat webbing. 'Gentlemen. Maghooks.'

They all pulled out their Maghooks.

'Now do this,' Schofield moved to the port-side edge of the Typhoon, raised his Maghook and fired it at close range up into the hull of the sub.

Clangggggg!

Clark and Book II did the same.

Clangggggg! Clangggggg!

Schofield peered down the length of the submarine. 'When the wave hits, let your Maghook ropes play out, so we can move along the outside of the sub.'

'Wave?' Clark said. 'What wave . . . ?'

But Schofield didn't answer him.

He simply took the two demolition charges in his hands and selected the timer switch he wanted.

Timer switches on Thermite-Amatol charges come in three colours: red, green and blue. Depressing the red switch gives you five seconds. Green gives you thirty seconds. Blue: one minute.

Schofield chose red.

Then he hurled the two charges down the length of the dry-dock pit, over the heads of the advancing mercenary team, sending the two high-powered explosives bouncing into the plate-steel sea gate like a pair of tennis balls. They came to rest at the

gate's weakest point, at the spot where it met the pit's concrete right-side wall.

Five seconds. Four . . .

'This is going to hurt. . .' Book II said, wrapping the rope of his Maghook around his forearm. Clark did the same.

Three . . . two . . .

'One,' Schofield whispered, eyeing the dam. 'Now.'

Boom.

The twin blasts of the Thermite-Amatol demolition charges shook the walls of the entire dry-dock building.

A blinding-white flash of light lit up the sea gate. Smoke rushed up the length of the pit, filling the alleyways between the giant concrete blocks as it roared forward, consuming the nearest group of assassins, enveloping everything in its path, including Schofield's

team.

There was a moment of eerie silence . . .

And then came the crack—an almighty, ear-splitting craaaack— as the wounded sea gate broke under the weight of the water pressing against it, and 100 million litres of water rushed into the pit, bursting through the smoke.

A wall of water.

The immense body of liquid created an incredible sound—it roared down the length of the dry-dock pit: foaming, roiling,

bounding forward.

The nearest group of mercenaries were simply blasted off their feet by the wall of water, and hurled westward.

Schofield, Book II and Clark were next in line.

The wall of water just collected them where they stood—one second they were there, the next they were gone. It lifted them instantly off their feet, flinging them like rag dolls toward the bow-end of the Typhoon, bouncing them along the side of its

hull.

The other team of mercenaries was also taken by the rushing wall of water. They were smashed into the solid concrete wall at the far end of the dry-dock, many of them going under as the

waves of roiling water crashed against the edge of the 200-metre-long pit.

Schofield and his men, however, didn't hit the end of the pit.

As the roaring body of water had collected them, they'd held grimly onto their Maghook launchers as the ropes connected to their magnetic hooks unspooled at a phenomenal rate.

When they came alongside the bow of the Typhoon, Schofield had yelled, 'Clamp now!'

He had then jammed his finger down on a button on his Maghook's grip, initiating a clamping mechanism inside it that stopped the unspooling of its rope.

Book II and Clark did the same . . . and the three of them jolted to simultaneous halts right next to the bow of the Typhoon, the rushing water kicking up blast-sprays all around their bodies.

Next to them, exactly where Schofield had seen it before, was the yawning opening of the Typhoon's port-side torpedo tubes—the tubes which had evidently been undergoing repairs when Krask-8 had been abandoned.

At the moment, the torpedo tubes lay a foot above the surface of the inrushing water.

'Get into the tubes!' Schofield yelled into his mike. 'Into the sub!' Book and Clark did as they were told, and squirming and struggling against the rushing water, entered the submarine.

Sudden silence.

Schofield wriggled out of the torpedo tube last of all and found himself standing inside a Soviet Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine.

It was a world of cold steel. Racks that had once contained torpedoes occupied the centre of the room. Rows of pipes lined the ceiling. The stench of body odour—the smell of fear, the smell of submariners—filled the air.

Two fat waterfalls of seawater now gushed in through the sub's open torpedo tubes, rapidly filling the cramped room.

It was largely dark in here: the only light, the grey daylight that crept in through the now-flooding torpedo tubes. Schofield and the others flicked on their barrel-mounted flashlights.

'This way,' Schofield said, charging out of the torpedo room, his legs sloshing through the rising water.

The three Marines bolted through the Typhoon's imposing silo hall next—a long high-ceilinged chamber that contained twenty gigantic missile silos; tall tubular structures that rose from floor to ceiling, dwarfing them.

As he ran past the silos, Schofield saw that the access hatches on some of them were open, revealing hollow emptiness inside. The hatches on at least six of the silos, however, remained closed— indicating that they still contained missiles.

'Where to now?' Book II called forward.

Schofield said, 'The control room! I need information on these assholes!'

He hit the nearest rung-ladder on the fly.

Thirty seconds later, Shane Schofield entered the control room of the Typhoon.

Dust lay everywhere. Mould grew in the corners of the room. Only the occasional glinting reflection from his men's flashlights betrayed the shiny metallic surfaces under the dust.

Schofield hurried over to the command platform, to the periscope located there. He yanked the scope up out of the floor, turned to Book II.

'See if you can get some power up. This sub would've been connected to the base's geothermal supply. There might still be some residual power. Fire up the Omnibus central control system. Then get the ESM and radio antennas online.'

'Got it,' Book II said, hurrying away.

The periscope reached its full height. Schofield put his eye to it. A basic optical periscope, it didn't need any electric power to work.

Through it, Schofield saw the dry-dock hall outside—saw the

swirling water filling the pit around the Typhoon—saw a half-dozen mercenaries standing at the edge of the pit, watching it fill with seawater.

Pivoting the periscope, Schofield lifted his view, casting his gaze over the balcony level that overlooked the dry-dock pit.

There he saw more mercenaries, saw one man in particular gesticulating wildly, sending another half-dozen men running toward the gangway that connected the Typhoon's conning tower to the balcony level.

'I see you . . .' Schofield said to the man. 'Book? How's that power coming!'

'Just a second, my Russian's a bit rusty—wait, here it is . . .'

Book flicked some switches and suddenly—vmmm—a small collection of green lights burst to life all around Schofield.

'Okay, try it now,' Book said.

Schofield snatched up a pair of dusty headphones and engaged the sub's Electronic Support Measures antenna—a feature on most modern submarines, an ESM antenna is little more than a roving scanner, it simply trawls over every available radio frequency, searching for activity.

Voices came through Schofield's headset instantly.

'—crazy bastard blew open the fucking sea gate!'

'—they went in through the torpedo tubes. They're inside the sub!''

Then a calmer voice.

As he gazed through the periscope, Schofield saw that it was the commander-type individual up on the balcony level who was speaking.

'—Blue Team, storm the sub via the conning tower. Green Team, find another gangway and use it as a bridge. Split up into two groups of two and enter the sub via the forward and rear escape hatches—'

Schofield listened to the voice intently.

Crisp accent. South African. Calm, too. No sign of pressure or anxiety.

That wasn't a good sign.

Usually a commander who has just seen a dozen of his men swept away by a tidal wave would be somewhat rattled. This guy, however, was completely calm.

'—Sir, this is radar. That first incoming aerial contact has been identified as a Yak-141 strike fighter. It's the Hungarian.'

'—ETA?' the commander asked.

'—Based on current speed, five minutes, sir.'

The commander seemed to ponder this news. Then he said, '—Captain Micheleaux. Send me every other man we've got. I'd like to finish this before our competitors arrive*

'—It will be done,' a French-accented voice replied.

Schofield's mind went into overdrive.

They were about to storm the Typhoon—through the conning tower and the forward and rear escape hatches.

And reinforcements were on their way . . . but from where?

All right, he caught himself. Rewind. Think!

Your enemy. Who are they?

They're a mercenary force of some kind.

Why are they here?

J don't know. The only clue is the missing heads. McCabe and Fan ell's heads . . .

What else?

That South African guy spoke of 'competitors' who were on their way. But it was a strange word to use . . . competitors.

What options do you have?

Not many. We have no contact with our home base; no immediate means of escape; at least not until the Rangers arrive, and that's a minimum of thirty minutes away . . .

Damn it, Schofield thought, a whole half-hour, at the very minimum. That was his enemies' biggest advantage.

Time.

Aside from the 'competitors' they had mentioned, they had all the time in the world to hunt Schofield and his men down.

Then that's the first thing we have to change, Schofield thought. We have to impose a time constraint on this situation.

He looked about himself, assessing the constellation of pilot lights that illuminated the control room.

He had power . . .

Which meant maybe he could—

He thought of the six missile silos down below that had been firmly sealed, while all the others had been opened.

There might still be missiles in them. Sure, the Russians would have removed the warheads, but maybe the missiles remained.

'Here,' Schofield invited Clark to the periscope. 'Keep an eye on the bad guys outside.'

Clark seized the periscope, while Schofield dashed to a nearby console. 'Book. Give me a hand here.'

'What are you thinking?' Book II asked.

'I want to know if the missiles on this sub still work.'

The console came alive when he hit the power switch. A code screen came up and he entered an ISS-obtained all-purpose Soviet code that he had been given at the start of this mission.

Called the 'Universal Disarm Code' it was kind of like an electronic skeleton key, the ultimate skeleton key, designed for use by only the most senior Soviet personnel. It was an eight-digit code that worked on all Soviet-era keypad locks. It had been given to Schofield to overcome any digital keypads at Krask-8. Apparently, there was an American equivalent—known only to the President and a few very senior military figures—but Schofield didn't know that one.

'I can see six men on the balcony level heading for the gangway!' Clark called. 'Four more down on ground level, they're hauling a bridge into position so they can board us!'

Book II flicked some switches, brought up a screen that revealed, yes, there were indeed some missiles still sitting in their silos in the forward section of the Typhoon.

'Okay,' Book II said, reading the screen. 'The nuclear warheads have been removed but it seems that some of the missiles are still in their silos. There appear to be, let me see, six of them . . .'

'One is all I need,' Schofield said. 'Open the hatches for the six missiles, and then open one extra hatch.'

'An extra one?' 'Trust me.'

Book II just shook his head and did as he was told, hitting the hatch switches for seven of the sub's missile silos.

Cedric Wexley's eyes widened at the sight.

He saw the Typhoon, now surrounded by an enormous indoor pool of water, saw his own men converging on it . . .

. . . and now, to his astonishment, he saw seven of the submarine's forward missile hatches slowly and steadily opening on their hydraulic hinges.

'What on earth is he doing?' Wexley asked aloud.

'What on earth are you doing?' Book asked.

'Changing the timescale for this fight,' Schofield said.

He brought up another screen, saw the exact GPS co-ordinates of Krask-8: 07914.74, 7000.01. They matched the grid co-ordinates he had employed when his team had dropped in from the Stealth Bomber earlier.

Schofield punched in the necessary information.

He set the missiles to fire immediately—programmed them to fly for a duration of 20 minutes—and then he set the target co-ordinates as: 07914.74, 7000.01.

He didn't expect all of the missiles to work. The O-ring seals on their solid-fuelled rocket boosters would have degraded significantly over the past few years, possibly rendering all of them useless.

But then he only needed one to work.

The fourth one he tried did.

When its green 'Go' light blinked to life, a final approval-code screen came up. Schofield used the Universal Disarm Code. Authorisation granted.

Then he hit 'fire'.

Cedric Wexley heard the noise before he saw the spectacle.

An ominous deep-seated thromming emanated from within the submarine.

Then—with an ear-shattering explosive shoom—a 30-foot-long SS-N-20 ballistic missile blasted out from one of the sub's forward hatches!

It looked like the launch of a space shuttle: smoke billowed everywhere, expanding wildly, completely filling the dry-dock hall, shrouding the giant Typhoon in a misty grey fog, enveloping the mercenaries who had been converging on its entrances.

For its part, the missile shot straight upward, blasting right through the cracked glass roof of the hall and rocketing off into the grey Siberian sky.

Cedric Wexley was unperturbed. 'Men, continue your attack. Captain Micheleaux, where are those reinforcements?'¹

If, at that same moment, one had been watching Krask-8 from the horizon, one would have witnessed an incredible sight: a single dead-straight column of smoke rocketing high into the sky above the mini-city.

As it happened, someone was indeed watching that sight.

A lone individual, sitting in the cockpit of a Russian-made Yak-141 fighter jet that was speeding towards Krask-8.

In the control centre of the sub, Schofield whirled around.

'Where are they?' he asked Clark at the periscope.

'It's too cloudy,' Clark said. 'I can't see anything.'

The view through the periscope now revealed a grey misty nothingness. Clark could only see the immediate area around the periscope itself—the small standing-room-only space on top of the sub's conning tower and the narrow gangway connecting the conning tower to the balcony level.

'I can't see a thi—'

A man's face brushed up against the periscope, large and clear, wearing a gas-mask.

'Yow!' Clark leapt back from the eyepiece. 'Jesus. They're right outside. Right above us!'

'Doesn't matter,' Schofield said, heading downstairs. 'It's time for us to go and we're not leaving that way.'

Schofield, Book II and Clark raced into the missile silo hall that they had passed through before. A foot-deep pool of rising water covered its floor.

They came to one of the empty silos—its little access hatch still lay open—and hustled inside it.

They were met by the sight of the empty missile silo: a towering 30-foot-high cylinder, at the top of which, looking very small, they could see the open outer-hull hatch—the seventh outer hatch that Schofield had opened. Some hand and foot indentations ascended the wall of the silo like a ladder.

The three Marines began climbing.

They reached the top of the silo, and Schofield peered out—

—and saw two mercenaries disappearing inside the submarine's forward escape hatch three metres further down the hull.

Perfect, Schofield thought. They were going in while he and his men were coming out.

In addition to this, the hall around the Typhoon was still enveloped in the cloudy white fog of the missile launch.

Schofield's eyes fell on the balcony level overlooking the

Typhoon and on the South African commander directing the mercenary operation.

That was the man Schofield wanted to talk to.

He charged toward the hand-rungs on the outside of the Typhoon's conning tower.

Schofield and the others climbed the submarine's conning tower and dashed across the gangway connecting it to the upper balcony level.

They saw a small internal office structure at the end of the elongated balcony.

Standing in a doorway there, barking into a radio mike while at the same time trying to peer through the fog at the Typhoon, was the mercenary commander, Wexley, flanked by a single armed bodyguard.

Under the cover of the smoke, Schofield, Book II and Clark sidestepped their way down the balcony, approaching Wexley fast.

They sprang on him: Schofield yelling 'Freeze!'—the bodyguard firing—Clark firing at the same time—the bodyguard dropping, hit in the face—Clark falling, too—then Wexley drew his pistol—only to see Schofield roll quickly and fire his Desert Eagle twice—blam! blam!—and Wexley was hit in both the chest and the hand and hurled backwards a full three feet, slamming into the outer wall of the office structure and slumping to the ground.

'Clark! You okay!' Schofield called, kicking Wexley's gun away.

Clark had been hit near the shoulder. He winced as Book II checked his wound. 'Yeah, he just winged me.'

Wexley was largely okay, too. He'd been wearing a vest under his snow gear, which saved him from the chest-shot. He lay slumped against the outer wall of the office, winded and gripping his wounded hand.

Schofield pressed the barrel of his Desert Eagle against Wexley's forehead. 'Who are you and why are you here?'

Wexley coughed, still gasping for air.

'I said, who the hell are you and why are you here?' Wexley spoke in a hoarse whisper. 'My name ... is Cedric Wexley. I'm with . . . Executive Solutions.'

'Mercenaries,' Schofield said. 'And why are you here? Why are you trying to kill us?'

'Not everyone, Captain. Just you.'

'Me?'

'You and those two Delta men, McCabe and Farrell.'

Schofield froze, remembering Dean McCabe's headless body. He also recalled Bull Simcox saying that the same thing had been done to Greg Farrell.

'Why?'

'Does it really matter?' Wexley sneered.

Schofield didn't have time for this. So he simply pressed his boot against Wexley's wounded hand, twisting it slightly.

Wexley roared with pain. Then he looked directly up at Schofield, his eyes filled with venom.

'Because there is a price on your head, Captain Schofield. Enough to entice just about every bounty hunter in the world to come after you.'

Schofield felt his stomach tighten. 'What?'

With his good hand Wexley withdrew a crumpled sheet of paper from his breast pocket, threw it dismissively at Schofield. 'Choke on it.'

Schofield snatched the piece of paper, glanced at it.

It was a list of names.

Fifteen names in total. A mix of soldiers, spies, and terrorists.

He quickly noticed that McCabe, Farrell and he himself were on it.

Wexley's South African accent dripped with grim delight as he spoke: 'I can imagine that you are about to meet quite a few of the world's crack bounty hunters, Captain. Your friends, too. Bounty hunters do so have a proclivity to hold friends and loved ones as bait to draw out a target.'

Schofield's blood went cold at the thought of his friends being held hostage by bounty hunters.

Gant. . . Mother . . .

He yanked his mind back to the present.

'But why do you have to cut off our heads?' he asked.

Wexley answered him with a snort. Schofield simply moved his boot towards Wexley's bloody hand again.

'Wait. Wait. Wait. Perhaps I haven't been specific enough,' Wexley said nastily. 'The price on your head, Captain, is literally a price on your head—18.6 million dollars to the person who brings your head to a castle in France. It's a worthwhile sum, the largest I've ever seen: enough to bribe the highest officials, enough to erase all evidence of a sham mission against some terrorists in Siberia, enough to ensure that your reinforcements, a company of Rangers out of Fort Lewis, never even left the ground. You're on your own, Captain Schofield. You're here . . . alone . . . with us . . . until we kill you and cut off your fucking head.'

Schofield's mind raced.

He'd never expected this. Something so targeted, so individual, so personal.

Then abruptly, he saw Wexley do something odd: he saw him look away again, only this time the South African was glancing out over Schofield's shoulder.

Schofield turned—and his eyes widened in horror.

Like the ominous precursor to an underwater volcanic eruption, a roiling mass of bubbles appeared in the ice-covered 'lake' that now extended out from the dry-dock pit. The thin layer of ice covering this body of water cracked loudly.

And then from out of the middle of the bubbling froth, like a gigantic whale breaching the surface, came the dark steel body of a Soviet Akula-class attack submarine.

While it could never attain the international sales of the smaller Kilo-class submarines, the Akula was rapidly gaining popularity on international arms markets—markets which the new Russian government was keen to exploit. Obviously, Executive Solutions was one of Russia's customers.

The Akula in the icy lake moved quickly. No sooner was it up

than armed men were swarming out of its hatchways, extending exit gangways to the shore, and running across those gangways onto the floor of the dry-dock hall.

Schofield blanched.

It was at least thirty more mercenaries.

Wexley smiled wickedly.

'Keep smiling, asshole,' Schofield said. He looked at his watch. 'Because you don't have forever to catch me. In exactly sixteen minutes that missile from the Typhoon is going to return to this base. Till then, smile at this.'

Thwack!

Schofield punched Wexley in the nose with his Desert Eagle, knocking him out.

Then he hustled over to Book II and started helping him with Clark. 'Grab his other shoulder . . .'

They helped the young corporal up. Clark strained to get to his feet. 'I can do it—' he said just as his chest exploded in a sickening gout of blood. An involuntary bloody gob shot out from his mouth—direct from the lungs—and splashed all over Schofield's chestplate.

Clark just stared at Schofield, aghast, the life fading quickly from his eyes. He dropped to the balcony's grilled catwalk, dead—shot from behind—by the force of mercenaries now charging out of the newly-arrived sub and swarming down the length of the hall.

Schofield just looked down at his dead companion in horror.

He couldn't believe it.

Apart from Book II, his whole team was gone, dead, murdered.

And so here he was, stranded at a deserted Siberian base with close to forty mercenaries on his tail, one man by his side, no reinforcements on the way and no means of escape at all.

Schofield and Book II ran.

Ran for their lives as bullet-holes shredded the thin plasterboard walls all around them.

The new collection of ExSol mercenaries from the Akula had entered the battle with frightening intensity. Now they were climbing every rung-ladder they could find and sprinting down the dry-dock hall, with only one purpose: to get Schofield's head.

The meres who had entered the Typhoon earlier were now also aware that Schofield had got away, and they re-emerged, guns blazing.

Schofield and Book II dashed westward, entering the concrete overpass bridge that connected the dry-dock hall with Krask-8's office tower.

As they had approached the bridge, Schofield had seen the movements of the Executive Solutions forces—some of them were scaling the balcony level, while others were paralleling his and Book's movements down on ground level, running along underneath them, also heading for the tower.

Schofield knew one thing: he and Book had to get over to the office tower and then down to the ground before the bad guys got there. Otherwise, the two of them would be stuck in the 15-storey building.

They bolted through the overpass bridge, whipped past its cracked concrete window frames.

Then they burst out the other end of the bridge, entered the office tower . . .

. . . and stopped dead.

Schofield found himself standing on a balcony—a tiny catwalk balcony, one of many that rose up and up for 15 floors, all connected by a network of ladders—overlooking a gigantic square-shaped chasm of open space.

This wasn't an office tower at all.

It was, in truth, a hollowed-out glass-and-steel structure.

A false building.

It was an amazing sight, kind of like standing in a gigantic greenhouse: the grey Siberian landscape could be seen beyond the cracked glass windows that formed the four sides of the building.

And at the base of this gigantic crystalline structure, Schofield saw its reason for being.

Four massive ICBM missile silos, half-buried in the wide concrete floor in a neat square-shaped formation. Covered by the false office tower, they could never have been spotted by US spy satellites. Schofield guessed that three more silo clusters could be found under the other 'buildings' in Krask-8.

On the ground beside the silos, one level below him, he saw ten slumped figures—the six members of Farrell's Delta team and Bull Simcox's four-man Marine squad.

Schofield glanced at his watch, at the countdown indicating when the Typhoon's missile would return to Krask-8: 15:30 . . . 15:29 . . . 15:28 . . .

'The ground floor,' Schofield said to Book. 'We have to get to the

ground floor.'

They dashed for the nearest rung-ladder, started down it— —just as it was assailed by a volley of gunfire.

Shit.

The mercenaries had got to the ground floor first. They must have run across the snow-covered road between the dry-dock warehouse and the tower.

'Damn it!' Schofield yelled.

'What now!' Book II called.

'Doesn't look like we have much choice! We go up!'

And so they went up.

Up and up, climbing rung-ladders like a pair of fleeing monkeys, dodging the mercenaries' fire as they went.

They were ten floors up when Schofield dared to stop and take a look down.

What he saw crushed any hope of survival he'd had until then.

He saw the whole mercenary force arrayed around the concrete missile silos on the ground floor of the tower—about 50 men in all.

And then the crowd of mercenaries parted as a lone man walked into the middle of their ranks.

It was Cedric Wexley, his nose all smashed up with blood.

Schofield froze.

He wondered what Wexley would do now. The mercenary commander could send his men up the ladders after Schofield and Book—and watch Schofield and Book pick them off one by one until the two Marines ran out of ammunition and became sitting ducks. Not exactly an appealing strategy.

'Captain Schofield!' Wexley's voice echoed up the wide shaft of the tower. ' You run well! But now there is nowhere else for you to go! Mark my words, very soon you will run no more!''

Wexley pulled several small objects from his combat webbing.

Schofield recognised them instantly, and stopped dead.

Small and cylindrical, they were Thermite-Amatol demolition charges. Four of them. Wexley must have taken them from the bodies of Schofield's dead Marines.

And now he saw Wexley's plan.

Wexley passed the Thermite charges to four of his men who promptly scattered to the four corners of the ground floor and attached them to the tower's corner pillars.

Schofield snatched his field binoculars from his webbing, pressed them to his eyes.

He caught a glimpse of one of the Thermite charges affixed to its P'Har, saw the coloured timer switches on it: red, green and blue.

'Initiate the timers!' Wexley called.

The man Schofield was watching hit the blue timer switch on his Thermite-Amatol charge.

Blue meant one minute.

The three mercenaries manning the other demolition charges did

the same.

Schofield's eyes went wide.

He and Book II now had sixty seconds till the building blew.

He started his watch's stopwatch:

00:01 . . .

00:02 . . .

00:03 . . .

'Captain Schofield! When this is over, we will sift through the rubble and we will find your body! And when we do, I will personally rip your fucking head off and piss down your throat!

Gentlemen!''

With that, the mercenaries scattered, dispersing like a flock of

birds to every exit on the ground floor.

Schofield and Book II could only watch them go. Schofield pressed his face to the nearest window to see them appear on the snow-covered ground outside and spread out in a wide circle, covering every exit from the building with their weapons.

He swallowed.

He and Book were stuck in this building—a building which in

52 seconds was going to explode.

It was while he was peering out the window at the mercenary troops on the ground that Schofield heard it.

A deep reverberating throbbing sound.

The unmistakable sound of a fighter jet.

'The transmission from before,' Schofield breathed.

'What?' Book II asked.

'When we were inside the Typhoon, they picked up an incoming aerial contact: a Yak-141 strike fighter. Flown by someone they called "the Hungarian". On his way here.'

'A bounty hunter?'

'A competitor. But in a Yak-141. And a Yak-141 is a . . .' Schofield said. 'Come on! Quickly!'

They dashed for the nearest rung-ladder and climbed it—heading upwards—heading for the roof of the doomed office tower.

Schofield threw open the hatch to the roof. He and Book II climbed out—to be immediately assaulted by the bitter Siberian wind.

His stopwatch ticked upwards:

00:29

00:30

00:31

They cut a lonely sight indeed: two tiny figures on the roof of the tower, surrounded by the deserted buildings of Krask-8 and the stark Siberian hills.

Schofield hurried to the edge of the roof, searching for the source of the engine noise.

00:33 00:34 00:35 There!

It was hovering in the air over by a low dome-shaped building five hundred yards to the west: a Yakovlev-141 strike fighter.

The Russian equivalent of a Harrier jump-jet, the Yak-141 is potentially the ugliest fighter plane ever built; indeed with its squared edges and single fat afterburning engine, it was never meant to look beautiful. But a hinged rear nozzle allows it to redirect its afterburner so that it points downward, allowing the plane to take off and land vertically, and also hover like a helicopter. 00:39 00:40 00:41

Schofield drew his MP-7 and loosed a full clip of thirty rounds across the bow of the hovering Yak, desperately trying to get the pilot's attention. It worked.

Like a T-rex disturbed from its meal, the Yak-141 pivoted in the air and seemed to gaze directly at Schofield and Book II. Then with an aerial lurch, it powered up and approached the glass tower. Schofield waved at the plane like an idiot. 'Over hereV he yelled. 'Closer! Get closer . . . !' 00:49 00:50 00:51

The Yak-141 came closer, so that it now hovered about fifty yards out from the roof of the tower. Still not close enough . . .

Schofield could see its pilot now—a wide-faced man wearing a flight helmet and a confused frown. Schofield waved frantically, calling him over. 00:53 00:54

00:55

The Yak-141 edged a fraction closer.

Forty yards away . . .

00:56

'Jesus, hurry up!' Schofield yelled, looking down at the roof beneath his feet, waiting for the Thermite charges to blow.

00:57

'Too late.' Schofield turned to Book and with a meaningful look, drew his signature weapon. Seeing him do so, Book did the same.

'Just do what I do,' Schofield said, 'and you'll stay alive. Now runV

And so they ran—hard, together, side-by-side—rushing toward the edge of the 15-storey roof.

00:58

They hit the edge, moving fast, legs pumping—

00:59

—and as Schofield's stopwatch hit 1:00, he and Book II leapt out into the clear open sky, their feet stepping off the parapet just as the whole lower section of the building exploded in a billowing cloud of concrete and the entire office tower—all 200 feet of it, the roof, the glass walls, the concrete pillars—just fell away beneath them like a gigantic falling tree.

The pilot of the Yak-141 watched in absolute amazement as the 15-storey building in front of him just disintegrated, crumpling to the earth in eerie slow motion, collapsing into its own dustcloud.

A stocky bear of a man with a wide round face forever set in a heavy-browed Eastern European frown, his name was Oleg Omansky.

But no-one ever called him that.

A former major in the Hungarian Secret Police with a reputation for employing violence rather than brains, he was known in freelance bounty-hunting circles simply as 'The Hungarian'.

Right now, however, the Hungarian was confused.

He had seen Schofield—whom he recognised immediately from the bounty list—and Book II leap off the roof a moment before the building had collapsed.

But he couldn't see either of them now.

A massive dustcloud rose up from the wreckage of the building, enveloping everything within a half-mile radius.

The Hungarian circled the site, looking for the spot where

Schofield had landed.

He noticed a force of men forming a perimeter around the fallen building—a bounty-hunting force, no doubt—saw them rush forward when the collapse of the tower had ceased.

But still he saw no Schofield.

He readied his weapons, and made to land on the roof of a nearby building.

• • •

The Yak-141 landed lightly on the roof of one of Krask-8's smaller buildings, its downward-pointed rear thruster blasting the rooftop clear of any debris.

No sooner was it down than the fighter's canopy opened and the Hungarian climbed out, his body as heavy as his face, carrying an AMD assault rifle—the crude but effective Hungarian variant of the AK-47, notable for its extra forward handgrip.

He was four steps away from the plane when—

'Drop the gun, mister.'

The Hungarian turned . . .

... to see Shane Schofield emerge from the underside of the Yak-141, an MP-7 held in his hand and pointed right at the Hungarian's nose.

While the glass tower had smashed down into the earth, Schofield and Book II had launched themselves into the air above it, falling in matching arcs underneath the bow of the hovering Yak-141.

Before they'd started their run, Schofield had drawn his signature weapon—his Maghook—from his back-holster. Then as he had fallen through the air, he had aimed it at the underbelly of the Yak and fired. Book II had done the same.

Their Maghooks had shot into the air, unspooling wobbling tails of rope behind their hooks. With a pair of dull clunks, the two powerful magnetic heads had slammed into the underside of the Yak—and Schofield's and Book's respective falls had abruptly ceased as they were yanked up by their Maghooks' ropes.

As the Yak had made its way toward the nearest rooftop, they had initiated the internal spoolers on their Maghooks which had reeled them upwards, toward the safe forward underbelly of the hovering fighter jet—while at the same time they were hidden from the eyes of the mercenary force on the ground by the billowing dustcloud below.

The landing had been a little hairy, what with all the flying debris and the deflected heat-blast from the Yak's downward thruster, but they'd made it.

The Yak-141 had touched down, and Schofield and Book II had dropped down to the roof underneath it and rolled away. Now Schofield had one simple plan for the Yak-141. To steal it.

Schofield and Book II faced off against the Hungarian on the roof of the low building.

The Hungarian dropped his assault rifle. It clattered to the ground. Schofield scooped up the ugly gun.

'You another bounty hunter?' he demanded, yelling above the roar of the idling fighter.

'Da,' the Hungarian grunted.

'What's your name?'

'I am the Hungarian.'

'Hungarian, huh? Well, you're too late. The mercenaries beat you here. They got McCabe and Farrell.'

'But they did not get you.' The Hungarian's voice was entirely

devoid of emotion.

Schofield's eyes narrowed. 'They told me that you have to bring my head to a castle in France to claim the money. Which castle?'

The Hungarian eyed Schofield's gun warily. 'Valois. The Forteresse de Valois.'

'The Forteresse de Valois,' Schofield said. Then he asked the money question. 'And who is paying for all this? Who wants me

dead?'

The Hungarian held his gaze.

'I do not know,' he growled.

'You sure about that?'

'I said I do not know.'

There was something in his simple directness that made Schofield believe him. 'Right . . .'

Schofield headed for the Yak, walking backwards, his guns still up, but as he did so, he felt a twinge of pity for this chunky bounty hunter in front of him. 'I'm taking your plane, Hungarian, but I'm

also going to tell you something that I don't have to. Don't be here in eleven minutes.'

Schofield and Book II ascended the cockpit ladder of the Yak-141, their guns trained on the Hungarian.

'You know,' Book II said. 'One day your Maghook isn't going to work . . .'

'Shut up,' Schofield said.

They climbed in.

A former Harrier pilot, Schofield had little difficulty figuring out the Yak's controls.

He keyed the vertical take-off thruster and the Yak-141 lifted into the air above the rooftop.

Then he charged up the plane's afterburners and blasted off over the barren Siberian hills, leaving the lone figure of the Hungarian staring dumbly and helplessly after him.

Schofield and Book II left Krask-8 disappearing in their wake.

As he sat at the controls of the Yak-141, Schofield contemplated his next move.

Sitting in the back, Book II said, 'What are you thinking? We go to that castle?'

'The castle is important,' Schofield said. 'But it's not the key.'

He pulled Wexley's bounty list from his pocket.

'This is the key,' he said.

He looked at the names on the crumpled sheet and wondered what they all had in common.

In short, the list was a Who's Who of international warriors: crack commandos like McCabe and Farrell; British spies from MI-6; an Israeli Air Force pilot. Even Ronson Weitzman was on it—Major General Ronson Weitzman from the United States Marine Corps, one of the highest-ranking Marines in America.

And that wasn't even mentioning the Middle-Eastern terrorists on the list: Khalif, Nazzar and Hassan Zawahiri.

Hassan Zawahiri. . .

The name leapt out at Schofield.

He was the second-in-command of Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man.

And a man being hunted right now in the mountains of northern Afghanistan by the United States, by Schofield's Marine Corps friends: Elizabeth Gant and Mother Newman.

Wexley's voice invaded Schofield's thoughts: 'Bounty hunters do so have a proclivity to hold friends and loved ones as bait to draw out a target

Schofield pursed his lips.

His friends, plus at least one target on the list—Zawahiri—were in the same place. It was the perfect starting point for any bounty hunter.

And so he made the decision.

He set the Yak's autopilot for south-south-west, destination: northern Afghanistan.

Eleven minutes after Schofield left Krask-8, a finger of white smoke blasted out of the clouds above the base—led by the point of the submarine-launched SS-N-20 missile that had been launched twenty minutes earlier.

It descended like a lightning bolt towards the remains of Krask-8, ready to do whatever damage it could.

The missile rushed downward at supersonic speed.

5,000 feet. . .

2,000 feet. . .

1,000 feet. . .

And then in a fleeting shocking instant. . .

... it exploded . . .

... a clear 800 feet off the ground.

The descending missile blasted out into a million fragments, bursting like a firecracker as it was hit by a smaller laser-guided missile from the side.

Glittering fragments of the submarine-launched missile rained down on Krask-8 harmlessly.

And when the smoke cleared, there, hovering in the sky above the mini-city, was the second fighter jet to arrive at Krask-8 that morning.

This one was far sleeker than the Hungarian's Yak-141, longer too, and it was painted almost entirely black. The only trace of another colour could be found in its white-painted nose cone. It was also possessed of rare forward-swept wings and a two-man cockpit.

It was a Sukhoi S-37—a Russian-made hover-capable fighter that was far more advanced than the old Yak-141.

The sleek S-37 hovered like a hawk above the destroyed Siberian base, surveying the scene. The streets were deserted. The members of ExSol were nowhere to be seen.

After a few minutes of aerial surveillance, the Sukhoi landed on a stretch of open ground not far from the enormous dry-dock

warehouse.

Two men climbed out of its cockpit.

One was exceedingly tall, at least seven feet, and armed with a massive G-36 rifle.

The second man was shorter than the first but still tall, well-built, about six feet. He was dressed entirely in black—black combat fatigues, black body armour, black helmet—and he wore two short-barrelled Remington 870 pump-action shotguns in thigh holsters. Both shotguns were made of glistening silver steel.

He also had one other distinguishing feature.

He wore wraparound anti-flash glasses with black frames and

yellow-tinted lenses.

Drawing one of his silver shotguns and holding it like a pistol, the man in black left his partner to guard the Sukhoi while he himself strode toward the door that Schofield had used to enter the dry-dock hall earlier.

He stopped at the door, checked the snow-covered ground, touched it with a black-gloved hand.

He moved inside.

The dry-dock hall was deserted. The remnants of Schofield's smoke cloud lingered in the air. The Typhoon submarine towered in the middle of it all.

The ExSol mercenary force was long gone. Likewise its Akula

submarine.

The man in black examined the Delta corpses on the ground next to the now-flooded pit—the spent ammo shells on the ground—the headless corpse of McCabe—and the still-warm body of Schofield's Marine corporal, Rooster, who had been snipered when the mercenary trap had revealed itself.

Some bodies were floating face-down in the flooded dry-dock.

Moving with calm measured steps, the man in black went over to the sea gate that had once separated the dry-dock from the lake—noticed its exploded-open side section.

A sign of the Scarecrow, the man in black thought. After they shot one of his boys, they trapped him in the dry-dock. So he blew it open, flooding the dry-dock, killing the men who had followed him in . . .

The man in black strode over to the edge of the indoor lake, crouched beside a series of wet footprints smeared on the concrete there: the fresh outlines of combat boots.

Different brands of combat boots. Which meant mercenaries.

And all of them stepping onto the dock from a wet surface.

A submarine. A second submarine.

So, Executive Solutions had been here.

But they had got here very quickly. Too quickly.

They must have been tipped off by someone behind the bounty hunt. Given a head-start to claim the American heads.

There came a sudden grunt and the man in black snapped around, gun up, quick as a mongoose.

It had come from the balcony level overlooking the warehouse.

The man in black dashed up a nearby rung-ladder and arrived at a small internal office up on the balcony.

In the doorway to the shack lay two figures: the first was the dead body of Corporal Max 'Clark' Kent; the second was another soldier—judging by his French-made assault rifle, a mercenary from ExSol—and he was still alive.

But only just. Blood gurgled from a gaping bullet wound to his cheek. Half of his face had been blown off.

The man in black stood over the wounded mercenary, gazed at him coolly.

The wounded mercenary extended a hand toward the man, pleading with his eyes, moaning, 'Aidez moi! S'il vous plait. . . aidez moi . . .'

The man in black looked over at the concrete overpass that had connected this hall to the collapsed office tower.

A destroyed 15-storey building: another sign of the Scarecrow. The wounded mercenary switched to English. 'Please, monsieur.

Help me . . .'

The man in black turned to face him, looked coldly down at the

distressed fellow.

After a long moment, he spoke.

'No.'

Then he shot the wounded mercenary in the head.

The man in black returned to his sleek Sukhoi, rejoined his massive

companion.

They then climbed back into their fighter, took off vertically, and blasted off into the sky, heading south-south-west.

After the Sukhoi had gone, a lone figure emerged from one of the buildings of Krask-8.

It was the Hungarian.

He just stood there on the deserted street and watched the Sukhoi disappear over the hills to the south, his eyes narrowing.

FORTERESSE DE VALOIS

BRITTANY, FRANCE

26 OCTOBER, 0900 HOURS LOCAL TIME

(1300 HOURS IN AFGHANISTAN—0300 HOURS

E.S.T. USA)

The two bounty hunters crossed the drawbridge that gave entry to the Forteresse de Valois, a mighty castle that thrust out into the Atlantic Ocean from the rugged north-western coast of France.

Built in 1289 by the mad Compte de Valois, the Forteresse was not your typical French castle.

Whereas most fortified buildings in France put an emphasis on beauty, the Forteresse de Valois was far more utilitarian. It was a rock, a grim fortress.

Squat, fat and solid as hell, through a combination of sheer engineering audacity and the uniqueness of its location, in its time the Forteresse de Valois was ail-but impregnable.

The reason: it was built on top of an enormous rock formation that jutted up from the ocean itself, about sixty yards out from the high coastal cliffs.

As they stretched downward, the fortress's colossal stone walls blended seamlessly with the vertical sides of the rocky mount, so that the whole structure stood 400 feet above the crashing waves of the Atlantic.

The castle's only connection with the mainland was a 60-metre-long spanning bridge of stone, the last twenty metres of which was a lowerable drawbridge.

The two bounty hunters crossed the drawbridge, dwarfed by the dark castle looming above them, the relentless Atlantic wind blasting their bodies.

They carried between them a large white box marked with a red cross and the words: 'human organs: DO NOT OPEN—express

delivery'.

Once across the bridge, the two men stepped underneath the fortress's 700-year-old portcullis, and entered the castle.

They were met in the courtyard by a dapper gentleman dressed in perfectly-pressed tails and wearing a pair of wireframed pince-nez.

'Bonjour, messieurs,' the man said. 'My name is Monsieur Delacroix. How may I help you?'

The two bounty hunters—Americans, dressed in suede jackets, jeans and cowboy boots—looked at each other.

The bigger one growled, 'We're here to collect the bounty on a

couple of heads.'

The dapper gentleman smiled politely. 'But of course you are.

And your names?'

The bigger one said, 'Drabyak. Joe Drabyak. Texas Ranger. This here is my partner, my brother, Jimbo.'

Monsieur Delacroix bowed.

'Ah, oui, the famous brothers Drabyak. Why don't you come

inside.'

Monsieur Delacroix led them through a garage that contained a collection of rare and expensive automobiles—a red Ferrari Modena; a silver Porsche GT-2; an Aston Martin Vanquish; some race-ready rally cars, and taking pride of place in the centre of the showroom, a glistening black Lamborghini Diablo.

The two American bounty hunters eyed the array of supercars with delight. If their mission went according to plan, they'd be buying themselves some ail-American muscle cars very soon.

'They yours?' Big Drabyak grunted as he walked behind Monsieur Delacroix.

The dapper gentleman snuffed a laugh. 'Oh, no. I am but a humble banker from Switzerland supervising this distribution of funds for my client. The cars belong to the owner of this castle. Not me.'

Monsieur Delacroix led them down some stone stairs at the end of the pristine garage, down to a lower level . . .

. . . and suddenly they entered medieval times.

They came to a round stone-walled ante-room. A long narrow tunnel branched off it to the left, disappearing into torch-lit subterranean gloom.

Monsieur Delacroix stopped, turned to the smaller of the two Texans. 'Young monsieur James. You will stay here, while your brother and I verify the heads.'

Big Drabyak gave his younger brother a reassuring nod.

Monsieur Delacroix then led Big Drabyak down the long torch-lit tunnel.

At the end of the passageway was a magnificent office. One entire wall of it was a picture window offering a stunning panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean, stretching away to the horizon.

As they came to the end of the stone tunnel, Monsieur Delacroix stopped again.

'If I may have your case, please . . .'

The bounty hunter gave him the white medical transport box.

Monsieur Delacroix said, 'Now, if you would wait here.'

Delacroix entered the office, leaving the Texan bounty hunter standing just beyond the doorway, still inside the stone passageway.

Delacroix crossed to his desk, pulling a handheld remote from his coat as he did so, and pressed a button on it—

Wham! Wham! Wham!

Three steel doors came thundering down into the medieval passageway from slits concealed in its roof.

The first two doors sealed off the ante-room, imprisoning Little Drabyak in the circular stone room, cutting him off from both the upstairs garage and the narrow tunnel containing his older brother.

The third steel door sealed off the office from the passageway— separating Monsieur Delacroix from Big Drabyak.

Small perspex windows set into each steel door allowed the two bounty hunters to look out from their new prisons.

Monsieur Delacroix's voice came to them via speakers in the

ceiling.

'Gentlemen. As you both would no doubt appreciate, a bounty hunt of this value attracts—how shall I put it—some rather unscrupulous individuals. You will stay where you are while I verify the identity of the heads that you have brought me.'

Monsieur Delacroix placed the medical delivery box on his desk, opened it with expert hands.

Two severed heads gazed up at him.

One was speckled in blood, its eyes wide with horror.

The other was in poorer condition. It had been badly burned.

Monsieur Delacroix was unperturbed.

Donning a pair of surgical gloves, he calmly extracted the blood-speckled head from the box and placed it on a scanning device beside his computer.

'And who do you claim this is?' Monsieur Delacroix asked Big

Drabyak over the intercom.

'The Israeli, Rosenthal,' Drabyak said.

'Rosenthal,' Delacroix punched the name into his computer. 'Hmmm . . . Mossad agent ... no DNA records. Typical of the Israelis, really. It is no matter. I have instructions on this. We shall have to use other means.'

Delacroix initiated the scanning device on which the severed

head sat.

Like a CAT scan, the device ran a series of laser beams over the

exterior of the severed head.

Once the device had finished scanning the head, Delacroix calmly opened the mouth of the blood-speckled face and exposed the head's teeth to the laser scanner.

Delacroix then pressed another button on his keyboard and compared the analysed head to a collection of records on his computer screen.

The computer beeped, and Monsieur Delacroix smiled.

'The cross-reference score is 89.337%. According to my instructions, a verification score of 75% or higher is enough to warrant payment of the bounty. Gentlemen, your first head has been successfully verified by cranial shape and known dental records as that of Major Benjamin Y. Rosenthal of the Israeli Mossad. You are now 18.6 million dollars richer.'

The two bounty hunters smiled in their respective stone cages.

Delacroix then pulled out the second head.

'And this one?' he asked.

Big Drabyak said, 'It's Nazzar, the HAMAS guy. Found him in Mexico. Buying M-16s from a drug lord.'

'How utterly fascinating,' Delacroix said.

The second head was blackened with burn-damage, and it appeared as if half its teeth had been blasted out with a gunshot wound ... or a hammer.

Monsieur Delacroix performed the cranial and dental laser tests.

The two bounty hunters held their breath. They seemed to get increasingly apprehensive with Delacroix's examination of the two heads.

The skull and dental records returned a verification score of 77.326%.

Monsieur Delacroix said, 'The percentage is 77%, no doubt due to the extensive fire and bullet damage to this head. Now, as you know, according to my instructions, a verification score of 75% or higher is enough to warrant payment of the bounty . . .'

The bounty hunters grinned.

'. . . unless there is a DNA record of the individual at issue, in which case I am to consult it,' Delacroix said. 'And it appears from my records here that there is a DNA sample for this individual.'

The two bounty hunters whirled to face each other, shocked.

Big Drabyak said, 'But there can't be . . .'

'Oh, yes,' Delacroix said, 'according to my records here, Mister Yousef Nazzar was imprisoned in the United Kingdom in 1999 on minor weapons importation charges. A sample of his blood was taken in accordance with the UK's prisoner-intake

DNA policy.'

As Big Drabyak shouted for him to stop, Monsieur Delacroix injected a hypodermic needle into the left cheek of the blackened head in front of him and extracted some blood.

The blood was then placed in an analyser attached to Delacroix's computer.

Another beep.

A bad one.

Delacroix frowned—and suddenly his face took on a far more dangerous complexion.

'Gentlemen . . .' he said slowly.

The bounty hunters froze.

The Swiss banker paused, as if he was offended by the indiscretion. 'Gentlemen, this head is a forgery. This is not the head of Yousef Nazzar.'

'Now wait a minute—' Big Drabyak began.

'Please be quiet, Mister Drabyak,' Delacroix said. 'The cosmetic surgery was quite convincing; you employed a good plastic surgeon, that much is certain. The burning of the head to remove visual identification, well, that is clever but old. And the restructured teeth were very well faked. But you didn't know there was a DNA record, did you?'

'No,' Big Drabyak growled. 'The Rosenthal head was also a fake, then?' 'It was obtained by an associate of ours,' Big Drabyak lied, 'and he assured us that it was—'

'But you have presented it to me, Monsieur Drabyak, therefore it is your responsibility. Let me be clear. Honesty, in this moment, may help you. Is the Rosenthal head also a fake?'

'Yes,' Drabyak grimaced.

'This is a grave offence against the rules of the hunt, Mister Drabyak. My clients will not tolerate attempts to deceive them, you do understand that?'

Big Drabyak said nothing.

'Fortunately, I have instructions on this,' Delacroix said. 'Monsieur Drabyak the Elder. The passageway in which you are standing, do you know what it is?'

'No.'

'Oh, yes. How silly of me to forget, you are American. You know nothing of world history except the name of every US President and the capital of every US state. A knowledge of medieval European warfare would be somewhat beyond you, no?'

Big Drabyak's face was blank.

Delacroix sighed. 'Monsieur Drabyak, the tunnel in which you now stand was once used as a trap to ensnare those who would attack this castle. When enemy soldiers came through that passageway, boiling oil would be flushed into it through the gutters in its walls, killing the intruders in a most painful way.'

Big Drabyak snapped to look at the walls of the stone passageway around him. They were indeed pockmarked with a series of basketball-sized holes high up near the ceiling.

'This castle, however, has been modified slightly,' Delacroix said, 'in keeping with modern technology. If you would observe your brother.'

Big Drabyak spun, and stared wide-eyed through the perspex window in the steel door that separated him from his younger brother.

'Now. Say goodbye to your brother,' Monsieur Delacroix's voice said over the speakers.

In the office, Delacroix lifted his handheld remote again and pressed another button on it.

Immediately, an ominous mechanical humming noise emanated from the stone walls of Little Drabyak's circular ante-room.

The humming noise gathered intensity, getting faster and faster and faster.

At first Little Drabyak seemed unaffected.

Then with frightening suddenness, he convulsed violently, snapping a hand to his chest, to his heart. Then he clutched his ears—a moment before they spurted hideously with blood.

He screamed.

Then, as Big Drabyak watched, the most horrifying thing of all happened.

As the humming noise hit fever-pitch, his little brother's chest just burst open, his whole rib cage blurting outward in a disgusting spray of blood and gore.

Little Drabyak dropped to the floor of the ante-room, his eyes vacant, his rib cage blasted apart. Dead.

Delacroix's voice: 'A microwave defence system, Monsieur Drabyak. Tres effective, no?'

Big Drabyak was thunderstruck.

He spun where he stood, powerless to escape.

'You little fuck! I thought you said honesty would help!' he yelled.

Delacroix laughed. 'Americans. You think you can plea-bargain your way out of anything. I said it might help. But on this occasion, I have decided that it will not.'

Drabyak glanced at his brother's grisly remains. 'Is that what you're going to do to me?'

Monsieur Delacroix smiled. 'Oh, no. Unlike you, I am an admirer of history. Sometimes, the old ways are the most satisfying.'

And with that the Swiss banker hit a third and final button on his remote . . .

. . . and 1,000 litres of boiling oil sprayed out from the wall-holes in the tunnel containing Joe Drabyak.

Any exposed flesh was burned on contact—all the skin on his face was scalded in a second. Wherever the boiling oil touched his clothes, it simply melted them to his body.

And as the oil felled him, Drabyak screamed. He would

shriek and cry and wail until he was dead, but no-one would hear him.

Because the Forteresse de Valois, mounted on its high rocky pinnacle overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, hanging off the edge of the Brittany coast, lay 20 miles from the nearest town.

DEEP IN THE HINDU KUSH MOUNTAINS AFGHANISTAN-TAJIKISTAN BORDER 26 OCTOBER, 1300 HOURS LOCAL TIME (0300 HOURS E.S.T USA)

It was like storming the gates of hell.

Lieutenant Elizabeth Gant's eight-wheeled Light Armoured Vehicle kicked up a tornado of dust and dirt as it sped across the 200 yards of open ground that protected the entrance to the terrorist cave system.

An absolute storm of bullets hammered the ground all around the speeding LAV as it wended its way toward the cave entrance, covered by an overhead artillery barrage of its own.

This was the Allies' fifth attempt to get troops into the cave system—a converted Soviet mine known to be harbouring Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, Hassan Zawahiri, and about two hundred heavily-armed Al-Qaeda terrorists.

More than a year after the Taliban regime had been ousted from Kabul—and even though a far more public war had since been waged and won against Saddam Hussein in Iraq—Operation Enduring Freedom still raged in the darkest places of Afghanistan: the caves.

For the final annihilation of Al-Qaeda could not be achieved until all the terrorist caves had been cleared, and that involved a kind of warfare not suitable for viewing on CNN or Fox. A down-and-dirty variety of fighting. Hand-to-hand, man-on-man cave-hunting.

And then just this week, US and UK forces had found this cave

system far in the north of the country, straddling the Afghan-Tajikistan border—the most important terrorist cave base in Afghanistan.

It was the core of the Al-Qaeda network.

An abandoned Soviet coalmine once known as the Karpalov Mine, it had been converted by Osama bin Laden's construction company into a labyrinthine network of hiding caves: caverns in which terrorists lived and worked and in which they'd stored a veritable arsenal of weapons.

It also came with an extra defence mechanism.

It was a methane trap.

Coal gives off methane—a highly flammable gas—and methane levels of 5% are explosive. One spark and it all goes up. And while the inner sections of the abandoned mine were supplied with fresh air from chimney-like vents, its outer extremities were filled with methane.

In other words: invading soldiers couldn't use guns until they arrived at the core of the mine.

One thing was certain: the terrorists who had withdrawn to this cave system were not going to give up without a fight. Like Kunduz the previous year and the bloodbath at Mazar-e-Sharif, this was going to be a fight to the death.

It was Al-Qaeda's last stand.

The mine's entrance was a reinforced concrete archway wide enough for large trucks to pass through.

The sharply-sloping mountainside above it was pockmarked with dozens of tiny snipers' nests, from which the terrorists covered the wide expanse of open ground in front of the entrance.

And somewhere up in the tangle of mountain peaks covering the mine were the openings to two air vents—twin 10-metre-wide shafts that rose like chimneys from the bottom of the mine, allowing fresh air into it. The terrorists had long ago covered the tops of these vents with camouflaged lids, so that they were invisible to spy planes.

Those vents were Gant's objective.

Capture a vent from inside the mine, blow its lid from below, and then send up a targeting laser that would be picked up by an overflying C-130 bomber, giving it a bull's-eye that it wouldn't miss.

The only thing left to do then was to get the hell out of the mine before a devastating 21,000-pound Massive Ordnance Air Burst (more commonly known as MOAB, the Mother Of All Bombs) was dropped down the chimney.

The first three attempts that morning to storm the tunnel system had been successful.

In each attempt, a pair of LAV-25s—eight-wheeled Light Armoured Vehicles—filled with Marines and SAS troopers had survived the hail of bullets and entered the cave.

The fourth attempt, however, had been a disaster. It had ended with a terrible cross-fire of Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades—known to many as 'LAV-Killers'—slamming into the two inrushing vehicles, killing all the men inside them.

Gant's was the fifth attempt, and it had entailed sending two high-speed decoy buggies into the gauntlet first, to attract the enemy's fire, after which Gant's two eight-wheelers had zeroed in on the cave entrance under cover of mortar fire targeted at the enemy's emplacements. It had worked.

The speeding decoy buggies caught all manner of shit—automatic gunfire, RPGs that smashed into the ground all around them—while Gant's LAV-25 had burst forth from cover, closely followed by a second eight-wheeled beast.

The mountainside above the cave entrance had erupted in mortar impacts while the two LAVs had shot across the open plain before whipping into the entrance of the cave system, disappearing into darkness, out of the rain of gunfire and into a whole new kind of hell.

Elizabeth 'Fox' Gant was 29 years old and a newly-minted First Lieutenant, fresh from Officer Candidate School.

Now, it wasn't often that a brand-new lieutenant was given command of a prized Recon Unit, let alone a stand-alone one, but Gant was something special.

Compact, blonde and fitter than many triathletes, she was a natural leader. Behind her sky-blue eyes lay a razor-sharp mind. Plus she already had two years' experience in a Recon Unit as an NCO.

She also, it was said in whispers, had friends in high places.

Some said that her rapid rise to Recon command had been the result of a recommendation from no less than the President of the United States himself. It had something to do, they said, with an incident at the US Air Force's most secret base, Area 7, during which Gant had shown her worth in the presence of the President himself. But that was conjecture.

The greatest recommendation, in the end, had come from a highly-respected Marine Gunnery Sergeant named Gena 'Mother' Newman who had vouched for Gant in the best possible way: if Gant were put in command of a Recon Unit, Mother had said, then she herself would act as Gant's Team Chief.

At six-feet-two, with a fully-shaven head, one artificial leg and some of the most ruthless skills in the killing trade, Mother's word was gold. Her nickname said it all. It was short for 'Motherfucker'.

And so Gant took command of Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit 9 one month before it shipped out for Afghanistan.

There was one other thing about Libby Gant worth noting.

For almost a year now, she had been the girlfriend of Captain Shane M. Schofield.

Schofield's newly acquired Yak-141 shot through the air at close to

Mach 2.

It had been nearly five hours since his battle at Krask-8, and now, spread out before him and Book II, were the formidable Hindu Kush mountains.

And somewhere in them was Libby Gant—Potential Hostage No. 1 for anyone wanting Schofield's head.

Their Yak was almost out of gas. A quick pit-stop at an abandoned Soviet airfield in rural Kazakhstan had allowed them to refuel, but now they were running low on fuel again. They needed .to find Gant soon.

Since he didn't trust anyone in Alaska any more, Schofield tuned his plane's radio to a very obscure US satellite frequency—the frequency of the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

After his identity had been verified, he asked to be put through to the Pentagon, to David Fairfax in the Cypher and Cryptanalysis

Department.

'This is Fairfax,' a young male voice came in over his earpiece.

'Mr Fairfax, this is Shane Schofield.'

'Hey, Captain Schofield. Nice to hear from you. So, what have you destroyed today?'

'I've flooded a Typhoon-class submarine, levelled a building, and launched a ballistic missile to destroy a maintenance facility.'

'Slow day, huh.'

'Mr Fairfax, I need your help.'

'Sure:

Schofield and Fairfax had formed an unlikely alliance once

before, during the incident at Area 7. Both had received (classified) medals for their bravery and afterwards had become good friends.

Now, as he and Book II blasted over the mountains of Tajikistan in the Yak-141, Schofield could picture Fairfax—sitting at his computer in an underground room at the Pentagon, dressed in a Mooks T-shirt, jeans, glasses and Nikes, munching on a Mars Bar and looking pretty much like Harry Potter as a graduate student. A code-cracking genius of a graduate student.

'So what do you need?' Fairfax asked.

'Four things,' Schofield said. 'First, I need you to tell me where Gant is stationed in Afghanistan. Exact GPS location.'

'Jesus, Scarecrow, that's operational information. I don't have clearance for that. I could get arrested just for accessing it.'

'Get clearance. Do whatever you have to do. I just lost six good Marines because my mission to Siberia was compromised by someone back home. It was a set-up designed to put me in the hands of some bounty hunters. I can't trust anybody, David. I need you to do this for me.'

'Okay. I'll see what I can do. What else;"

Schofield pulled out the list of names he'd taken from Wexley, the ExSol leader. 'I need you to look up the following names for me . . .'

Schofield read out the names on the bounty list, including his own.

'Find out what these names have in common. Career history, sniper skills, hair colour, anything. Cross-check them on every database you've got.'

'Got it.'

'Third, look up a base in Siberia called Krask-8. Find out whatever you can about it. I want to know why it was chosen as an ambush site.'

'Okay. And the last impossible task?'

Schofield frowned, thinking—thinking about one of the names he had heard mentioned on the radio at Krask-8.

At last he said, 'This is going to sound weird, but can you look

Gant's armoured eight-wheeler skidded to a halt inside the darkened cave entrance.

Its double rear doors were flung open from within and the six-man team of Marines thundered out of it, boots slamming against the ground, guns up.

Gant stepped out of the LAV and scanned the area, the gigantic Mother Newman by her side. Both were dressed in sand-coloured fatigues, helmets and body armour, and held MP-7s and pistol-sized crossbows in their hands.

The cave here was wide and high and completely concrete-walled. A wide set of train tracks disappeared down a very steep tunnel in front of them. The tunnel was called a drift and it was how you entered the mine.

'Sphinx, this is Fox,' Gant said into her throat-mike. 'We're in. Where are you?'

A British-accented voice came in: 'Fox, this is Sphinx. Christ, it's bedlam down here! We're at the eastern extremity of the mine! About two hundred metres from the drift! They're bunkered down in front of the two vents, in an air pock—'

The signal cut off.

'Sphinx? Sphinx? Damn,' Gant turned to two of her men. 'Pokey. Freddy. Flush out those RPG foxholes upstairs. There's gotta be some internal tunnels giving access to them. Nail those suckers so we can open a safe corridor into this mine.'

'Yes, ma'am.' The two young Marines took off.

'The rest of you,' Gant said, 'follow me.'

• • •

up a guy called the "Black Knight"? Check the mercenary databases in particular, anything ex-military. He's a bounty hunter-and so far as I know, a very good one-and he's after me. I want to know who

¹⁶ '/r will be done, Scarecrow. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.'

Schofield's Yak-141 zoomed over the mountain peaks of Tajikistan.

Fairfax came on the line.

'Okay, you listening. I found Gant for you. Her unit is working out of Mobile Command Station California-2, under the command of Colonel Clarence W. Walker. California-2 is located at GPS co-ordinates 06730.20, 3845.65.'

'Got it,' Schofield said, punching the co-ordinates into his trip

computer.

Fairfax went on. 'I also got a couple of hits on that list of yours. Seven of the fifteen names matched up immediately on the NATO personnel database: Ashcroft, Kingsgate, McCabe, Farrell, Oliphant, Nicholson and you are all mentioned in something called the "NATO Joint Services MNRR Study". It's dated December 1996. Looks like some kind of joint medical study we did with the Brits'

'Where is it kept?'

'USAMRMC—Army Medical Research and Materiel Command.'

'Think you can get it?'

'Of course.'

'And the other hit?' Schofield asked.

'One of our Echelon spy satellites caught a voice transmission from an unknown aircraft flying over Tajikistan only this morning. Several of the names on your list were mentioned. I'll read you the transcript:

' "BASE, THIS IS DEMON. WE HAVE WEITZMAN, ALIVE, AS INSTRUCTED. HEADING FOR THE KARPALOV MINE SYSTEM NOW. IT'S THE MONEY SHOT—THE BIGGEST CONCENTRATION OF TARGETS ON THE LIST. FOUR OF THEM IN THE ONE PLACE: ASHCROFT, KHALIF, KINGSGATE AND ZAWAHIRI. PLUS SCHOFIELD'S GIRL IS THERE, TOO."'

Schofield felt his insides tighten.

Fairfax said, 'There's a notation here. It says that the voice on the intercept had a British accent, and that its owner is—whoa 'Keep talking.' Fairfax started reading: 'Voice identified as that of Damon F.

Larkham, call-sign "The Demon", former colonel in the British SAS.' Fairfax paused. 'He was big in the '90s, but was court-martialled in '99 because of his links with the former head of the SAS, a real bad dude named Trevor J. Barnaby.'

'Yeah, I've met Barnaby,' Schofield said.

'Larkham was sentenced to eleven years' jail but he escaped en route to Whitemoor Prison, killing nine guards in the process.

'Now alleged to be a principal in the freelance bounty hunting organisation known as the Intercontinental Guards, Unit 88, or "IG-88", based in Portugal. Jesus, Scarecrow, what the hell have you got yourself into}'

'Something that could lose me my head if I'm not careful.' Schofield swapped a look with Book II.

'As for that place you mentioned, Krask-8,' Fairfax said, 'the only thing I could find was this: in June 1997, the whole town of Krask, plus its surrounding maintenance facilities, was sold to an American company, the Atlantic Shipping Corporation. In addition to its shipping businesses, Atlantic also has oil interests. It got Krask-8 when it purchased about 10,000 hectares of northern Siberia for oil exploration.'

Schofield thought about that. 'Nope. Doesn't help me.'

Fairfax said, 'Oh, and I haven't found anything on that Black Knight guy on the regular ex-military databases. I'm running a search program now on some of the classified intelligence databases.'

'Thanks, David. Keep at it. Let me know when you find something. I've got to go now.'

He hit the afterburners.

Nine minutes later, the Yak-141 landed vertically in a cloud of dust in a clearing not far from a large gathering of American desert vehicles and command tents.

Schofield had heard that the campaign in Afghanistan had become like Vietnam all over again—principally because Afghanistan, even in war, was one of the world's foremost producers of heroin.

Not only did the Afghan mountain-men have the uncanny ability to vanish into hidden cave systems, but every now and then, when they were cornered, they would try to bribe Allied soldiers with bricks of 100% pure heroin. And when one such brick was worth about a million dollars on the street, it sometimes worked.

Why, only last week, Schofield had heard of a Russian unit going AWOL. A whole unit of special forces Spetsnaz soldiers—24 men in total, supposedly there as an observer unit—just stole an Mi-17 Russian-made transport helicopter and disappeared in search of a cavern reputedly filled with thirty pallets of heroin bricks.

Welcome to Afghanistan.

Schofield's plane was met by a ring of heavily-armed Marines who didn't take kindly to an unauthorised Russian fighter landing in their midst. But within seconds they recognised Schofield and Book II and escorted them to the tent of the base commander, Colonel Clarence Walker, USMC.

The command tent stood at the bottom of a low hill, beyond which lay the entrance to the Al-Qaeda mine.

Colonel Walker was standing at a map table yelling into a radio when Schofield and Book entered: 'Well, find a way to restore radio signals down there! Lay an antenna cable! Use fucking cups and a piece of string if you have to! I need to talk to my men down in that mine before the bombers arrive!'

'Colonel Walker,' Schofield said, 'I'm sorry to barge in on you like this, but this is very important. My name is Captain Shane Schofield and I have to find Lieutenant G—'

Walker spun, glowering. 'What? Who the fuck are you?' 'Sir, my name is Captain Shane Schofield, and I think there's more in that cave than just Islamist terrorists. There are probably

also bounty hu—'

'Captain, unless you're flying a C-130 Hercules with a laser-guided MOAB bomb on board, 1 don't want to talk to you right now. Take a seat and take a fucking number—'

'Hey! What the hell is that!' someone yelled.

Everyone charged out of the tent and peered out into the gauntlet just in time to see a huge Russian transport helicopter swoop down in front of the mine entrance and land in the dust.

About twenty masked men leapt out of the chopper and disappeared inside the mine under fire from the terrorist emplacements on the mountainside.

No sooner were the men inside the mine than the chopper lifted off, blasting the sniper holes with its side-mounted cannons before disappearing over a hill to the north.

'What in God's name was that?' Colonel Walker yelled.

'It was an Mi-17! With Russian insignia on its flanks!' a spotter called. 'It was that rogue Spetsnaz unit!'

'This place is nuts, fucking nuts . . .' Walker muttered. He turned. 'Okay, Captain Schofield. Do you know anything about this—?'

But Schofield and Book II were nowhere to be seen.

Indeed, the only thing Walker saw was a nearby Light Strike Vehicle skidding off the mark and speeding into the gauntlet with Schofield and Book II inside it.

The Light Strike Vehicle whipped across the stretch of no-man's-land in front of the mine entrance, kicking up a billowing cloud of dust behind it.

Gunfire erupted from the slopes above the mine entrance, smacking into the dirt next to its wheels.

A Light Strike Vehicle is like a dune buggy. It has no windscreens and no armour. It consists merely of a series of roll bars which form a cage around the driver and passenger. It is light, it is fast and it is supremely agile.

Schofield swung his LSV in a wide circle, raising a billowing dustcloud around himself, hiding his car from view. The snipers' shots began to miss by a larger margin.

Then he zeroed in on the mine entrance.

The bullet-fire became more intense—

—before suddenly there came several explosions from the mountainside above the mine's entrance, six sniper emplacements blasting outward in simultaneous showers of dirt.

And in an instant there was no more gunfire. Someone had blown up the emplacements from within the mine itself.

Schofield jammed the accelerator to the floor and zoomed into the darkness of the mine.

Six hundred metres below the surface, Libby Gant hurried on foot down a long rocky tunnel guided by flashlights attached to her helmet and MP-7.

She was followed by her three Marines, and she constantly checked her methanometer, a device that measured the levels of methane in the atmosphere.

At the moment, it read 5.9%.

That was bad. They were still in the mine's outer protective ring.

It was a maze down here—a series of low square-shaped tunnels, each about the width of a train tunnel, and all possessed of rigidly right-angled corners. Some tunnels seemed to go off into the darkness forever, others ended in abrupt dead-ends.

And everything was grey. The rock walls, the low horizontal ceilings, even the creaky wooden posts that supported the roof—all were covered in a ghostly grey powder.

Nothing escaped the powder. It was limestone dust, an inert substance designed to prevent highly flammable coal dust from flaking out from the walls and creating an even greater firetrap.

When Gant and her team had reached the bottom of the steep drift tunnel, they'd been met by an SAS commando. After the radio comms had dropped out, he'd been sent back as a verbal messenger.

'Turn left here, then go straight until you hit the conveyor belt! Then follow the belt to the barricade! Don't stray from the belt, because it's easy to get lost!' he'd said.

Gant's team had followed his instructions to the letter, jogging

for about 200 metres down a bending rock-walled tunnel that housed an elevated conveyor belt.

Methanometer: 5.6% . . . 5.4% . . .

The methane levels were getting lower as they ventured further into the mine.

5.2% . . . 4.8% . . . 4.4% . . .

Better, Gant thought.

'You know,' Mother said as they jogged, 'I think he's gonna pop

the question in Italy.' 'Mother . . .' Gant said.

After this mission, Mother and Gant—together with Schofield and Mother's nuggetty little husband, Ralph—were going on a group holiday to Italy. They were going to rent a villa in Tuscany for two weeks before taking in the famous 'Aerostadia Italia' air-show in Milan—the centrepiece of which were two very rare X-15s, the famous NASA-built rocket planes, the fastest aircraft ever built. Mother was really looking forward to it.

'Think about it,' she said. 'Tuscan hills. An old villa. A classy guy like the Scarecrow wouldn't miss an opportunity like that.'

'He told you he was going to ask, didn't he?' Gant said, eyes forward.

'Yep.'

'He's such a chicken,' Gant said as they rounded a bend and all of a sudden, heard gunfire. 'To be continued,' she said, giving

Mother a look.

Up ahead in the darkness, they saw the beams of helmet-mounted flashlights and the shadows of running Allied soldiers, all moving behind a makeshift barricade constructed of old mining equipment—barrels, crates, empty steel mini-skips.

And beyond the barricade, Gant saw the all-important air

vents.

In this tight, low-ceilinged, square-edged world, the air vent cavern was a welcome stretch of open space. Six storeys high and lit by brilliant white phosphorus flares, it shone like a glowing underground cathedral.

The two 10-metre-wide air vents disappeared up into the roof via a pair of identical cone-shaped recesses in the ceiling.

And underneath the air vents, one of the fiercest battles in history was underway.

The members of Al-Qaeda had prepared well.

They had built a blockade of their own in this high-ceilinged cavern—a barricade that was infinitely superior to the ad hoc creation of the Allied soldiers.

It was made of the larger mining equipment that had been left in the mine: big vehicles featuring gigantic hemispherical drill bits, front-end loaders, some old white Humvee-like trucks called 'Driftrunners', and tip-trays filled with bullet-absorbing coal.

As Gant reached the Allied barricade, she saw the terrorists on the other side of the cavern: over a hundred of them, all dressed in brown leather waistcoats, white shirts, and coiled black turbans.

They were also armed to the teeth. AK-47s, M-16s, RPGs. Bathed in the fresh air of the vents, gunfire was clearly safe inside this subterranean hall.

Gant linked up with the Allied soldiers on the scene.

There were about twenty of them, a mix of United States Marines and British SAS troops.

She arrived at the side of the Allied commander, an SAS major named Ashcroft, call-sign: Sphinx.

'It's a bloody nightmare!' the English commando shouted. 'They're dug in around those vents for the long term! And then every few minutes, one of them—shit! Here comes another one! Shoot him! Shoot him!'

Gant snapped round to look over the Allied barricade.

With shocking suddenness, a bearded Arab terrorist had burst forth from a gap in the Al-Qaeda barricade on a motorcycle, firing an AK-47 one-handed and yelling to Allah.

Strapped to his chest were four wads of C4.

Three SAS soldiers nailed him with their automatic rifles, blasting

the suicide bomber from his saddle, sending him crashing to the ground behind his speeding motorbike.

The Arab hit the ground in a clumsy puff of dust— —and then he exploded.

One second he was there. The next he was simply gone. Gant's eyes widened. Madness . . .

The SAS leader, Ashcroft, turned to her. 'It's absolute bedlam, darlin'! Every now and then, the bastards launch a suicide run and we have to cut them down before they reach our barricade! The problem is they must have a supply cave somewhere back there! Generators, gasoline and enough ammo, food and water to see them through to the year 3000! It's a stand-off!'

'What if we went around?' Gant said, indicating the series of tunnels off to their right.

'No. It's booby-trapped! Trip-wires. Landmines. I've already lost two good men going that way! These ragheads have been waiting for a fight in this place for a long time! This is going to take a frontal assault. What I need is more men!'

At that moment, as if on cue, a collection of about twenty more barrel-mounted flashlights appeared in the tunnel that led back to the mine's entrance.

'Ah, reinforcements,' Ashcroft said, heading down the tunnel to

meet them. '

Gant watched him go, saw him meet the leader of this new squad

and shake the man's hand.

Funny, she thought. Colonel Walker had said that the next team wouldn't be coming in for at least another twenty minutes. How did these guys get in so quickly—

She watched Ashcroft wave his hand toward the barricade, explaining the situation, turning his back on his new acquaintance for a split second, during which moment the leader of this new group of soldiers smoothly and fluidly drew something from his belt and swiped it hard across Ashcroft's neck region.

At first Gant didn't know what had happened.

Ashcroft didn't move.

Then, to her absolute horror, Gant saw Ashcroft's head tilt at an impossible angle and just drop off his body.

Her eyes went wide with disbelief.

What— ?

But she didn't have time for shock, for no sooner was Ashcroft down than the submachine-guns of this new force of men burst to life, raining fire on the Allied troops gathered behind their barricade.

Quick as a flash, Gant dived over and into one of the steel mini-skips that formed her barricade, just as bullets impacted all around her. She was joined a second later by Mother and her other two Marines.

The rest of the Allied troops weren't so lucky.

Most of them were caught out in the open . . . and they were pummelled mercilessly by this unexpected storm of bullets from behind. Their bodies exploded with bloody holes, convulsed horribly.

'Goddamnit! What the hell is this!' Gant pressed herself close to a mini-skip's rusty steel walls.

Now they were caught between two sets of enemies: one in front of their barricade, one behind.

A lethal sandwich.

'What do we do, Chickadee?' Mother yelled.

Gant's face set into a determined expression. 'We stay alive. Come on, this way!'

And with that, Gant led her team in the only direction they could go—she leapt over the forward side of the mini-skip and landed, cat-like, on the dusty section of open ground in between the two facing barricades.

At that very same moment, Schofield and Book's Light Strike Vehicle skidded to a halt in the upper entrance cave of the mine.

Schofield saw the roller-coaster-like tracks of the drift diving down into the mine, took a step toward them, just as two figures burst out from a nearby side-tunnel.

Schofield and Book whipped around together, MP-7s up. The two dark figures did the same and—

'Pokey?' Schofield said, squinting. 'Pokey de Villiers?'

'Scarecrow?' one of the figures lowered his gun. 'Man, I almost shot you dead.'

It was Corporal Paul 'Pokey' de Villiers, just returned from cleaning out the Al-Qaeda sniper holes on the mountainside with his partner, a lance-corporal nicknamed Freddy.

'I need to find Gant,' Schofield said. 'Where is she?'

'Down there,' Pokey said.

Thirty seconds later, Schofield was sliding down the steep drift tunnel at the wheel of the Light Strike Vehicle with Book II riding shotgun and the two extra Marines, Pokey and Freddy, sharing the rear gunner's seat.

The LSV's headlights blazed as it rocketed down the 30-degree slope, straddling the train tracks that ran down the centre of the tunnel.

Nearing the bottom, Schofield jammed the LSV into reverse, causing its wheels to spin wildly backwards as the speeding car skidded forwards down the tunnel.

The strategy worked: they slowed, if only slightly. But it was enough and with a few yards to go, Schofield slipped the dune

buggy out of reverse and the LSV blasted out of the bottom of the drift tunnel and shot into the maze, swinging left past the dead body of the SAS messenger who had been stationed there.

Gant was completely exposed.

Out on the forward side of the Allied barricade—with only thirty yards of open ground between her and about 200 murderous holy warriors.

If the terrorist forces wanted to kill her and her three Marines, then this was their chance. Gant waited for the hail of bullets that would end her life.

But it never came.

Instead she heard gunfire—from somewhere behind the Al-Qaeda blockade.

Gant frowned. It was a type of gunfire that she had never heard before. It sounded too fast, way too fast, like the whirring of a six-barrelled mini-gun . . .

And then she saw something that took her completely by surprise.

She saw the Al-Qaeda blockade get absolutely raked with internal gunfire—its walls blew out, assaulted by a million hypervelocity bullets—and suddenly a whole crowd of terrorists were leaping over their own barricade out into no-man's-land, fleeing some unseen force behind their own blockade . . . exactly as Gant had done herself.

Another thing was clear.

The terrorists were fleeing something far worse than Gant was.

As they leapt desperately over their barricade, they were shot in mid-air—from behind—and all but ripped apart, their limbs exploding from their bodies.

A split-second before one such Al-Qaeda warrior was ripped to pieces as he clambered over the barricade, Gant caught a glimpse of a green targeting laser zeroing in on him.

A green laser . . .

'Er, Lieutenant!' Mother yelled from beside her. 'What the hell

happened to this fight! I thought wars were supposed to be fought between two competing forces!'

'I know!' Gant called. 'There are more than two forces down here! Come on, follow me!'

'Where!'

'There's only one way to solve this problem, and that's to do

what we came here to do!'

With that, Gant made a break across no-man's-land, ducking underneath the overhead conveyor belt that ran up its left-hand side, and headed towards the left-hand air vent.

Gant came to the northern end of the elevated conveyor belt just as four Al-Qaeda terrorists came running out from behind their barricade, chased by gunfire.

The first three holy warriors scrambled up some boxes that had been arranged like stairs and jumped up onto the conveyor belt while the fourth hit a fat green button on a console. The conveyor belt roared to life—

—and the three men on it were instantly whisked out of sight at tremendous speed, heading towards the Allied barricade. The fourth man jumped onto the belt after them and—whoosh—he was swept southward as well.

'Whoa. Fast belt . . .' Mother said.

'Come on!' Gant yelled as she dashed behind the Al-Qaeda

barricade.

She burst into open space—the high-ceilinged area underneath the air vents. It did look like a cathedral here. Dim white light from electric lamps partially illuminated the area.

She also saw the reason why the Al-Qaeda terrorists had bolted from the safety of their barricade.

A team of maybe 15 black-clad commandos—dark wraiths wearing green-eyed night-vision goggles and motorcross-style Oakley anti-flash glasses—was fanning out from a small tunnel located behind the Al-Qaeda barricade, tucked into the north-eastern corner of the cavern.

It was, however, the weapons in their hands that seized Gant's attention. The weapons which had unleashed hell on the Al-Qaeda troops.

These new soldiers were equipped with MetalStorm Ml00 assault rifles. A variety of rail gun, the MetalStorm range of weapons do not use conventional moving parts to fire their bullets. Rather, they employ rapid-sequential electric shocks to trigger each round, and as such, are able to fire at the unbelievable rate of 10,000 rounds per minute. It amounts to a literal storm of metal, hence the name.

The MetalStorm guns of this new force of men were equipped with ghostly green laser-sighting devices—so in her mind, until she found out their real name, Gant just labelled them 'the Black-Green Force'.

One thing about them was truly odd. This Black-Green Force didn't seem to care about her at all. They were pursuing the fleeing terrorists.

In the midst of all this confusion, Gant slid to the dusty ground underneath the left-hand air vent and started erecting a vertical mortar launcher.

When the launcher was ready, she yelled, 'Clear!' and hit the trigger. With an explosive whump!, a mortar round shot up into the air vent, disappearing up it at rocket speed before . . .

. . . BOOM!!!!

Six hundred metres above them, the mortar round hit the camouflaged lid that capped the air vent, blasting it to smithereens. Debris rained down the vent, smacking to the ground, at the same time as a shaft of natural grey light flooded into the cavern from above.

When the rain of debris had cleared, Gant stepped forward again, and surrounded by her team, erected a new device, a much smaller one: a compact laser-emitting diode.

She flicked a switch.

Immediately, a brilliant red laser beam shot up into the vent from the diode, disappearing up the chimney, shooting into the sky.

'All units, this is Fox,' Gant said into her radio mike. 'If you're

still alive, pay attention. The laser is set. Repeat, the laser is set. According to mission parameters, the bombers will be here in ten minutes! I don't care what else is happening in here, let's clear out of this mine, people!'

At the Marine compound outside the mine, a communications officer abruptly sat up straight at his console.

'Colonel! We just picked up a targeting laser coming from inside the mine! It's Gant's beam. They did it.'

Colonel Walker stepped forward. 'Call the C-130s, tell them they have a laser. And get evac crews to that mine entrance to pick up our people as they come out. In ten minutes that mine is going to be history and we can't wait for any stragglers.'

Gant and Mother and the two Marines with them turned together.

They were still behind the Al-Qaeda barricade and now they had

to get back to the Allied one and then beyond it to the sloping entry

shaft.

They didn't get more than a few yards.

No sooner had they started moving than they saw a stand-off taking place just in front of the Al-Qaeda barricade, at the edge of no-man's-land.

Four Al-Qaeda holy warriors stood surrounded by a six-man squad of the Black-Green Force, caught in the beams of their MetalStorm rifles.

Gant watched from behind the barricade.

The Black-Green Force's squad leader stepped forward, pulled down his ski-mask to reveal a male model's square jaw and handsome blue-eyed features. He addressed the terrorists. 'You're Zawahiri? Hassan Zawahiri . . .'

One of the Al-Qaeda men raised his chin defiantly.

'7 am Zawahiri,' he said. 'And you cannot kill me.'

'Why not?' the Black-Green squad leader said.

'Because Allah is my protector,' Zawahiri said evenly. 'Do you not know? I am His chosen warrior. I am His Chosen One.' The terrorist's voice began to rise. 'Ask the Russians. Of the captured mujahideen, I alone survived the Soviets' experiments in the dungeons of their Tajik gulag. Ask the Americans! I alone survived their cruise missile attacks after the African embassy bombings!' Now he started shouting. 'Ask the Mossad! They know! I alone have survived over a dozen of their assassination attempts! No man born of this earth can kill me! I am the One. I am God's messenger. I am invincibleV

'You,' the squad leader said, 'are wrong.'

He fired a burst from his MetalStorm rifle into Zawahiri's chest. The terrorist was hurled backwards, his torso torn to mush, his body all but cut in half.

Then the handsome squad leader stepped forward and did the most gruesome thing of all.

He stood over Zawahiri's corpse, drew a machete from behind his back, and with one clean blow, sliced Zawahiri's head from his shoulders.

Gant's eyes went wide.

Mother's mouth opened.

They watched in horror as the Black-Green commando then grabbed Zawahiri's severed head and casually placed it in a white medical box.

Mother breathed: 'What kind of fucked-up shit is going on here?'

'I don't know,' Gant said. 'But we're not gonna find out now. We have to get out of this place.'

They turned—

—just in time to see a crowd of about thirty Al-Qaeda terrorists stampeding toward them—toward the conveyor belt, screaming, shouting, their empty machine-guns useless—pursued by more Black-Green commandos.

Gant opened fire—smacked down four terrorists.

Mother did too—took down four more.

The other two Marines in Gant's team were crash-tackled where they stood, trampled by the stampeding crowd.

'There are too many of them!' Gant yelled to Mother. She dived left, out of the way.

For her part, Mother stepped back onto the boxes leading up to the conveyor belt, firing hard, before she was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the terrorists and was herself flung backwards onto the speeding conveyor belt in their midst.

The Black-Green men who had killed Zawahiri seemed amused by the sight of the Al-Qaeda warriors fleeing desperately onto the

conveyor belt.

One of them strode over to the conveyor belt's control console

and hit a fat yellow button.

A mechanical roar filled the cavern, and from her position on the dusty floor, Gant spun to see its source.

Over by the Allied barricade, at the far end of the conveyor belt, a giant rock crusher had been turned on. It was composed simply of a pair of massive rollers that were each covered in hundreds of conical rock-crushing 'teeth'.

Gant gasped as she saw the Al-Qaeda terrorists now jumping for their lives off the speeding conveyor belt. She watched for Mother to jump, too, but it never happened.

Gant didn't see anyone resembling Mother leap off.

Shit.

Mother was still on the conveyor belt, rushing headlong toward

the rock crusher.

Mother was indeed still on the belt—shooting down its length toward the rotating jaws of the rock crusher sixty yards away. The problem was she was wrestling with two Al-Qaeda terrorists

as she went.

While the other Al-Qaeda troops had decided to leap off the conveyor belt, these two had decided to die in the rock crusher . . . and they were going to take Mother with them.

The conveyor belt rushed down the length of the cavern, racing toward the rock crusher at about thirty kilometres an hour—eight metres per second.

Mother had lost her gun when she'd hit the conveyor belt and now she struggled with the two terrorists.

'You suicidal ratfuckers!' she yelled as she fought. At six feet two, she was as strong as an ox—strong enough to hold off her two attackers but not overpower them.

'Think you're gonna take me down, huh!' she shouted in their faces. 'Not fucking likely!'

She kicked one of them in the balls—hard—and he yelped. She flipped him over her head, toward the rock crusher, now only twenty yards away and approaching fast.

Two-and-a-half seconds away.

But the second guy held on. Tight. He was a dogged fighter and he wouldn't let go of her arms. He was travelling backwards, feet-first. Mother was now travelling forwards, on her belly, head-first.

'Let—go—of—meV she yelled.

The first Al-Qaeda man entered the rock crusher.

A shriek of agony. An explosion of blood. A wash of it splattering all over Mother's face.

And then, in an instant of clarity, Mother realised.

She wasn't going to make it.

It was too late. She was dead.

Time slowed.

The terrorist holding her arms went into the jaws of the rolling rock crusher feet-first.

It swallowed him whole and Mother saw it all up close: a six-foot man chewed in an instant. Shluck-splat! Another blood explosion assaulted her face from point-blank range.

Then she saw the rolling jaws of the crusher inches away from her own face, saw each individual spoked tooth, saw the blood on each one, saw her hands disappear into the—

—and then suddenly she was lifted into the air above the yawning maw of the rock crusher.

Not far into the air, mind you.

Just a couple of inches, enough to take her off the swiftly moving conveyor belt, enough to stop her forward movement.

Mother frowned, snapped her head round.

And there above her, hanging one-handed from a steel overhead beam, gripping the collar of her body armour with his spare hand, was Shane Schofield.

Five seconds later, Mother was on solid ground again, standing with Schofield and Book II and their new offsiders, Pokey and Freddy. The Light Strike Vehicle was parked nearby, behind the Allied barricade.

'Where's Gant!' Schofield yelled above the mayhem.

'We got separated over at the other barricade!' Mother shouted back.

Schofield glanced that way.

'Scarecrow! What the fuck is going on! Who are all these people?'

'I can't explain it yet! All I know is that they're bounty hunters! And at least one of them is after Gant!'

Mother grabbed his arm. 'Wait. I got bad news! We've already set the targeting laser for the bombers. We got exactly'—she checked her watch—'eight minutes before this mine is hit by a 21,000-pound laser-guided bomb!'

'Then we'd better find Gant fast,' Schofield said.

After the Al-Qaeda stampede had passed her by, Libby Gant leapt to her feet—only to find several green laser beams immediately zero in on her chest armour.

She looked up.

She was surrounded by another sub-group of the Black-Green Force, six men, their MetalStorm rifles trained on her.

One of the black-clad soldiers held up his hand, stepped forward.

The man took off his helmet—at the same time removing his protective Oakley goggles, revealing his face.

It was a face Gant would never forget.

Could never forget.

He looked like something out of a horror movie.

At some point in the past, this man's head must have been caught in a raging fire—his entire skull was completely hairless and horribly wrinkled, with flash-burned skin that was blistered and scarred. His earlobes had melted into the side of his head.

Beneath this earring, however, the man's eyes glistened with delight.

'You're Elizabeth Gant, aren't you?' he said amiably, taking her guns.

'Ye—Yes,' Gant said, surprised.

Like the other Black-Green squad leader, the bald man had a British accent. He looked about 40. Experienced. Cunning.

He pulled Gant's Maghook out of her back-holster and threw it to the ground tar away from her.

'Can't let you keep that either, I'm afraid,' he said. 'Elizabeth Louise Gant, eallsign: Fox. Twenty-nine years old. Recent graduate of OCS. Graduated second in your class, I believe. Former member of Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit 16 under the command of then-Lieutenant Shane M. Schofield. Former member of HMX-1, the Presidential Helicopter Detachment, again under the command of Captain Shane M. Schofield.

'And now... now you are no longer under the command of Captain Schofield because of Marine Corps regulations about troop fraternisation. Lieutenant Gant, my name is Colonel Damon Larkham, eallsign: Demon. These are my men, the Intercontinental Guards, Unit 88. I hope you don't mind, but we just need to borrow you for awhile.'

And with that, one of Larkham's men grabbed Gant from behind and clamped a rag soaked in trichloromethane over her mouth and nose and in an instant Gant saw nothing but black.

A moment later, the handsome young squad leader whom Gant had seen cut off Zawahiri's head arrived at Demon Larkham's side, holding three head-sized medical transport containers.

'Sir,' the squad leader said, 'we have the heads of Zawahiri, Khalif and Kingsgate. We found the body of Ashcroft, but his head was already missing. I believe the Skorpions are here and that they got to him first.'

Larkham nodded thoughtfully. 'Hmmm, Major Zamanov and his Spetsnaz Skorpions. Thank you, Cowboy. I think we have gained more than enough from this incursion already.' He looked down at Gant's prone body. 'And we might have just added to our catch. Tell everybody to head for the back door. Time to get back to the planes. This mine has been lased for an airstrike and the bombers are on their way.'

Two minutes later, Schofield's Light Strike Vehicle slid around the conveyor-belt end of the Al-Qaeda barricade and skidded to a dusty

halt.

Schofield, Book II, Mother and the two junior Marines piled out

of it, guns up, searching for Gant.

'Mother. Time to the bomb?' Schofield called.

'Six minutes!'

Gant was nowhere to be seen. As was the Black-Green force. The area behind the Al-Qaeda barricade was deserted, the battle over.

Mother stood at the near end of the barricade, not far from the conveyor belt. 'This is where I last saw her. We saw a good-looking guy from that black-and-green group cut some terrorist dude's head off and then suddenly a whole bunch of Al-Qaeda chumps came stampeding at us from over there.'

She indicated the far north-eastern corner of the cavern, beyond the air vents. There Schofield saw a small tunnel about the size of a garage door.

And then he saw something else—on the floor. A Maghook.

He went over to it and picked it up, saw the words 'Foxy Lady' written in white marker on its side. Gant's Maghook. He clipped it

to his belt.

When he rejoined the others, Mother was saying: \ . . and don't

forget the fourth force that's down here.'

'A fourth force?' Schofield said. 'What fourth force?'

'There are four separate forces in this mine,' Mother said. 'Us,

Al-Qaeda, those black-and-green fuckers who took my little

Chickadee, and a fourth force: that bunch of guys who killed Ashcroft and took out the Allied barricade from behind.'

'They killed Ashcroft?' Schofield said.

'Fuckin'-A. Cut off his goddamn head.'

'Jesus. It's another group of bounty hunters,' Schofield said. 'So where is this fourth force now?'

'I, uh, think they're already here . . .' Book II said ominously.

They materialised from within and around the Al-Qaeda barricade—about twenty armed troops dressed in tan desert fatigues, caramel ski-masks and yellow Russian combat boots. They stepped out of the Driftrunner vehicles and tip-trays that made up the Al-Qaeda barricade.

Most of them held sinister-looking short-barrelled VZ-61 Skorpion machine pistols: the signature weapon of Russia's elite special forces unit, the Spetsnaz. It was from this gun that they had garnered their bounty hunting nickname: the Skorpions.

They'd been waiting.

A man wearing major's bars stepped forward from the group. 'Drop your weapons,' he said crisply, curtly.

Schofield and the other four Marines did so. Two Spetsnaz soldiers immediately rushed to his side and held him firmly.

'Captain Schofield, what a pleasant surprise,' the Spetsnaz major said. 'My intelligence did not mention that you would be at this site, but your appearance is a welcome bonus. Your head may pay exactly the same price as the others, but there is no doubt a certain prestige that goes with being the bounty hunter who brings in the famous Scarecrow.'

The major seemed to appraise Schofield down his long aquiline nose. He snorted. 'But perhaps your reputation is unwarranted. Kneel, please.'

Schofield remained standing. He nodded at Gant's laser-emitting diode on the ground. 'You see that device down there. That diode is leading a 21,000-pound laser-guided bomb to this mine. It'll be here in five minut—'

'I said kneel.'

One of the guards whacked Schofield behind the knees with his rifle butt. Schofield dropped to the ground underneath one of the cathedral-like domes of the air vents.

With a sharp slicing noise, the major then withdrew a glistening sword from his back-holster: a short-bladed Cossack fighting sword.

'Really,' the major said as he approached Schofield, rotating the sword lazily in his hand, 'I am somewhat disappointed. I had thought killing the Scarecrow would be more difficult than this.'

He raised the sword and, gripping it with both hands, started to swing it. . . just as a pair of blue laser dots appeared on the chests of Schofield's guards. The next instant, the two guards were blown away.

Schofield snapped up—

The Spetsnaz major whirled around—

And they all saw him.

He was standing out in the open, underneath the other air vent, two silver Remington shotguns in his hands, held like pistols. High-tech blue laser-sighting devices were attached to the shotguns' stainless steel barrels.

Erected next to him on collapsible tripods were two remote-operated FN-MAG machine-guns—also equipped with blue laser sights. One of the robot guns was now illuminating the Spetsnaz major's chest with its blue targeting laser, the other gun just roved randomly among the Russian troops.

Whoever this man was, he was dressed entirely in black.

Black fatigues.

Black body armour, scratched with battle scars.

Black hockey helmet.

And on his face—a rugged face, weathered and hard, unshaven—he wore a pair of wraparound anti-flash glasses with yellow lenses.

Schofield caught a glimpse of a thick rope hanging vertically from the air vent above the man, before—whoosh—it whiplashed up into the vent, disappearing like a spooked snake.

'Why hello, Dmitri,' the man in black said. 'Gone AWOL again have you?'

The Spetsnaz major didn't look at all pleased to see the man in black. Nor was he thrilled at the blue laser dot now lighting up his own chest.

The Russian major snarled. 'It is always easier to disappear on these international missions. As I'm sure you of all people would know, Aloysius.' He pronounced the name: allo-wishus.

The man in black—Aloysius—stepped forward, walking casually in amongst the heavily-armed Spetsnaz unit.

Schofield noticed his black utility vest. It was equipped with a bizarre array of wow-military devices: handcuffs, mountain-climbing pitons, a small hand-held scuba tank called a Pony Bottle, even a miniature welding torch—

The man in black strode past a Russian trooper, and suddenly the trooper whipped his gun up.

Muzzle flash. Gunfire.

The trooper was riddled with bullets, nailed.

The roving robot machine-gun whizzed back to pin its laser sights on the other Spetsnaz troops.

Unperturbed, the man in black stopped before Schofield and the Spetsnaz major.

'Captain Schofield, I presume?' he said as he lifted Schofield to his feet. 'The Scarecrow.'

'That's right. . .' Schofield said guardedly.

The man in black smiled. 'Knight. Aloysius Knight. Bounty hunter. I see you've met the Skorpions. You'll have to excuse Major Zamanov. He has this really bad habit of cutting off people's heads as soon as he meets them. I saw the laser signal from the air—when is the bomb due?'

Schofield glanced at Mother.

'Four minutes, thirty seconds,' she said, eyeing her watch.

'If you take his head, Knight,' the Russian major hissed, 'we will hunt you down to the ends of the earth, and we will kill you.'

'Dmitri,' the man named Knight said, 'you couldn't do that if you tried.'

'I could kill you right now.'

'But then you'd die, too,' Knight said, nodding at the blue dot on Major Dmitri Zamanov's chest.

'It would be worth it,' Zamanov spat.

'I'm sorry, Dmitri,' Knight laughed. 'You're a good soldier, and let's be honest, a fucking psychotic asshole. But I know you too well. You don't want to die. Death scares the shit out of you. Me, on the other hand . . . well, I couldn't give a fuck about dying.'

Zamanov froze.

This Knight character, Schofield saw, had called Zamanov's bluff.

'Come on, Captain,' Knight said, handing Schofield his MP-7 from the ground. 'Grab your boys and girls and follow me.'

With that, Knight led Schofield and the other Marines through the ranks of Spetsnaz troops without another shot being fired.

'Who are you?' Schofield asked as they walked.

'Never mind,' Knight said. 'The only thing you need to know right now, Captain, is that you have a guardian angel. Someone who doesn't want to see you killed.'

They reached the eastern end of the Al-Qaeda barricade, a short distance from the tunnel in the corner of the cavern.

Knight yanked open the door to a wide-bodied Driftrunner truck that formed the end section of the Al-Qaeda barricade.

'Get in,' he said.

Schofield and the others climbed inside—under the baleful glares of the Skorpions.

Aloysius Knight jumped into the front seat of the Driftrunner, keyed the ignition.

'Now,' he turned to Schofield, 'are you ready to run? Because as soon as we leave the cover of my remote guns, those cocksuckers are gonna be really pissed.'

'I'm ready.'

'Good.'

Then Knight gunned the accelerator and the Driftrunner shot off the mark, disappearing into the small tunnel in the corner of the cavern.

No sooner was it out of sight than the 20-odd members of Zamanov's Spetsnaz team were moving, jumping into other Driftrunners, three men even leaping into Schofield's abandoned Light Strike Vehicle.

Their engines roared and the chase began.

Headlights in darkness.

Bouncing, jouncing, carving sabre-like beams through the dust-filled air.

The Black Knight's Driftrunner roared down the narrow tunnel. The Driftrunner was about the size of a Humvee and essentially just an oversized pick-up truck, with a long rear tray and a partially-enclosed driver's compartment. There was, however, no dividing wall or window between the driver's compartment and the rear personnel tray: one could traverse between the two simply by climbing over the seats.

The tunnel around it was almost perfectly square, with sheer granite walls and a flat hardstone ceiling held up by wooden support beams. It was also practically dead straight, stretching away into darkness like an arrow.

And it was tightly—tightly—fitted around the Driftrunner. There were only about 12 inches to spare on either side of the speeding truck. Above the vehicle's roof the gap was about four feet. The Skorpions were close behind them.

The three Russian commandos who had commandeered Schofield's LSV were now speeding along the tunnel right behind the Driftrunner—the smaller, more nimble little vehicle catching up to it easily. The driver drove hard while his partners fired at the Driftrunner with their VZ-61 machine pistols.

Bathed in the glare of the LSV's bouncing headlights, Mother and Book and Pokey and Freddy returned fire.

Behind the speeding LSV came three other Driftrunners, packed with the other seventeen members of Zamanov's rogue Spetsnaz unit.

A mini-convoy, racing at dangerously high speed through the I tight stone passageway.

'Mother! Time!' Schofield yelled from the passenger seat of the I front-running truck.

'Three minutes!'

'How long is this tunnel?' he asked Knight.

'About four miles.'

'This is going to be close.'

Book and Mother and Pokey and Freddy's guns blazed, firing at I the speeding LSV behind their truck. They alternated their fire, so I that while two of them fired, the other two were reloading.

Following this pattern, Mother and Book ducked to reload; Pokey and Freddy took their places—and were hit by a shocking Iwave of gunfire. Freddy's face disappeared, transformed to pulp. Pokey was hit in the throat and he fell, teeth clenched. Book II dived forward to stop him falling off the back of the truck, caught him—

—but that was all the Skorpions needed.

Still reloading, Mother spun to see what was happening. She turned in time to see the two passengers from the LSV leaping off the front of the Light Strike Vehicle ///; onto the rear tray of the Driftrunner!

Book had his hands full with Pokey.

The two Skorpions landed on their feet, brought their guns up to kill Book and Pokey.

Lacking a loaded gun, Mother just hurled herself into them, crash-

Pckling them both, and the three of them fell to the floor of the tray, e walls of the tunnel rushing past them in a blur of rocky grey.

Benight and Schofield saw it all. Schofield got up to help.

'Here!' Knight yelled, tossing him one of his silver Remingtons. While you're back there, nail that car!' Schofield dived back into the open rear tray of the Driftrunner. He saw Mother on the floor, fighting—saw Book II lifting Pokey

back up into the tray—saw the LSV whipping along the tunnel behind them, its headlights illuminating the confined space.

He raised the silver Remington and, two-handed, fired it at the

LSV.

The recoil from the shotgun was enormous.

The effect was even bigger. Whatever shells this Knight guy used, they packed one hell of a punch.

The LSV was literally blasted off its wheels.

Hit by the shotgun shell, it was lifted clear into the air and tumbled sideways. Such was its velocity in the close confines of the stone tunnel, the speeding Light Strike Vehicle flipped and rolled and tumbled, banging off the walls and the ceiling before it came to a skidding halt on its crumpled roof.

Miraculously, its driver was still alive.

Not for long.

A split-second after it had stopped, the LSV was ripped apart from behind, blasted into a million pieces as the first Skorpion Driftrunner exploded right through it, followed by the second Spetsnaz truck, then the third.

Within seconds, the Skorpion Driftrunners were travelling right behind Schofield's truck, headlights ablaze, rushing forward in the

dusty tunnel.

The first Russian truck sped up, banged its bullbar against the rear bumper of Schofield's Driftrunner.

Both vehicles rocked with the impact.

Then the Skorpions kicked out the windscreen of the first Russian Driftrunner and clambered out onto its bonnet and before Schofield could do anything about it, in the confined space of the dark tunnel, three of them leapt over into the rear tray of his Driftrunner.

They completely ignored Book II and Mother—instead they headed straight for Schofield, their machine pistols drawn.

Knight saw them in the rear-view mirror, slammed down on the brakes.

The Driftrunner lurched, and everyone was thrown forward, including Schofield, Mother, Book and Pokey in the back.

Like dominoes falling, the three other trucks in the convoy all rammed into each other, thumping nose-to-tail, nose-to-tail, nose-to-tail.

Up in Schofield's Driftrunner, the three Skorpions attacking him were all flung forward.

One dropped his gun as he reached for a handhold; another tumbled to the floor next to Schofield; the third was thrown all the way forward into the driver's compartment where he slammed into the dashboard and looked up to find himself staring into the barrel of a silver shotgun, a blue laser dot illuminating his nose.

Boom!

Knight fired.

The trooper's head exploded like a can of tomato soup.

Knight jammed the accelerator back down and the Driftrunner shot forward again.

The other two Spetsnaz guys, however, their balance now restored, only had eyes for Schofield.

The gunless one drew a Warlock hunting knife, the other brought his VZ-61 machine pistol around fast—

—and at that very same moment, Knight snapped round and saw them, and something in his eyes ignited, a look that said that Schofield could never ever be touched.

Schofield reacted quickly.

He parried the machine pistol away, karate-style, pushing its barrel to the side just as his enemy fired.

But he couldn't hold off the two of them.

The knife-wielding Skorpion lunged at him, swiping at his throat—

—and suddenly Aloysius Knight was there—

—and with incredible strength, Knight yanked both the knife-wielder and the VZ-61 man away from Schofield, down into the driver's compartment—

—at precisely the same moment as their Driftrunner was rammed hard by the truck behind it.

Knight and the two Spetsnaz commandos were hurled forward, and they smashed right through the windshield of their Driftrunner, went tumbling onto its bonnet.

Truth be told, they didn't actually smash the windscreen. Constructed of shatterproof glass, the windscreen just burst into a spiderweb of cracks and popped out of its frame, landing on the bonnet as an intact but crumpled rectangular mat.

The four Driftrunners continued to rocket down the narrow

tunnel.

Schofield now saw that Knight had wisely wedged a steel bar against the gas pedal, keeping their Driftrunner moving down the dead-straight tunnel, its steering corrected by the tunnel's close

stone walls.

Out on the bonnet of the first Driftrunner, Knight struggled with

the two Skorpions.

The knife-wielder was trying desperately to get back to Schofield, while the VZ-61-armed one had lost his gun in the scramble to get a handhold.

Knight, however, had caught the worst of the smash through the windscreen—he lay with his legs dangling off the front of the speeding Driftrunner, hanging onto its bullbar for dear life.

He saw the knife-wielder clawing his way back towards Schofield, grabbed the man's boot and yanked hard on it, dragging the knife-wielder toward the front of the bonnet . . . and off it!

With a horrified scream, the Russian trooper went under the front of the Driftrunner, under its roaring tyres. He tumbled and smacked underneath the wheels of the whole convoy of Driftrunners before he was spat out the back of the fourth truck, crumpled and mangled and dead.

The other Skorpion saw this and started kicking at Knight's hands, but Knight got a grip on the man's belt and started pulling on it too.

'No!' the Skorpion yelled. 'Noooo!'

'You can't have him!' Knight called, dragging the Spetsnaz trooper toward the front of the bonnet.

The Skorpion came alongside Knight. He was a big guy, with a fierce angry face. He clutched Knight's throat.

'If I go, Black Knight, you go too . . .' he growled.

Knight looked him in the eye. 'Fine.'

And with that Knight kicked himself clear of the front of the Driftrunner—dragging the aghast Russian commando with him— and dropped to the dusty roadway in front of the speeding truck . . .

The Spetsnaz trooper hit the ground and rolled and—splat!—was flattened under the wheels of the lead Driftrunner.

Unlike Knight, he hadn't grabbed the mat-like windscreen of the Driftrunner on his way down.

As he'd fallen off the front of the Driftrunner, Knight had snatched the cracked-glass mat and thrown it to the rushing ground

beneath him.

The mat hit the ground—and Knight landed on it, cat-like—and the mat slid along the dusty ground, at first sliding forward, before whoosh the first Driftrunner roared over the top of it, and over the top of Knight, too!

The convoy of Driftrunners—all four of them—rumbled quickly forward, over the tiny figure of Aloysius Knight sliding on his back on his makeshift mat.

Whoosh—whoosh—whoosh . . .

Knight shot underneath the quartet of trucks and was about to blast out behind the last Driftrunner when he drew his second shotgun, held it by the barrel . . . and hooked its pistol-grip on the underside of the rear bumper of the fourth and last

Driftrunner.

The mat swished out from under him, tumbled away into the darkness of the tunnel, and Knight was dragged along behind the Driftrunner, his flailing legs bouncing on the roadway.

Then he reached up and hauled himself up into the tray of the last Driftrunner, ready to rejoin the fight.

• • •

Up in the first Driftrunner, Schofield was now sitting in the driver's seat. After Knight had gone flying out through the windshield and under the front of the truck, Schofield had kicked away the steel bar pinned to the gas pedal and taken the wheel.

In the rear-view mirror, he saw Mother and Book II fighting hand-to-hand with their two Spetsnaz assholes—saw two more Skorpion troopers make the leap forward from the second Driftrunner onto his one.

These two new guys charged straight for Schofield in the driver's compartment.

There are just too many of them, Schofield's mind screamed.

He saw the two new Skorpions rushing forward, guns drawn. They'd be on him in seconds.

And then he remembered something about mining vehicles. He hurriedly reached for his seatbelt.

'Book! Mother! Hang on to something!'

Then he reached across the driver's compartment . . . and kicked open the passenger door of the Driftrunner.

The response was instantaneous.

The Driftrunner's handbrake immediately activated itself and the speeding truck came to a sudden bone-jarring halt. It was a safety feature on all mining vehicles—to prevent miners from being hurt, if the passenger door was opened, the vehicle was instantly disabled, its park-brake initiated.

Caught by surprise, the second Driftrunner slammed into the back of the first one. The third and fourth trucks did the same, running into each other like a collapsing accordion.

As for the two Skorpions who had been coming for Schofield, one went flying through the now-empty windscreen, hurled at least 15 feet clear of the vehicle, the other caught his chin on the roof of the driver's cabin and while his legs flew forward, his head stayed still, and with a sickening snap! his neck broke.

Mother and Book II, on the other hand, had done as they'd been told and instead of fighting their assailants, had grabbed onto the nearest handholds, so that when the truck stopped, their attackers

had been thrown forward, smacking into the back of the driver and

passenger seats.

One was knocked unconscious by the fall.

The other was only bruised, and he rose—only to be headbutted viciously by Mother, a blow that put his lights out for good.

The damage done, Schofield reached over and closed the passenger door and hit the gas and soon they were speeding again.

There was less damage and mayhem in the other Driftrunners. They sped along behind the first truck once more—still with at least ten men on board.

But then the damage came.

In the form of Aloysius Knight.

When the impact had occurred, Knight had been in the process of climbing into the rear tray of the last Driftrunner, so it hadn't

really affected him.

Now that the Driftrunners were racing along again, however, he moved quickly through the last vehicle, dispatching the Skorpions in it with brutal—brutal—efficiency.

The Russians tried to resist, tried to raise their own weapons and

kill him first.

But Knight was like a killing machine.

Two Skorpions in the rear tray: he shot one in the head with his shotgun, while at the same time he shoved the other one's head above the roof of the driver's compartment . . . allowing it to be hit by a speeding overhead support beam, an impact that removed the

soldier's head from his body.

He came to the driver's compartment—levelled his short-barrelled Remington at the passenger and without so much as a blink, fired.

Boom.

The driver turned, surprised, just as Knight—ignoring him— blasted the windscreen out of its frame and climbed through it, leaping forward onto the tray of the third truck.

Zamanov was on this truck.

He dived for cover as Knight moved forward through the Driftrunner, blasting men left and right. Several of the Skorpions tried to return fire, but Knight was too fast, too fluid, too good. It was as if he anticipated their moves, even the order in which they would shoot.

On his way through the driver's cabin, Knight glimpsed Zamanov cowering under the dash, but he only saw him momentarily and since Knight's first priority was to get forward, back to Schofield, he didn't stop to kill the Russian. He was only killing anyone who was in his way.

He leapt over onto the second truck.

Up in the first Driftrunner, Schofield was now driving hard—with only friends not foes on his truck.

He could also now see a small white speck in the distance in front of him—the end of the tunnel.

Mother climbed into the passenger seat beside him. 'Scarecrow! Who the fuck are these people! And who is that dude in black?'

'I don't know!' Schofield yelled.

He looked in his rear-view mirror and saw Aloysius Knight step out onto the bonnet of the Driftrunner immediately behind his own.

'But he seems to be the only one around here who isn't trying to kill me.'

'He could be planning to kill you later,' Book II suggested from the rear tray. 'I say we ditch him.'

'I agree—' Mother began before cutting herself off.

They had reached the end of the tunnel.

Brilliant white light streamed in through a small square entryway.

It was about 200 metres away.

What had silenced her, however, was the enormous demonic object that had apparated in the air beyond the tunnel's exit.

A jet fighter.

A black Sukhoi S-37 fighter, hovering in the air just outside the tunnel.

Seen from head-on, with its sharply-pointed nose and down- 1 ward-swept wings dripping with missiles, the S-37 looked like a gigantic evil hawk, staring right at them.

There came a loud thump from behind Schofield as Knight landed in the tray of their Driftrunner and came up behind them. 'It's okay,' he said, nodding at the fighter, 'he's with us.' Knight pressed a button on his wrist guard, initiating a radio on it. 'Rufus, it's me! We're coming out and we're coming out hot, with three enemy vehicles on our tail. I need a Sidewinder. Just one. Aim low and to your right; arm at two hundred metres. Just like we did in Chile last year.'

'Copy that, Boss,' a deep voice said in Knight's earpiece. 'May I?' Knight nodded at Schofield's steering wheel. Schofield let him take it.

Knight immediately yanked the steering wheel hard over and drove the Driftrunner up against the left-hand wall of the tunnel.

The big four-wheel-drive rode up against the wall, grinding against it until . . . whump ... it jolted upwards, and suddenly was speeding along at a 45-degree angle, riding with two wheels on the ground and two on the wall itself.

'Okay, Rufus! Now!' Knight yelled into his wrist mike. Immediately, a horizontal finger of smoke shot out from the right wing of the hovering black fighter, and with a resounding phooni! a Sidewinder missile streaked into the tunnel system, rocketing at tremendous speed, hugging the ground.

From Schofield's point of view, the missile stayed close to the left-hand wall, zooming fast and low before— —shoooooooom!—

—it whizzed underneath his Driftrunner's 45-degree-tilted body and slammed into the truck immediately behind it.

The explosion ripped through the tunnel. The first Spetsnaz Driftrunner was blasted into a million pieces. With no way to avow it, the two mine trucks behind the first one smashed into the bacK of it, driving their noses into the wreck, slamming to a halt.

At the same time, Schofield's Driftrunner blasted out into glaring

daylight, shooting onto a wide flat turnaround area carved into the side of the mountain. Beyond the turnaround—directly underneath the hovering fighter jet—was a sheer thousand-foot drop.

Knight turned to Mother. 'You. How long till the bomb?'

Mother checked her watch. 'Thirty seconds.'

'That'll hurt Dmitri.' Knight then spoke into his wrist mike: 'Rufus. Meet us on the next turnaround down the mountainside.' He looked over at Schofield. 'I've got three passengers with me, including our man.'

'Any problems?'

Knight said, 'Nah, it was pretty light this time.'

Thirty seconds later, the sleek Sukhoi landed in a cloud of dust on another turnaround area further down the precarious cliff-side roadway. Flat and round, the turnaround looked like a natural landing platform jutting out from the cliff-face. Schofield's Driftrunner skidded to a halt beside it.

At that very same moment, guided by Gant's laser diode down in the mine, a 21,000-pound MOAB bomb was dropped out the back of a C-130 Hercules and angled in toward the mine's air vents.

The precision guidance system worked perfectly.

The bomb rushed toward the earth, hitting terminal velocity, its nns controlling its flight-path, before—whump—the giant weapon disappeared into the mine's now-open chimney.

One, one thousand . . .

Two, one thousand. . .

Three . . .

donation.

the entire mountain shuddered.

A volcanic boooom! echoed out from within the mine.

Standing next to the Sukhoi's two-man cockpit, pushing Mother up into it, Schofield had to grab onto its ladder just to keep his

balance.

He glanced up at the mountain peak above them—at the layer of

snow resting on top of it—and realised.

'Oh no,' he breathed. 'Avalanche . . .'

Then he snapped round to look back up the roadway, in time to see two bent-over figures stagger out of the mine tunnel on foot— a bare moment before a shocking blast of air came rocketing out of the tunnel, expelling the crumpled remains of the Skorpion Driftrunners that had been left in it.

The three Driftrunners were catapulted clear off the edge of the upper turnaround—shooting horizontally out into the sky, past the two hunched figures—after which the three trucks fell a thousand feet straight down into the ravine below.

It was then that an ominous rumbling came from somewhere

above Schofield.

The gigantic body of snow resting on the mountain above the Sukhoi's perch was shifting, cracking, starting to . . .

Slide.

'Move!' Schofield yelled, climbing up the ladder.

The sliding body of snow began to gather speed.

'Quickly! Into the bomb bay!' Knight yelled.

Book and Mother squeezed through the small cockpit and into the tight space behind it: a bomb storage bay that had been converted into a . . . holding cell.

'Just get in!' Knight yelled from behind them. 'I'll be joining you!'

Knight squeezed in with them. Schofield jumped into the cockpit last of all, climbed into the rear gunner's seat, looked up.

The vertically-sliding snowdrift had taken on the appearance of a crashing ocean wave: blasting explosions of white preceding the full weight of the avalanche.

Knight called forward, 'Er, Rufus . . . !'

'Already on it, Boss!' the large man in the front seat hit the throttles and the Sukhoi rose.

'Faster . . .' Schofield said.

The avalanche came rushing down at them, tumbling, rumbling, smashing, crashing.

The Sukhoi lifted higher, hovering for a moment before it powered out over the edge of the cliff just as the avalanche rushed past it, the falling wall of snow rushing by with a colossal roar, gobbling up the turnaround in a single enormous bite before rumbling past the floating black fighter jet and disappearing into the abyss below.

'Now that was close,' Knight said.

Three minutes later, the Sukhoi S-37 landed in a clearing on the Afghan side of the mountain, about a mile away from Schofield's

parked Yak-141.

Schofield, Knight, Book and Mother all climbed out, while the pilot—an enormous bushy-bearded individual whom Knight introduced simply as 'Rufus'—killed the engines.

Schofield walked a few yards away to regather his thoughts. A lot had happened today and he wanted to clear his head.

His earpiece crackled.

'Scarecrow, it's me, Fairfax. You there?

'Yeah, I'm here.'

'Listen. I got a couple of things for you. A few facts on those USAMRMC guys on your list, and some big stuff on that Black Knight guy, most of it from the FBI and ISS Most Wanted lists. You got a moment?'¹

'Yeah,' Schofield said.

'Jesus, Scarecrow, this Knight guy is bad news . . .'

In his office deep beneath the Pentagon, Dave Fairfax sat bathed in the glow of his computer screen. In the eastern United States, it was just hitting 4 a.m., October 26, and the office was quiet.

On Fairfax's screen were two photos of Aloysius Knight: the first was a portrait shot of a clean-shaven young man in US Army dress uniform, smiling. The second was a blurred long-distance shot of Aloysius Knight holding a shotgun in each hand and running hard.

'All right,' Fairfax said, reading. 'His real name is Knight,

Aloysius K. Knight, 33 years old, 6 feet 1 inch tall, 185 pounds. Eyes: brown. Hair: black. Distinguishing features: known to wear amber-tinted anti-flash glasses because of an eye abnormality known as acute retinal dystrophy. It means that his retinas are too sensitive to handle natural light, hence the need for tinted glasses.'

As Fairfax's voice came through his earpiece, Schofield gazed over at Knight, standing over by the Sukhoi with the others, with his two holstered shotguns, his yellow glasses, his all-black fighting uniform.

Fairfax went on: 'Former member of Delta Team 7 which is regarded as the best within Delta, an elite within an elite. Reached the rank of captain, but found guilty of treason against the United States in absentia in 1998 after he betrayed a mission he was leading in Sudan. Intelligence sources say that Knight was paid $2 million by a local Al-Qaeda cell to inform them of an impending US assault on their arms depot. Thirteen Delta operatives died as a result of the forewarning Knight gave.

'He disappeared after that, but was rediscovered eighteen months later living in Brasilia. A team of six Navy SEAL commandos was sent in to liquidate him. Knight killed them all, then mailed their heads back to the SEAL training facility at Coronado Naval Base in San Diego.

'Now known to be working as a freelance international bounty hunter. Get this. Apparently, insurance companies keep track of these things for kidnap scenarios: he's rated by Carringtons of London as the second-best bounty hunter in the world.''

'Only second? Who's the best?'

'That Demon Larkham guy I told you about before. Wait a second, I'm not finished with Knight yet. ISS believes that in 2000, Knight tracked down and killed twelve Islamic terrorists who'd kidnapped the daughter of Russia's Deputy President, cut off four of her fingers, and demanded a ransom of US$100 million. Knight traced them to a terrorist training camp in the Iranian desert, went

there, razed the whole frigging camp to the ground, grabbed the girl—minus the fingers—and returned her to Moscow without the media getting a whiff of it. In return, it says here, the Russian government gave him . . . wait for it... a test-damaged Sukhoi S-37 jet fighter, plus refuelling privileges at any Russian base in the world. Apparently, the plane is known in bounty hunting circles as the Black Raven.'

'Black Raven, huh,' Schofield turned to look at the black Sukhoi S-37 standing nearby . . . and saw that Aloysius Knight was walking towards him.

7 tell you, Scarecrow,' Fairfax said, 'this is not the kind of guy you want hunting you.'

'Too late,' Schofield said. 'He's standing right in front of me.'

Schofield and Knight rejoined the others underneath the Black Raven.

Book II and Mother came up to Schofield.

'You all right?' Mother asked softly. 'Book told me what happened in Siberia. Excuse my French, Scarecrow, but what the fuck is happening here?'

'It's been a tough morning,' Schofield said, 'and a lot of people have died. Any idea what happened to Gant?'

'The last time I saw her was when those cocksuckers with the green laser sights came rocking in and I was knocked onto that conveyor belt—'

'She was taken,' a voice said from behind Mother.

It was Aloysius Knight.

'Taken by a bounty hunter named Demon Larkham and his men from IG-88.'

'How do you know that?' Book II asked.

'Rufus,' Knight nodded to his partner, the mountainously tall pilot.

With his great bushy beard, Rufus had a wide smiling face and earnest eyes. He hunched slightly, as if trying to diminish his seven-foot height. When he spoke, he spoke quickly and matter-of-factly, report-style.

'After I lowered Aloysius down the air vent,' he said, 'I went to hover over by the back entrance. I dropped a MicroDot aerosol charge onto the turnaround outside the exit tunnel—just like you told me to, Boss. Then I took up a hovering pattern about a mile away—again just like you told me to.

'About five minutes before you all came charging out, a great big Chinook helicopter flanked by a couple of Lynx attack choppers landed on that turnaround. Then two LSVs and a Driftrunner came speeding out of the mine tunnel and shot straight up the ramp of the Chinook and into its belly. Then the Chinook lifted off and headed out over the hills, back toward Afghanistan.'

Schofield said, 'How do you know Gant was with them?'

'I got photos,' Rufus said simply. 'Aloysius told me that if anything unusual happened while he was inside the mine, I was to take photos of it, so I did.'

Schofield assessed Rufus as the big man spoke. For a guy who could manoeuvre a hover-capable Russian fighter with incredible skill—something which required an almost innate knowledge of physics and aerodynamics—his speech seemed oddly formal and direct, as if he took comfort in military formality.

Schofield had seen men like Rufus before: often the most gifted pilots (and soldiers) had great difficulty in social situations. They were so focused on their area of expertise that they often had trouble expressing themselves, or missed conversational nuances like irony and sarcasm. You just had to be patient with them. You also had to make sure their fellow troops were equally patient. Direct but not stupid, there was more to this Rufus than met the eye.

Knight pulled a handheld monitor from the cockpit of the Sukhoi, showed it to Schofield.

On the monitor was a series of digital photos showing three speeding vehicles blasting out of the mine's rear entrance, out onto the turnaround and up the ramp of a waiting Chinook helicopter.

Knight flicked a switch, blowing up several of the photos, zooming in on the lead Light Strike Vehicle.

Knight said, 'See the three white boxes on the passenger seat. Medical transport cases. Three cases: three heads.'

He clicked to another photo, which showed a blurry zoomed-in image of the Driftrunner racing along behind the two LSVs.

'Check out the rear tray on the truck,' Knight said. 'Notice that all of Larkham's guys are dressed in black. One person, however . . . that one . . . the one without the helmet... is wearing sand-coloured Marine fatigues.'

And Schofield saw her.

Although the figure was blurred and out-of-focus, he recognised her shape, the fall of her short blonde hair.

It was Gant.

Slumped unconscious in the rear tray of the Driftrunner.

Schofield's blood ran cold.

The greatest bounty hunter in the world had Gant.

More than anything else, Schofield wanted to go after her—

'No. That's exactly what the Demon wants you to do, Captain,' Knight said, reading his thoughts. 'Don't rush into anything. We know where she is. And Larkham won't kill her. He needs her alive if he's going to use her to flush you out.'

'How can you be sure of that?'

'Because that's how I'd do it,' Knight said evenly.

Schofield paused, holding Knight's gaze. It was almost like looking in a mirror—Schofield with his silver anti-flash glasses masking his scars, Knight with his yellow-lensed wraparounds covering his defective eyes.

A tattoo on Knight's forearm caught Schofield's eye. It showed an angry bald eagle and the words:

SLEEP WITH ONE EYE OPEN.

Schofield had seen that image before: on posters that had come out soon after September 11. On them, the American eagle said, 'Hey terrorists, sleep with one eye open.'

Underneath Knight's eagle tattoo was another one which simply read: brandeis. Schofield didn't know what that one meant.

He locked eyes with Knight.

'I've heard about you, Mr Knight,' he said. 'Your loyalty isn't exactly something to brag about. You sold out your unit in the Sudan. Why should I think you won't sell me out, too?'

'Don't believe everything you read in the, papers,' Knight said, 'or what you read in US Government files.'