Scarecrow Returns

THE BERIEV CRASH SITE

4 APRIL, 0900 HOURS

2 HOURS TO DEADLINE

TWENTY MINUTES later, the two assault boats pulled to a halt at a junction of two major leads. The ice walls that bounded the watery junction rose about twenty feet above the boats. After two hours of travel, they were close to the coordinates of the crashed Beriev.

Scarecrow extended a ladder, hooked its curved upper prongs over the lip of the ice-wall and started climbing. His team remained in the boats below him, huddled in their drysuits and parkas, looking very anxious.

Schofield’s head appeared above the flat edge of the ice plain.

The crashed Beriev was right there, barely fifty yards away.

It was tipped over on its left-hand side, its nose pointing southward. Its tail section was completely destroyed, and its left wing had snapped under the weight of the fuselage rolling onto it. Beyond the plane, a vast expanse of ice stretched away to the west, cracked here and there by leads.

Far to the south, Schofield saw Dragon Island for the first time.

It loomed on the horizon, small but visible, a jagged upthrust of mountains on the otherwise perfectly flat horizon. Low clouds hovered above it. It looked dangerous, even from here.

Scarecrow peered warily up at the sky, scanning for surveillance aircraft.

Nothing. Only the purple dawn-like sky and some high-altitude clouds, although to the south, around Dragon, the sky did seem to shimmer somewhat.

He saw something.

A tiny object, circling lazily high above him. It wasn’t a surveillance plane; it was too small. It looked like a large Arctic bird, gliding on the thermals.

Schofield swore. He was completely unprepared for a combat mission and he knew it. He was working with untrained civilians just to make up the numbers and he had almost zero surveillance equipment. He wished he had a simple waveguide radar or even just a parabolic dish to scan the immediate airspace. But he didn’t even have that. Right now, all he had were his eyes and they just weren’t good enough.

“Mother, come on up. Bring Bertie with you. Everyone else, stay in the boats for now.”

He stepped up onto the flat surface of the ice plain, MP-7 submachine gun poised and ready.

A few moments later, Mother joined him. She plonked Bertie on the ground between them and the little robot beeped and spun on his chunky tires.

Mother stood beside Scarecrow, clasping a menacing Heckler & Koch G36A2 assault rifle in her hands.

Most Force Recon NCOs used the standard-issue M4, but Mother preferred the venerable German assault gun, and hers came with all the optional extras: it had a 100-round C-Mag drum magazine, underslung AG36 grenade launcher with the new anti-tank zinc-tipped incendiary grenades, a Zeiss RSA reflex sight and Oerlikon Contraves LLM01 laser light module. With all the additions, it looked like something out of a science-fiction movie.

Scarecrow glanced from his compact MP-7 to her G36. “Could you have attached anything else to that thing?” he asked.

“Quiet, you,” she said. “Weapons options are like good commanders: you love ’em when you’ve got ’em, and you wish you had ’em when you don’t.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Mother scanned the area. “It’s too quiet here.”

“Yeah, it is. Bertie, acquire and identify that object up in the sky, please.”

“Yes, Captain Schofield.” Bertie’s optical lens tilted skyward.

As the robot did this, Scarecrow and Mother approached the crashed plane, guns raised.

Standing before the Beriev, Schofield pulled down the thermal-vision scope on his helmet.

He saw the crumpled plane in infra-red, saw the strong residual warmth of its intact wing-mounted engine plus two man-shaped blobs in the cockpit, dim but pulsing.

“I got two human signatures in the cockpit,” he said. “Looks like they’re still alive in there—”

Suddenly, Schofield’s earpiece crackled to life.

Ironbark Barker’s voice growled: “SEAL team in position off the north-east corner of Dragon Island. Commencing underwater insertion via the old submarine dock.”

Ironbark and his team were going in.

Scarecrow returned his attention to the plane and, stepping cautiously forward, arrived at its cracked cockpit windshield. Since the Beriev was rolled on its side, he couldn’t get in via its side doors, so he smashed one of the cockpit windows while Mother covered him, her G36 ready to fire.

Schofield saw two figures slumped in the plane’s flight seats. Still strapped into the pilot’s seat was an older man with a bushy gray mustache and IVANOV stenciled onto his parka. He groaned as Schofield reached in and touched his carotid artery.

“Ivanov. This is the guy who sent out the distress call. He’s alive.” Schofield pulled out a heat-pack from his first-aid pouch and pressed it against Ivanov’s chest. Ivanov immediately groaned.

Mother crawled in and checked the other man, a young Russian private by all appearances. He was pale and pasty-faced, but after a few slaps, he came to with a grunt.

Beside him, Vasily Ivanov also regained his senses. He blurted something in Russian before, seeing the U.S. flags on Schofield’s and Mother’s shoulders, he switched to English: “Who are you!”

Schofield said, “We’re United States Marines, Dr. Ivanov. Our people picked up your distress signal and we’re here to—”

Gunfire.

Schofield spun. Mother did, too.

But it wasn’t here. It was in their ears, in their earpieces.

Then Schofield heard Ironbark’s voice again and it was shouting desperately.

Cut into the cliffs on the north-eastern flank of Dragon Island was a Soviet-era submarine dock. It was essentially a rectangular concrete cave that had been carved into the rocky cliff-face, and like all such edifices of the once-mighty Soviet Union, it was enormous.

It featured two berths that could hold—at the same time, completely sheltered from the elements—a nuclear ballistic missile submarine and a 30,000-ton bulk carrier. The tracks of an oversized railway system ended at the edge of the two docks. In the old days, Soviet freighters had unloaded their cargoes—weapons, weapons-grade nuclear material or just steel and concrete—directly onto the carriages of a waiting megasized train.

Today, one of those berths was occupied by a most unusual sight: a huge red-hulled Russian freighter lay half sunk beside the dock, deliberately scuttled. It was tilted dramatically forward, its bow fully under the surface while its stern remained afloat. The stricken vessel’s name blared out from that stern in massive white letters:

OKHOTSK

It was the mysterious Russian freighter that had gone missing with an army’s worth of weapons and ordnance on board: AK-47s, RPGs, Strela anti-aircraft vehicles, ZALA aerial drones, APR torpedoes and even two MIR mini-submarines. One of those compact glass-domed submersibles could be seen tilted on its side on the half-submerged foredeck of the freighter.

Apart from the Okhotsk lying alongside the dock, the rest of the vast concrete cavern lay empty, long-unused, its many ladders, catwalks and chains doing nothing but gathering dust and frost.

The first of Ironbark’s Navy SEALs emerged silently from the ice-strewn water, leading with a silenced MP-5N. He was quickly followed by a second man, then Ironbark himself.

It was a textbook entry. They never made a sound.

There was only one problem.

The force of a hundred armed men stationed at various positions around the dock, using the aging debris and the half-sunk wreck of the Okhotsk as firing positions. They formed a perfect ring around the water containing the SEALs.

And as soon as all twelve of the SEALs had breached the surface, they opened fire.

What followed was nothing less than a shooting gallery. The SEALs were annihilated in perfectly executed interlocking patterns of fire.

Schofield heard Ironbark’s voice shouting above the rain of gunfire: “Fuck! Go under! Go under!—Jesus, there must be a hundred of them!—Base, this is Ironbark! SEAL assault is negative! I repeat, SEAL assault is fucked! They were waiting in the submarine dock! We’re being slaughtered! Miami, we have to get back to you. Miami, come in—”

Ten miles away, the Los Angeles–class attack submarine, the USS Miami, hovered in the blue void beneath the Arctic sea ice.

Inside its communications center, a radio operator keyed his mike: “Ironbark, this is Miami. We read you—”

“What the hell . . .” the sonar operator beside him said suddenly before shouting: “Torpedo in the water! Torpedo in the water! Signature is of an APR-3E Russian-made torpedo. Bearing 235! It’s coming from Dragon and it’s coming in fast!”

“Launch countermeasures!”

“It’s locked onto us—”

Schofield listened in horror to the frantic commands being given on the Miami.

“—Take evasive action—”

“ —can’t, it’s too close!”

“—too late! Brace for impact! Fuck! No!—”

The signal from the Miami cut to hash.

Schofield heard Ironbark yell: “Miami? Come in. USS Miami, respond!”

There was no reply from the Miami.

Mother looked at Schofield in utter shock.

Schofield kept listening.

“Ah! Fuck!” Ironbark shouted in pain before, in a hail of louder gunfire, his signal also went dead and the airwaves went completely silent.

Schofield and Mother listened for more, but nothing came.

“Holy shit . . .” Mother whispered. “A hundred men waiting? A force that can take out a SEAL team and a fucking Los Angeles–class attack sub? Who in God’s name is this Army of Thieves?”

Schofield was thinking exactly the same thing.

“Whoever they are,” he said, staring out the cockpit’s shattered windshield at Dragon Island on the southern horizon, “our little team just became the last people on Earth capable of stopping them.”