Scarecrow Returns

BEAR ISLET LOADING DOCK

4 APRIL, 0940 HOURS

1 HOUR 20 MINUTES TO DEADLINE

IN THE dark concrete loading dock on Bear Islet, Zack Weinberg and Emma Dawson were checking the corpse of the polar bear that had come bursting out of the shadows upon their arrival. As always, Bertie trailed along behind Zack.

“I’ve never seen a polar bear like this,” Emma said. “Look at its coat: it’s shaggy and matted and filthy. Polar bears usually have short coats which they keep fastidiously clean.”

Zack winced at the sight of the dead bear. It was indeed filthy. It was also stained all over with its own blood from the gunshot wounds.

“It’s smaller than other polar bears I’ve seen,” he said.

“Yes, it is.” Emma stepped around the corpse, eyeing it analytically, scientifically. “I’d say it’s an adolescent, the bear equivalent of a teenager; moody, aggressive and presumptuous.”

She gazed through the reinforced-glass door that led into the islet’s laboratory structure. In there she saw a wide octagonal space with a sunken section in the middle. On the elevated walkways ringing that sunken section, four larger polar bears padded around, pacing. One of them came over to the glass door and peered through it at her and Zack.

“Do you think this bear was living in this dock?” Zack asked.

Emma shrugged. “It’s a good home for a polar bear. A fully enclosed cave with a single underwater entrance.”

“But why would it be living apart from the others?”

“Adolescent bears of all species—grizzlies, Kodiaks, polars—often overstep their bounds and fall foul of the older bears. I’d guess this bad boy crossed one of the older males and got chased out. He was living here in exile—”

Smack!

The large bear on the other side of the door punched the glass.

The door shuddered, but held.

Schofield turned at the noise, took in the bear on the other side of the door. “You guys okay over there?”

Zack and Emma nodded.

“How about you, Chad?” Schofield said.

The young executive was sitting with his back up against the wall and his head bowed. He looked up, clearly shaken by their recent experiences, but nodded gamely.

Schofield glanced at the stalking bear. “I think it’s time we learned more about this place from Dr. Ivanov.”

The group gathered around the Russian scientist.

“All right, doc,” Schofield said, “we know the big-picture stuff about Dragon Island. Now I want the details from someone who knows them: I want to know everything about that island, from the layout to the atmospheric weapon and what we can do in the next eighty minutes to stop it going off.”

Ivanov shook his head. “Ostrov Zmey is a rock, a fortress. With enough men stationed at its watchtowers, it is very difficult to take by force.”

“If it’s so impregnable, how could this group take it so easily?” Mother asked.

Ivanov sighed. “I suspect they bribed one of the members of the skeleton team I was coming to replace. Specifically, a man named Dr. Igor Kotsky. In the new Russia we men of science are not well paid and I know Kotsky was in considerable debt. He could have been easily bought. We all could have been bought. When my relief plane arrived at Dragon, Kotsky was there at the hangar, waving us in, calling us over . . . into a waiting field of fire.”

“Okay, then,” Schofield said, “tell us about the weapon. We’ve been told we can disrupt its use by stealing or destroying some red-uranium spheres or destroying the missiles that will fire them into the gas cloud. Is that correct?”

“That is right,” Ivanov said. “In theory, you could also disrupt the creation of the gas cloud itself, but it is far too late for that. If you destroyed the vents now, you might create a gap in the gas cloud, but any gap you created would not be wide enough. The atmospheric flame, once ignited, is incredibly potent. It would be able to leap any such void. You would need a gap created by at least ninety minutes of zero gas production to create a large enough gap, and that is not possible anymore.”

“So it comes down to the spheres and the missiles?”

“Yes.”

“So where are these spheres kept?”

“They are stored in a sealed laboratory atop the shorter of the two spires mounted upon the main tower. They are the reason for our enemy’s delay—due to their substantial potency, the red-uranium spheres are kept at a temperature close to zero Kelvin, or -273 degrees Celsius. So they must be primed before use: priming involves reheating them to ambient temperature at a very precise incremental rate or else their molecular structure will break down and their ability to light the gas will be lost.”

“How many of these spheres are there?” Champion asked.

“Well, there are six in that lab . . .” Ivanov said, a little hesitantly. Schofield saw it.

“Are there more spheres elsewhere on Dragon Island?” he asked.

Ivanov grimaced. “There is a secret laboratory built directly underneath the main tower, beneath the great pillar. This laboratory is only accessible by a security-coded elevator and is equipped with a reheating unit of its own and one reduranium sphere. It is a fallback, a last retreat in the event of nuclear conflict, but . . .”

“But what?”

“But Kotsky does not know about it. Its existence is beyond his level of clearance. And if Kotsky does not know about it, then neither can this army.”

“Hmmm.” Schofield bit his lip in thought. “Still, if we can get to that shorter spire and disrupt the priming process, we can render the spheres useless.”

“Yes, if you get there in time,” Ivanov said.

Champion asked, “Can we destroy the spheres with a grenade blast?”

“No, they are too dense for a conventional explosive to do any damage to them. Such an explosive would not even crack a red-uranium sphere. It requires a large, carefully timed and even-more-carefully calibrated implosive blast to break one.”

“How much do they weigh?” Schofield asked.

Ivanov shrugged. “They are heavy for their small size, as one would expect of a semi-nuclear substance. Perhaps three kilograms each. Why?”

“Because a three-kilogram sphere the size of a golf ball will sink like a stone,” Schofield said. “If we can steal those spheres and get them to the coast and hurl them into the ocean, finding them would be all but impossible.”

“This is true,” Ivanov said.

“Wait a second,” Mother said. “Aren’t we talking about radioactive material here? You can’t just pick up a nuclear substance and run off with it.”

Ivanov said: “No, this is the advantage of red uranium. While its explosive energy is great, its passive radioactive decay is minimal. You can carry it in a suitcase or even create a hand grenade with a tiny amount of it—”

“Hold on. There are other devices made from this stuff?”

“Why, yes. Our weapons scientists fell in love with red uranium. It is an almost perfect thermobaric explosive. Smaller devices were fashioned, including hand grenades with red-uranium cores the size of ball bearings that could blow apart a T-72 tank.”

“You assholes built nuclear hand grenades?” Mother said.

Ivanov bowed his head. “This island is a product of a different time. We were given leave to create whatever weapons science would allow and so we did. On occasion, we may have gone too far—”

“No shit,” Mother said.

“Hey! I have a family, too!” Ivanov said indignantly. “Two sons. Six grandchildren. They live in Odessa, in southern Ukraine. If the weapon is ignited, the firestorm will kill them, too. I have as much to lose in all this as you do. I may have helped build this terrible thing, but I most assuredly do not wish to see it set off.”

“Okay, everyone, settle down.” Schofield got back on topic. “What about the missiles that are used to fire the spheres into the gas cloud? Where are they located?”

Ivanov nodded. “Our enemy will have readied the battery of intermediate-range ballistic missiles on the launch pad to the south of the main tower. Sabotaging those missiles is a possibility, but as one would expect, the missile site is very well protected—one can only get to it via a high, single-lane bridge. If our enemies have men guarding the missile site, it will be exceedingly difficult to get to.”

Schofield was silent for a moment, deep in thought.

“There might be one other thing we can do,” he said. “It occurred to me before, but it comes with . . . complications.”

“What’s that?” Mother asked.

“The reason we’re here is because this Army of Thieves is able to detect incoming missiles and bombers from long range, right? They even managed to turn a Russian ICBM around and strike its own launch site.”

Mother shrugged. “They’re teched up. We know this.”

Schofield said, “But it goes deeper than that. To possess this kind of early-warning capability—which lets them see an incoming missile or plane from thousands of miles away—they must be patched into some kind of early-warning satellite. Which means somewhere on this island there’s a satellite uplink connecting them to that satellite.”

“Oh, I see, I see . . .” Veronique Champion nodded. “But, yes, as you say, such a plan brings with it substantial complications.”

Mother didn’t get it. “Wait, wait. What complications? I don’t see it.”

Schofield said, “If we take out the Army of Thieves’ satellite uplink—destroy it or disable it—then the Army of Thieves will be blinded and we can open the way for a nuclear strike on this island.”

“Once that uplink is destroyed,” Champion added, “a nuclear missile launched from, say, Alaska or a site in central Russia could strike this island inside twenty minutes. The complication is—”

“Us,” Schofield said. “We won’t have time to get away before any nuclear missile hits. If we can find and knock out their uplink, we can save the world . . . but in doing so, we kill ourseves.”

“Oh,” Mother said. “Right. I see.”

There was a short silence.

“We have to keep it as an option,” Schofield said seriously. “Maybe not our first option, but if all else fails, we might have to consider it.”

He turned to the group.

“All right, people, here’s how we’re going to do this. If we can somehow get in, I say we make this a split-op: one team goes for the spheres while a smaller second team tries to disable the missile battery. I’ll lead the first team: if we can disrupt the reheating of those spheres before eleven o’clock, we stop this thing cold; if not, we steal the spheres and get them to the coast and toss them into the ocean. At the same time, the second team—I’m thinking of the Kid and Mario here—tries to knock out the missiles, thus preventing the bad guys from firing the spheres into the gas cloud should the first team fail.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Mother said.

“If we can get in there by eleven o’clock,” Champion said. “That in itself will be extremely difficult.”

Schofield nodded. “While we’re doing all this, Dr. Ivanov is going to try and spot any recently added satellite uplink dishes around the complex. In the event of everything going to Hell, our last resort will be blowing the uplink and calling in a nuclear airstrike on ourselves. Any questions?”

No one said a word. They were all taking in exactly what the final option meant.

“I have a question,” Mother said. “For him.” She jerked her chin at Ivanov. “Who the fuck designs and builds a global-killing weapon like this?”

Ivanov smiled tightly. “You may not like the answer. You see, we stole the plans for the atmospheric device, indeed for this whole complex, from a top secret laboratory at Nellis Air Force Base in the United States of America. Your country designed this terrible weapon. We just built it.”

Schofield nodded at the reinforced-glass door, at the shaggy polar bears on the other side.

“What about them? What’s the story with the bears?”

“They were another experiment,” Ivanov said. “An experiment gone wrong.”

“Oh, come on. What did you do to the bears?” the Kid asked.

“It was not one of my projects,” Ivanov said, “and not one I agreed with. The idea was not unlike the infamous U.S. tests with dolphins: we tried to train the bears to carry out certain military tasks. Laying mines, attaching explosives to submarines. One group, however, was given advanced mood-altering drugs, to heighten their aggressive instincts, the goal being to turn them into hyper-aggressive frontline troops that would strike fear into the hearts of an enemy force as they rampaged toward them.”

Emma Dawson was shocked. “You tried to make polar bears more aggressive? And obedient? Were you out of your minds?”

Ivanov shrugged. “There was a similar American project only recently, involving gorillas, based on an island in the Pacific Ocean known as Hell Island.”

At his words, Mother glanced at Schofield, but he just shook his head imperceptibly.

“But it didn’t work, did it?” he said.

“No. The drugs wreaked havoc with the bears’ primitive brains, and they became demented, enraged, deranged with fury. They started attacking their handlers and the other bears. They also became very resourceful and continually broke out of their cages.”

“They attacked the other bears.” Schofield recalled the dead polar bear they’d seen on the ice floe earlier that morning, the one that had been torn to pieces by something. “And they’re cage-breakers. Wait, are you saying that those bears in that lab are not trapped in there?”

“Oh, no,” Ivanov said. “There are other exits to that laboratory: cracks in the roof dome, fire exits. When Dragon Island was decommissioned in 1991 and reduced to a skeleton staff, we just left the bears to their fate. They come and go as they please. These ones choose to stay here.”

Emma shook her head. “You just left them. You guys are something else.”

Schofield gazed through the reinforced-glass door at the pacing bears. “Deranged polar bears. Just what I need—”

“Er, Captain . . .” Zack said, looking the other way, down into the pool of water behind them. He was crouched at its edge with Bertie beside him. “What is that?”

Schofield turned . . .

. . . and saw it.

An eerie green glow coming from deep within the pool.

It was moving, growing, coming closer.

Schofield hurried to the edge of the pool, where he grabbed Bertie, flipped him upside down, and plunged the little robot’s stalk-mounted lens under the surface while keeping his display screen above the waterline.

“Shit!”

On the display Schofield saw six small sea-sleds rising quickly through the haze—each sled bearing two armed men wearing scuba gear. They were zooming quickly through the tunnel toward the dock, their forward lights emitting sharp green beams.

“They sent a dive team in behind us . . .”

He yanked Bertie out of the water and spun, taking in all the available options. The enclosed concrete dock had only two possible escapes: the pool of water and the reinforced-glass door that led into the lab containing the polar bears.

“Between a rock and a hard place.” Schofield quickly put his battle glasses back on and drew his Desert Eagle pistol . . .

. . . and aimed it at the reinforced-glass door. “Only one option. Marines, ready your weapons!”

Then he fired repeatedly into the door and eventually its glass shattered and the world went completely mad.