Scarecrow Returns

THEY ROSE out of the pool like deadly wraiths.

They wore body-hugging gray-and-white wire-heated wetsuits and looked down the barrels of compact MP5N machine pistols held pressed against their shoulders in expert firing positions.

Schofield couldn’t tell how many of them there were—ten, twelve, maybe fourteen—but having paved the way with the acid grenade, they came up fast and firing.

Bullets shredded the walls.

Schofield and the Kid returned fire, loosing wild shots behind them as they dashed across the first extendable bridge after the others.

“Mother! Give us cover!” Schofield yelled.

Leading the group, Mother stopped on the central platform and raised her G36.

“Baba! Help her!” Veronique Champion called, and the big French commando joined Mother, aiming his massive Kord at the shattered reinforced door behind them.

The first attacker came through the doorway—braaack!—to be torn apart by the combined brutal fire of Mother and Baba. One second, the wetsuit-clad attacker was there, the next he was simply gone.

The civilians hurried past Mother, Baba and Champion, racing out across the second extendable bridge, led by Mario. As they came to the door on the far side—it was surrounded by discarded crates and barrels—the attacking force launched their own machine-gun salvo.

A burst of fire even more powerful than Baba’s and Mother’s came lancing out of the dock’s doorway: heavy machine-gun fire laced with tracers.

It was so strong it compelled everyone—Mother, Baba, Champion, Schofield and the Kid—to take cover. Mother and Baba ducked behind the console on the platform, while Champion stumbled and fell down through the hatch in the platform’s floor, dropping down within its reinforced-glass walls—while bullets smacked off the curved walls, leaving scratch-marks and cracks—before landing clumsily at the base of the platform structure—

—just in time to see another shaggy polar bear come roaring out of one of the darkened cells and leap at her, jaws bared, aiming for the open door in the base of the glass-walled platform—

—Champion quickly slid forward and kicked the glass door in front of her shut, an instant before the bear slammed into the outside of it, causing the transparent door to shudder violently and the bear to fall back onto its ass, dazed and groaning.

Schofield and the Kid had been halfway across the first bridge when the tracer fire had started.

They both dived forward, joining Mother and Baba behind the console on the central platform.

A shout came from Mario over at the southern door:

“Kid! Look out! Above you!”

The Kid looked up—

—just as a blurring white shape dropped from the network of girders supporting the geodesic dome and landed on the second bridge right in front of him.

It was another deranged bear.

During the mayhem, it had clambered across the girders and had now dropped right in their path. It roared at them an instant before its head exploded like a punctured soccer ball, and Schofield and the Kid turned to see Baba holding a massive .44 Magnum pistol extended in his hand.

The headless bear dropped off the bridge and thudded down onto the floor of the pit, blood oozing from its open neck.

“Fucking Hell . . .” the Kid gasped.

Mother snapped around at the bearded Frenchman’s shot. “Goddamn, you are good!”

“Oui,” Baba replied.

Schofield quickly took in the situation.

Veronique Champion was ascending the ladder below him.

Mario and the three civilians—Chad, Emma and Zack, plus Bertie—as well as Ivanov and the third French agent, Dubois, were safely in the far doorway, taking cover there behind some crates and barrels.

On the other side of the wide octagonal space, in the doorway to the dock, Schofield saw eight wetsuit-clad attackers gathering in a four-on-four fanning formation—coolly preparing to attack. At their feet, lying just inside the doorway, were two men manning bipod-mounted heavy automatic weapons.

These guys aren’t common thugs, Schofield thought. They’re trained. And they’re planning somethi—

Suddenly, two dark-skinned men firing AK-47s from the hip came charging out from behind the eight others, bursting out from the dock at a mad run, guns blazing in every direction.

Even from where he stood, Schofield could see they had the crazed yellow-red eyes of ganja-weed users. But these two Africans were totally out there: they wore torn wetsuits and bore many tattoos on their necks; their hair was half-shaved and their faces were literally covered in piercings: eyebrow rings, nose rings, lip studs. They shrieked an ululating war cry as they ran in a crazed ducking-and-weaving kind of way.

Schofield’s eyes went wide.

It was a suicide run, designed to take out as many of his people as possible before the two berserk runners were inevitably shot down. It was the exact opposite of the cool calculation Schofield had thought he was seeing. It was also a disconcerting tactic, designed to shock and confuse, and for a moment, it had indeed shocked him.

The two berserkers sprayed the whole laboratory with AK-47 fire as they dashed for the first bridge, bobbing, weaving and screaming.

As they raced out onto the bridge, Schofield raised his pistol and shot the first one in the chest, but he just kept on coming—still shrieking and firing—and it took four more shots until he was snapped backward and dropped off the bridge, his gun still spraying bullets. Mother took five shots to drop the other one.

“Mother fucking crazy bastards . . .” she breathed.

“Retract that first bridge!” Schofield yelled.

Baba scanned the console for the correct switch and punched it.

The first bridge began to retract into the outer wall of the circular pit, creating a fifty-foot-wide chasm between Schofield’s position on the central platform and the dock’s doorway.

“Mother! Take the Kid and your new French friend and go!” He glanced downward. Veronique Champion was almost up the ladder. “I’ll cover you guys, then you cover us when I come over with Ms. Champion!”

With those words, he stood suddenly and lay down a shitload of fire—causing his attackers to take cover—while Mother, the Kid and Baba hustled across the second bridge, firing as they went, and joined the others at the far door.

Champion rejoined Schofield on the central platform, rising up through its hatch.

“Mother! You ready to return the favor?” he called.

“Gotcha boss,” Mother’s voice replied in his earpiece.

“Okay, let’s go—” Schofield said to Champion as he broke cover and ran, just as three things happened at once:

First, his enemy’s machine-gunners unleashed a new burst of tracer fire that pinged off the second bridge, sending sparks flying up all around Schofield’s feet.

Second, that volley of sizzling tracer bullets sliced through the air between Schofield and Champion, separating them, forcing Veronique Champion to dive back to the platform.

And third, the second bridge began retreating into the far wall of the pit as Schofield ran across it—it was retracting, its segments reverse-telescoping into each other inches behind his running boots. One of his opponents had found a control panel by the dock’s doorway and had retracted the bridge, isolating the central platform, leaving Champion stranded out on it.

Covered by Mother’s fire and running at full speed, Schofield dived over a crate and tumbled to a halt beside the others at the far door.

“Sexy French Chick is still out there!” Mother shouted above the gunfire.

Schofield spun to see Champion huddled behind the console out on the island-like platform, hopelessly pinned down.

“Leave her!” Mario yelled. “She wanted to kill us before!”

“We don’t leave anybody,” Schofield said. “Dr. Ivanov, what’s behind this door?”

Ivanov said, “A stairway leading up to a structure we called the Stadium.”

“Does it take us toward Dragon Island?”

“There’s a pontoon bridge on the other side of the Stadium that connects this islet to Dragon Island, yes.”

“Then we keep going that way,” Schofield said. “Kid! Mario! You two take the lead, get everyone out of here! Get to this Stadium! Mother, stay with me.”

The others all started up the stairs with the Kid and Mario—except for Baba and Dubois. They stood their ground.

“I will not leave Renard,” Baba said simply.

“I wasn’t going to leave her, either. I’m gonna try to get her out of there right now,” Schofield said.

With Baba and Dubois hovering behind them, Schofield and Mother watched the attacking force pummel the central platform on which Veronique Champion was stranded.

“Mario does have a point,” Mother said to Schofield softly. “She did want to kill us before . . .”

“We need every able-bodied soldier we can get,” Schofield whispered, unholstering his Maghook.

“Oh, here we go . . .” Mother said.

“Just cover me, please.”

Mother sprang up and opened fire as Schofield stood suddenly and aimed his Maghook up at the girders supporting the huge domed roof—

But he caught himself in mid-action and didn’t fire.

For at the exact moment that he rose, Veronique Champion did something similar. In fact, she did exactly the same thing.

She sprang up from her crouched position, and aimed a device very similar to Schofield’s Maghook and fired it up at the overhead girders. Schofield only caught a glimpse of it, but her Maghook-like device was larger than his, bulkier, and the tip of its grappling hook was sharper, like an arrowhead.

It shot upward, its pointed silver tip slicing through the air, a cable wobbling behind it like a tail. With a crisp whack, the sharp hook lodged, three inches deep, right into one of the metal girders and held.

Schofield stared as Champion then sprinted into the open, gripping her device’s gun-like launcher, and leapt out over the pit, into open space, and swung . . . just as he would have done.

She swooped out over the bear-infested pit, a graceful sixty-foot swing—covered by Mother’s fire—before her swing-arc brought her perfectly to the outer platform, where she landed deftly right in front of Schofield.

“Nice move . . .” he said.

“Thank you,” Champion said. With the flick of a switch, she reeled in her “Maghook” and within seconds, they were away, dashing through the doorway after the others.

As they fled, neither Schofield nor Champion noticed the closed-circuit TV cameras surveying the lab from above.

Those cameras had caught everything, including clear shots of both their faces.

From his position inside the loading dock, the commander of the small enemy force also watched them go.

His name was Wilhelm Mauser, but everyone who knew him called him “Bad Willy.” Technically, he was a German citizen, and once upon a time he had been a sergeant in the German Army. But an unhealthy taste for young girls that became apparent during a multi-national peacekeeping mission in Africa had seen him dishonorably discharged. It was also the source of his nickname.

Bad Willy smiled.

“Thresher Team, this is Bad Willy,” he said into his throat mike. “Just flushed them out of the Bear Lab. They’re coming right to you.”

“Copy that, Willy. We’re ready and waiting in the Stadium.”

OVERHEAD VIEW

SIDE VIEW

THE “STADIUM” ON BEAR ISLET