Scarecrow Returns

EVERYBODY GOT all their fingers and toes?” Schofield asked as he hurried up a long dark flight of stairs, moving past the members of his little team.

They all nodded.

“What do we do now?” the Kid asked.

“No choice,” Schofield said. “Either we keep going forward or we die trying—”

Gunfire cut him off. A volley of bullets slammed into the stairs at the bottom of the passageway.

“Come on.”

He led them onward.

Schofield emerged from the stairway inside a squat, cube-shaped building that seemed to burrow into Bear Islet’s mountainous core. It contained a few drab offices and a wider open-plan space, long abandoned.

“These were the offices for the scientists who worked on this islet,” Ivanov said.

Schofield’s eyes never stopped roving.

The building seemed to straddle a narrow waist-like section of the islet. Schofield saw daylight through a bank of windows at the far, southern, end. Their only option was to keep going that way.

“Mother, Kid. I need you two to hold the stairway behind us for as long as you can. We’re going south.”

“Roger that, Scarecrow.”

He ran southward, came to the bank of windows and looked out through them.

“Good God . . .” he breathed.

Beside him, Veronique Champion also stopped short. “What is this place?”

They were looking out over a vast oval-shaped crater bounded by sheer hundred-foot-high rocky walls. There was a network of trenches cut into the near half, a watchtower in the middle and a semi-frozen lake at the far end. A covered walkway extended out across the space, half-buried in the earth before it delved below the lake to finally emerge at another cube-shaped building at the opposite end of the crater, a twin of the one they were standing in. Atop that building stood a second watchtower, gazing out over the crater.

Over the top of it all, four massive girders reached skyward, joining above the first watchtower in a T-shaped junction 150 feet above the floor of the crater. From those girders hung floodlights that presumably illuminated the great space at night. It really did look like a football stadium, or perhaps a gladiatorial arena.

“This,” Ivanov said, “is the Stadium. This is where my colleagues tested the bears in combat.”

“Scarecrow!” Mother called from the top of the stairway leading back to the Bear Lab. “They’ve got too much firepower back here! Do some of that officer shit and make a decision!”

A steep flight of stairs covered by a clear-glass awning led down to the Stadium’s floor, where it met the half-buried walkway that ran down the length of the enormous crater. A section of the glass awning over these stairs was shattered, leaving a thirty-foot segment of the stairway open to the sky.

Something inside Schofield’s brain balked.

He didn’t like this. Something about it was wrong. But then, they had no choice.

“Everybody! Down the stairs! Get to that walkway!”

They took off down the awning-covered stairs, bounding down them, with Mother and the Kid as the rear guard, firing at the wetsuit-clad members of the Army of Thieves now emerging from the other stairway behind them.

As Schofield and the others hurried down the stairs toward the Stadium, they suddenly burst out into the segment where the overhead awning was broken and they could see the sky—

A withering burst of gunfire cut through the air all around them, bullets raking the exposed segment of stairway.

Chad dived away, covering his head, as beside him the third Frenchman, Dubois, was hit several times and fell. He was still alive but badly wounded, and Champion scooped him up, pulling him out of the line of fire.

Emma Dawson shrieked as a stray round clipped her left leg. She stumbled and Zack dived to her side, dragging her back up the stairs to safety.

Everybody else fell back, too.

A hailstorm of enemy rounds hammered the stairs. Some hit the glass awning, but its reinforced glass deflected the long-range shots. Sparks exploded everywhere.

“Goddamn it!” Mario shouted, ducking his head.

Zack shielded Emma with his body while Schofield and Champion frantically scanned the Stadium for the shooters and found them right where they expected them to be: on the second watchtower atop the far building, with a perfect line of sight looking straight down the central walkway.

They’d been waiting for Schofield’s people to appear.

Schofield swore. He’d walked right into a fucking trap.

He opened fire with his MP-7—a useless spray that wouldn’t hit anything from this range, but it would make the shooters at the other end of the crater duck. Mario, Champion and Baba did the same and the enemy’s fire stopped for a moment.

“We can’t stay here!” Schofield yelled. “Military people! Rolling cover fire! We must not stop firing or else we are dead!”

He then looped Dubois’s arm over his shoulder and helped the wounded Frenchman along as they all hurried down the stairs, the military people firing as they ran.

Zack helped Emma and she limped along as fast as she could as they entered the flat covered walkway that ran down the length of the Stadium. Rounds from the enemy shooters now peppered the glass awning but bounced away.

As he hurried along under Dubois’s weight, Schofield yelled, “I should’ve seen it! They weren’t even trying to kill us back in that lab. They were flushing us out here, into this Stadium. It’s a turkey shoot.”

“So how do we get out?” Zack shouted with Emma draped over one shoulder and Bertie gripped in his spare hand.

Schofield peered at the area around them. From the crashed Beriev to the exploding submarine to the race through the leads to the Bear Lab to this, he hadn’t had a chance to get his bearings at all.

“Right now, I have no idea,” he answered truthfully. “We’ll just have to keep running and firing till I get one.”

They kept running and firing, hustling down the covered walkway.

A short way ahead, the reinforced-glass awning of the walkway had been shattered, leaving a long stretch of the trench open to the sky. Here a large mound of snow had fallen into the sunken path, filling it, blocking the way.

Schofield peered back down the walkway, searching for the original enemy force that would soon arrive behind them.

He tried to calm his mind. He only had a few seconds, but if they were going to get out of this, he needed to think clearly and make the right decision.

Okay. What do you have to do?

I need to get to Dragon Island to stop the igniting of the atmospheric weapon inside the hour.

But my enemies are outmaneuvering me at every turn. They’re carrying out a coordinated plan while I’m improvising as I go.

They know the terrain. I don’t. I only know where I am when I look around the next corner.

And now they’re both in front of and behind us and about to rip us apart.

I am seriously about to lose this battle . . .

So what do you need to do to stop that happening?

I need to alter the conditions of battle.

Okay. How are you going to do that?

I need to disrupt their plan. I need to get out of this walkway and make them play a game of my choosing—

His eyes scanned the area around them: the high rocky rim of the crater, the T-shaped girder structure above the whole space, the watchtower in the middle of the Stadium—

The watchtower . . .

That was it. That was how you changed the state of this battle.

If I can just buy a little time . . .

He recalled seeing a network of military-style trenches cut into the floor of the Stadium; trenches in which the Soviets had tested their polar bears in combat scenarios.

That might work . . .

“People!” he called. “We can’t stay in this walkway! When you get to that open section up ahead, climb up the snow-mound and go left into the trenches! They’ll give us some cover!”

A bullet whistled past his ear.

It had come from behind.

Their pursuers had arrived at the start of the walkway.

With Dubois still on his shoulder, Schofield whirled and opened fire with his spare hand. So did the Kid, Mario and Mother, forcing the attackers back up the stairs.

Leading the way, Zack and the limping Emma arrived at the open section of the walkway. The snow-mound rose before them, white and huge, blocking the way—and the sight lines of the snipers on the far tower—but also providing an ungainly slope up which they could climb out of the sunken walkway.

Suddenly, more enemy rounds sizzled past their heads, smacking into the walls of the walkway. These rounds had come from the side, from more shooters stationed up on the rim of the crater, on both the eastern and western sides—these shooters were huddled beside the large steel buttresses from which the mighty girders that straddled the immense Stadium sprang.

Baba and Champion stepped up alongside Zack and Emma and returned fire.

“Go!” Champion yelled. “Get to the trenches!”

Zack—still carrying Bertie like a suitcase in his free hand—pushed Emma up the snow-mound before joining her. They scrambled on their hands and knees across some open muddy ground, bullets impacting all around them, before they dropped into the safety of the nearest trench.

The two civilians landed inside the six-foot-deep trench. Its dark earthen walls were covered in frost. The trench stretched away from them, tight and narrow, branching off into several other trenches: a mini-maze of right-angled twists and turns.

From somewhere in those passageways, Zack heard a low growl.

“I don’t think these trenches are empty . . .” he said.

In the walkway, Schofield was still firing back at the pursuing force with Dubois hanging from his shoulder.

He jerked his chin southward. “Mother! I want that watchtower! Get to it via the trenches! Kid, Mario, protect Dr. Ivanov and Chad, and catch up with Zack and Emma!”

“Whatever you say, Scarecrow!” Mother hurried up and out of the walkway, firing in every direction as she went. Mario and Chad went next, followed by the Kid who reached back down to grab Ivanov.

Veronique Champion came alongside Schofield, still firing nonstop.

“Captain!” she shouted. “We can’t continue like this! We need to change the conditions of this battle or we won’t last much longer!”

“I know! I know!”

“Do you have a plan?”

“Yeah! We get into the trenches and work our way over to that watchtower!”

“And then?”

“From there, I’m going to—” Gunfire cut him off.

“Never mind! That is good enough for me for now!” Veronique threw an arm underneath Dubois and, covered by Baba, helped Schofield drag the wounded French soldier up the snow-mound.

They had almost made it up the mound when suddenly Schofield realized that the gunfire from behind them had stopped.

He frowned, peered back down the walkway.

There was now no one at the base of the stairs at that end. No shadowy figures, nobody.

That wasn’t good. It meant they were up to somethi—

Clink, clink, clink.

A small metal cylinder bounced down the stairs and rolled to a halt at that end of the walkway.

It looked to Schofield like a smoke grenade, only smaller. At first he thought it might be another acid grenade, but this cylinder wasn’t painted silver. Rather, it was painted bright red with yellow bands at either end.

Up above Schofield, Ivanov had stopped and turned, too, and he saw the grenade.

His eyes went wide. “Captain! Get out of the trench now! It’s a reduranium grenade!”

Baba and Champion were already out of the trench. Champion was reaching back down, pulling Schofield—with Dubois on his shoulder—up the snow-mound, when suddenly Dubois’s boots slipped and as he scrabbled for a purchase, Dubois—almost unconscious from loss of blood—lost his grip on Schofield’s hand and fell back down the mound, tumbling back into the walkway.

Schofield made to dive after him but before he could, he heard Ivanov yell to Champion: “No! It’s too late! Get the captain out!” and Schofield felt Champion yank him up and out of the walkway and he fell face-first onto cold hard-packed mud a split second before the red-and-yellow grenade spectacularly went off.