Scarecrow Returns

KEEP MOVING, keep moving,” Schofield urged, hustling everybody along an asphalt road that led up to the large warehouse-sized building that occupied the central section of Acid Islet.

They entered the building and a vast space met them: a huge hall the size of a football field.

A single grated super-catwalk suspended from the ceiling ran down the length of the space, hanging above two dozen menacing-looking industrial vats. Minor catwalks branched off the main one and from them ladders reached down to the floor where the vats lay.

Each vat was round with steel walls, about the size and shape of an aboveground backyard swimming pool. Some bore pressurized lids on them, while others were open to the air, revealing their strange contents: liquids of various putrid colors—off-green, off-brown, off-yellow—some frozen, others not. A couple of them bubbled. A tangle of pipes and valves linked some of the vats. Suspended from chains above one of the vats was a man-sized cage with semi-melted bars.

“The acid laboratory,” Ivanov said as they moved. “We experimented with acids for use in chemical weapons, grenades and, well, torture.”

“Torture?” Mother asked.

“Trust me, when you are lowered into an acid bath and you start to see your own skin boil, you will tell your questioner everything he wants to know,” Ivanov said grimly.

“Charming,” Schofield said, pushing them along. “Keep moving.”

He glanced downward as he said this, and as he did, he glimpsed a thick lead door down on the lowest level, partially obscured by the minor catwalks. It looked like a walk-in safe at a bank, but the big nuclear symbol on it, accompanied by a warning in Russian, gave away its true character: radioactive material storage.

“Don’t stop.” He pushed everyone along. “We gotta get to that cable car.”

A few minutes later, they emerged from the acid warehouse and raced up a short road that ended at the cable car station.

Dragon Island loomed before them, impossibly huge, protected by its mighty cliffs, the only method of access: the long swooping cable that joined the cable car station to the terminal hanging off the cliff.

As Schofield arrived at the cable car station, he saw it waiting there, sitting by the platform, suspended from the cable: a long bus-sized cable car.

“It’s very likely our enemy will have men waiting at the other end of this cable,” Champion said. “Like those gantry elevators, this is an obvious entry point.”

“And easily defended,” Mother added.

“I know,” Schofield said, “which is why I think we should go in all guns blazing.”

It took a few tries and some tinkering from Mario, but after a couple of minutes the cable car’s engine came to life.

Shortly after that, with a labored mechanical groan, it rumbled out from the station on Acid Islet and began its ascent to Dragon Island.

It took two minutes to make the 300-yard climb—two tense, interminable minutes. It moved upward at a steady pace.

And the whole time it was being observed.

By the ten Army of Thieves men waiting in the upper terminal.

“Thermal scan is in,” one of those Thieves said. He stood at the very end of the terminal’s platform, practically at the edge of the cliff itself, holding an infra-red scanner pointed at the rising cable car. “There’s nobody in it . . .”

The commanding officer of this group of Thieves frowned darkly. His callsign was “White Tip.”

“They might be using thermal blankets to hide their heat signatures. Gentlemen, ready your weapons. When it comes in, shoot the shit out of it.”

The cable car entered the upper terminal, its multi-wheeled overhead unit creeping along the cable.

White Tip and his terminal team were waiting for it, guns raised, safeties off. One man wore a flamethrowing unit clipped to a chest-harness. Its pilot flame flickered, ready.

Thunk!

The cable car shunted to a halt. Its doors began to slide open . . .

White Tip’s unit prepared to fire . . .

The doors slid fully open . . .

And at first White Tip and his men saw no one.

Because they were looking too high.

By the time they lowered their gazes, it was too late.

Bertie opened fire.

Bertie razed the terminal, firing on full auto in a perfect sixty-degree arc.

White Tip and his men didn’t stand a chance. They were cut down where they stood, torn to pieces by the little robot’s devastating fire. They dropped like marionettes that had had their strings cut.

Once all the Thieves up in the terminal were down, Bertie rolled out of the cable car and took up a defensive position in the landward doorway of the terminal. As he stood guard there, Schofield recalled the cable car and it headed back down to Acid Islet.

They now had four minutes—two for the cable car to return to Acid Islet and two for it to make the journey back up to the terminal on Dragon.