Scarecrow Returns

WHEELS SPINNING, the tanker truck shot off the outer edge of the circular chasm and soared out into space; a small concrete gutter on the rim of the moat kicked its nose upward as it did so.

As the truck’s tires left the ground, Baba fired both of his Magneteux’s two grappling hooks back at the concrete rim of the moat. With loud twin thunks! the two drill-bit-tipped hooks plunged deep into the concrete and held. Their cables—unspooling rapidly—stretched back to Baba on the truck and he quickly looped the Magneteux’s launcher under the tanker truck’s steel ladder.

At the same time, crouched at the forward end of the truck’s roof, Mother waited. Waited . . . waited . . . and waited . . . for the truck’s flight to get them as far out into the void as possible. Then, as the truck’s nose dropped, she fired the two hooks from the Magneteux that she held—Champion’s—only Mother fired her pair of hooks at the disc-shaped tower in front of the flying truck.

Her French-made grappling hooks soared out into the air, trailing their cables, and slammed into the thick concrete flank of the disc, just above the windows of the disc’s middle level. Then, just as Baba had done, Mother looped her launcher around the steel-rung ladder that ran along the top of the truck’s tank and held on as tightly as she could, waiting for the jolt.

When it came, it was stomach-dropping.

The truck, sailing out through the air, came to a sudden, lurching, swinging halt.

The combined effect of the two coordinated launchings was remarkable: the truck didn’t fall into the great moat.

Instead, as it began to drop in its natural arc, the four cables—two in front, two at the rear—went taut, and like a rope bridge hanging across a mountain gorge, the truck now hung suspended from the four cables out in the middle of the chasm!

It looked totally bizarre.

A one-and-a-half-ton fuel truck hanging into the middle of the void, like a fly caught in a spider’s web, suspended by the four cables between the outer rim of the moat and the colossal tower, hanging a dizzying 200 feet above the concrete base of the moat, with the tiny figures of Baba and Mother on its back and . . .

. . . without missing a beat, Shane Schofield emerged from the cab of the truck and, moving fast, attached Champion’s motorized ascender to one of the cables stretching up to the disc-shaped tower.

The ascender whizzed him up the cable at tremendous speed, and in a few seconds he arrived at the windows of the second level of the disc—where with his spare hand he raised his Desert Eagle pistol and blasted the windows to shit.

They shattered and he used the momentum of the motorized ascender to swing in through them.

And suddenly he was inside.

He checked his watch.

10:57.

Three minutes to go.

He dashed into the tower.

In an attempt to cut off access to the tower structure, the Lord of Anarchy had raised his two crane-bridges—but now, as Schofield had hoped, that order would work against him.

Now the bulk of the Lord’s men would not be able to get across onto the tower until those bridges were lowered back into place again; for most of his Army was on the outer rim of the moat in a conventional defensive deployment.

Lowering the two bridges would take time—maybe a minute—and that meant sixty precious seconds that Schofield could use to get past the much smaller force of Army men on the tower itself, and get to the shorter spire and the lab inside it containing the spheres.

He sprinted as fast as he could.