Scarecrow Returns

THE INTERIOR of the disc-shaped tower was like a 1980s office: beige carpet and brown faux-wood desks, but unlike the other areas of the island Schofield had seen, it was clean and well kept. It was also empty, a ghost town.

Schofield raced through it, firing his Desert Eagle left and right as he did so, not at any enemy troops but at the surveillance cameras he saw mounted near the ceiling. They exploded in sprays of sparks as he rushed by.

He dashed past abandoned desks and workbenches before he came to an elevator situated—he guessed—directly underneath the shorter spire. He crouched by the elevator doors and lay something on the floor beside them, flicking switches.

Time check.

10:59 became 11:00.

The spheres were ready for use.

He was now officially operating on borrowed time.

Gripping his Desert Eagle in one hand, he drew his MP-7 with the other. Then he hit the call button and raised both guns.

The Lord of Anarchy stared at the tanker truck hanging from the four cables, bridging the moat.

“Now that’s inventive,” he said.

Beside him, Typhon was less controlled. He yelled into a radio: “Tower Team! We have an intruder in the building and he’s coming toward you! He’s going for the spheres! Get out of there and take the spheres with you!”

A surprised voice replied: “Sir, the spheres only just reached operating temperature a few seconds ago. We’re opening the reheater unit now and it’ll take at least a couple of min—”

Typhon scowled. “Then tell your guards to cover the elevator. I’m sending reinforcements.”

He turned to a small six-man Army team stationed inside the command center. “Get to that tower now!”

As Typhon raged, the Lord of Anarchy called up a CCTV screen that displayed the interior of the elevator that serviced the shorter spire’s lab.

On that screen, in silent black-and-white, he saw the elevator’s doors open and saw Shane Schofield enter it. Then he saw Schofield aim his MP-7 directly up at him and fire.

The image cut to hash.

The laboratory at the summit of the shorter spire was a circular space with windows facing every direction. It had a commanding view of Dragon Island, blocked only by the gray concrete column of the taller spire that stood a short way to the east. In the lab’s center was a compact structure that contained a kitchen, a toilet, a closet, a little bunkroom with two cots and the elevator: the only point of access to the lab.

Inside the lab were two Army of Thieves technicians—men who had been selected for this task because of their engineering backgrounds—and the Russian scientist who had allowed the Army of Thieves onto Dragon Island, Igor Kotsky.

Kotsky was a big lump of a man, overweight and pear-shaped, with a hunched, stooping stance, combed-over thinning hair and venal eyes. He often perspired greatly, which he did now.

The three men stood before a large incubating chamber. The chamber housed the six uranium spheres and had just completed its twelve-hour priming cycle.

With the techs was a small guard team of three Army troops. These men were regular Army of Thieves men who had thought guarding the lab was an easy assignment. They’d spent the last few hours lounging around, smoking.

Now, at Typhon’s command, they leapt to their feet and aimed their guns at the elevator as ping! it arrived.

In the tower’s command center the Lord of Anarchy gazed at Shane Schofield’s military record. It appeared on a screen beside a CCTV image of the men gathered in the sphere lab, waiting tensely.

The Lord of Anarchy spoke to the picture of Schofield on the screen: “Captain. Even if you get the spheres, how will you get them off this tower, let alone off this island?”

In the shorter spire’s lab, the elevator doors opened.

The waiting Army guards opened fire. The walls of the little elevator were shredded with bullet holes, a wave of fire that no human being could possibly survive.

They stopped firing.

The smoke cleared. The elevator was empty.

There was no one in it—

Then a floor hatch in the elevator popped open and Shane Schofield emerged from it, MP-7 firing.

The three guards fell, and within seconds Schofield was standing in the doorway of the elevator with the dead men at his feet and his guns pointed at the horrified figures of Igor Kotsky and the two Army of Thieves technicians.

“Step away from the priming unit,” he commanded.

Schofield hurried to the incubating chamber, holstering one of his guns. It opened with a hiss and he beheld the six gleaming spheres, sitting in two neat rows of three. They were deep maroon in color, the color of blood, with gleaming polished sides; and they really were small, the size of golf balls.

They looked perfect. Perfect and potent.

Schofield didn’t care for that. He just started grabbing them and stuffing them into three small purpose-built Samsonite cases sitting nearby; cases that the two Army of Thieves technicians had themselves been about to place the spheres into. The cases were specially designed to carry two spheres each in snug velvet-lined recesses.

Schofield clipped two of the small cases to his weapons belt and carried the third in his spare hand.

He looked at Kotsky and the terrified technicians as he raised a small handheld remote.

“You might want to hold on to something.” He thumbed the switch on the remote.

There was movement all around the tower now.

The two crane-bridges that gave access to it touched down and Army men hurried across them in large numbers, racing toward the shorter spire.

One Osprey banked around the mighty tower, sweeping in toward the tanker truck that hung suspended across the moat, while the other one—the one Baba had hammered with his Kord earlier—had limped back to the helipad where it now sat, its wounded engine still belching thick black smoke.

On the tanker truck, Mother and Baba were making their own hurried escape plans.

Baba attached his own ascender to one of the cables leading back up to the outer rim just as gunfire from the Osprey started raining down in them.

“Do you think your man made it?” he shouted to Mother.

She glanced up at the shorter spire. “We’ll find out in a couple of seconds! Go!”

Gripping the ascender, Baba whizzed up the cable, while Mother opened fire on the Osprey with her G36.

Admirable as her effort was, her bullets sparked ineffectually off the gunship and the big Osprey swooped into a hover right in front of her, its cannons rotating into position to return fire.

Mother’s jaw dropped. “Oh, fuck me, I’m dead . . .”

Baba reached the rim of the massive moat, where Zack and Emma met him, driving the second truck from the garage, the cement mixer. Veronique Champion arrived a few seconds later, skidding to a halt in a newly stolen jeep.

They saw the Osprey facing off against Mother down below them.

Baba said, “Do not watch. This will not be pretty.”