Scarecrow Returns

IF SOMEONE were looking down on the Earth from space, Schofield figured, they would have seen a blinding flash from up near the North Pole, and then they would have seen the extending yellow-white inferno advancing around the globe in a spiral of fiery devastation—

At that thought, Schofield whipped up his wrist guard and flicked on its satellite imagery, bringing up his own real-time overhead view of Dragon Island and the Arctic Circle.

On the black-and-white screen, he saw the atmospheric inferno.

It reached outward from Dragon Island like the claw of some mythical creature, reaching southward before curving eastward, following the course of the jet stream.

Schofield felt ill. He was literally watching the end of the—

And then suddenly the expanding wave of devastation and destruction stopped.

Abruptly and without warning, as if it had come up against an invisible wall in the atmosphere.

Schofield frowned. “What the hell . . . ?”

By his crude reckoning, the roaring atmospheric fire had only gone about six hundred miles before it hit the invisible wall and stopped.

Then he heard the Lord of Anarchy’s voice, only it wasn’t directed at him: “What the fuck just happened?!”

Another voice: “Sir! We just caught an intruder in the gasworks under the main vents! He cut the TEB pipes feeding the vents! By the look of the oxidation around the valves, he must’ve cut them two hours ago! We’ve been pumping useless gas up into the sky for the last two hours!”

“What? Who is he?” the Lord of Anarchy demanded.

“Says his name is Barker. Navy SEAL. Musta slipped past us when we killed the others in the submarine dock.”

Schofield’s mind raced.

It was Ira Barker.

Ironbark.

Somehow, Ironbark had survived the clusterfuck in the submarine dock, and while Schofield and his people had been islet-hopping to Dragon Island and stealing the spheres, Ironbark had penetrated Dragon, got to the gas vents and, unknown to anyone, sabotaged them.

The SS-23 missile had detonated its quasi-nuclear payload but thanks to Ironbark, the gas cloud close to Dragon was not combustible, so the missile had ignited nothing—or perhaps it had just ignited some leftover trace particles of the gas, causing the “smaller” incandescent flash in the sky that he had just seen.

At that exact moment something else became clear to Schofield . . . at exactly the same time as it appeared to dawn on the Lord of Anarchy.

“Thanks to Ironbark’s sabotage,” Schofield said, “the sky for a few hundred miles is safe, but the atmosphere over the rest of the northern hemisphere is still contaminated with combustible gas. This isn’t over. If the Army of Thieves gets another sphere, they’ll fire the next missile past the safe zone and detonate it inside the infused atmosphere. Which means . . .”

He snapped to look outside.

“. . . they need our spheres again. They’re not going to toy with us anymore. They’re going to attack this plane with overwhelming force right now.”

No sooner had he said it than twelve berserkers burst forth from the ring of vehicles surrounding the plane, AK-47s blazing, followed by the rest of the Army force on the runway.

The Army of Thieves had just declared war on Shane Schofield and his plane.