Scarecrow Returns

MOTHER AND Baba started firing straightaway and managed to take down the first rank of berserkers, but this attack was far larger than any of the previous ones. It was simply too big to repel.

“We have ten seconds to do something!” Champion said urgently to Schofield.

Beside them, Ivanov said, “But we have nowhere to go—”

“There’s always somewhere to go . . .” Schofield said, his eyes searching as the sound of gunfire increased.

His gaze landed on the broad river right in front of their plane, the one that flowed parallel to the runway, ending at the high western cliffs of Dragon Island in a mighty waterfall.

“Why not?” he said as he reached past Ivanov and jammed forward on all four of the Antonov’s throttles and—just as the next rank of berserkers reached it—the big cargo plane suddenly lunged forward, engines surging, tires squealing, its destroyed forward landing gear shrieking as it scraped across the runway.

The plane shot forward and charged straight off the side of the runway and down a short embankment, rumbling toward the river.

Back in the hold, both Mother and Baba were thrown off their feet by the abrupt surge of power and the ensuing plunge down the embankment.

As she scrabbled for a handhold, Mother called, “Scarecrow! What are you doing!”

“Keeping us alive!”

The Antonov picked up speed, bouncing wildly as it rumbled down the embankment and then—suddenly, crazily—shot off the edge of the riverbank and plunged nose-first into the fast-flowing waters of the river!

The Antonov sent up a massive splash as its belly hit the water. Like most planes, it was designed for a water landing, and even with its rear ramp open, it immediately began to float, bobbing like a child’s bath toy.

Then, a few seconds after the great splash settled, the plane began to move, slowly at first, then more quickly. It pivoted on the surface of the river so that now it traveled forward, nose-first, carried downstream by the steady current toward the powerful waterfall that tumbled over the cliffs only 600 yards away.

In the right-side doorway of the plane, Mother keyed her radio: “Remind me how this course of action helps us, Boss?”

“They need our spheres,” Schofield’s voice replied in her earpiece. “We get to the waterfall and hurl them into the ocean.”

“And what’re the bad guys gonna do about that?”

The answer to her question came a second later: the two Strela amphibious anti-aircraft vehicles came speeding along the airstrip, racing parallel to the floating Antonov before they veered off the runway, sped down the embankment, and without any loss of speed, leapt off the riverbank and plunged into the water alongside the free-floating plane. Their propellers kicked in and the two amphibious cars started moving in toward the Antonov!

“Oh, this is just a new level of crazy,” Mother breathed as she turned and found herself looking into the bloodshot eyes of a berserker rushing at her from the rear of the hold, brandishing a knife!

The crazy bastard was gunless—as the Antonov had accelerated off the runway, he and four other berserkers had been close enough to dive onto its rear ramp, some with their AK-47s, some without. This guy had discarded his AK as he’d leapt for the ramp, which was why he now rushed at Mother with a serrated knife and a cry of rage.

Mother parried his knife-hand away, but the madman tumbled into her, throwing her off balance, and he head-butted her hard and she fell backward, toppling out through the open side doorway—she had to release her G36 to clutch the doorframe and suddenly she was dangling out the door of the Antonov, dazed and reeling, just above the waves of the river, holding on with one hand.

Her attacker lunged forward, intent on pushing her out, just as Mother swung herself up, drawing her thigh-holstered Beretta M9, and jammed it into the berserker’s mouth and fired.

The man’s head exploded, spraying blood and brains, and he dropped, headless, to the floor while Mother hauled herself back inside.

On the other side of the hold, Baba spun to see Mother get attacked by her berserker—a split second before the walls all around him were hammered with impact sparks: two more berserkers were rushing down his side of the hold, firing their AK-47s as they skirted the jeep and the cement mixer to get to him. Baba fired back with his Kord.

Beside him, Zack and Emma cowered behind the cab of the cement mixer. Bullets whizzed past their faces, impacted against the walls above their heads.

Baba pushed Zack and Emma up onto the cement mixer’s running board. “Get inside!” he yelled.

Zack and Emma didn’t argue. As Baba covered them, they clambered into the cement mixer’s cab, disappearing inside it just as its tub was hit all over by a burst of machine-gun fire, but the tub’s thick walls held and saved their lives.

As for Baba, he kept firing at the two berserkers, his Kord booming loudly. And while clearly crazy, these berserkers weren’t totally mindless: in fact, they were cunning little bastards. They mocked him, popping up and firing from behind the jeep, while cackling with high-pitched laughter. It was like doing battle with a pair of demented jesters.

“Merde!” Baba growled as one of the berserkers leapt onto the rear seat of the jeep and leveled his AK-47 at him, but Baba adjusted his aim and fired his Kord at one of the rear wheels of the jeep, blasting the handbrake clamp to pieces and the car lurched suddenly, released, and rolled quickly backward out the open rear ramp of the Antonov, with the berserker on it!

The jeep vanished out the back of the floating plane, dropping into the water rear-first with a great splash and Baba was facing one less enemy.

While all this was happening in the hold, Schofield peered out through the cockpit’s starboard-side windows. Beside him, Champion and Ivanov were still coming to grips with their unusual predicament.

Schofield saw the two amphibious Strelas enter the water to his right, saw them powering alongside the floating Antonov. Disturbingly, he saw one man on each Strela heft an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher onto his shoulder . . .

“This is about to get very bad. Here, take this.” He handed Champion one of the three small Samsonite cases containing the spheres. “When we get to the cliffs, throw it as far as you can out to sea.”

“If we get that far—” she began to say just as all the forward cockpit windows shattered under heavy gunfire from an unknown direction.

Champion ducked instinctively but then—whump! whump!—the boots of the last two berserkers who had boarded the Antonov thumped down onto the nose of the plane.

Schofield quickly realized what had happened: after somehow boarding the plane, these two had climbed up and over the top of it to take the cockpit.

“Out! Now!” he yelled, pushing Champion back through the cockpit door and pulling Ivanov from his flight seat a nanosecond before the whole cockpit was raked with gunfire.

The cockpit’s walls and seats were ripped to shreds.

Unfortunately, so, too, was Dr. Vasily Ivanov.

The Russian scientist had moved a second too late and, still being pulled by Schofield, he was torn apart by the vicious storm of bullets. He exploded all over with bloody wounds and Schofield dived out the door an instant before the storm could sweep over him, too. In a distant corner of his mind, Scarecrow felt a pang of sadness for the Russian scientist: his help had been invaluable but he wouldn’t be seeing his children and grandchildren in Odessa again.

With bullets sizzling all around them, Schofield and Champion came tumbling out of the cockpit into the rear hold.

One round took a chunk out of Schofield’s left shoulder, while another plunged into Champion’s lower back, emerging from her stomach in a gout of blood.

She yelled in pain, doubled over and stumbled.

Schofield caught her as he quickly took in the scene in the hold: the cement mixer; Baba beside it, near the open port-side door, firing at the last nimble berserker, who was peeking around the mixer’s tub; various cables, folded seats and netting, the open rear ramp with daylight and the river beyond it and lastly, Mother, crouched by the starboard-side door—

—through which an RPG suddenly rocketed in from outside, shooming low over her head before slamming into the cement mixer and exploding!

The cement mixer was thrown through the air . . . straight at Baba.

Baba had nowhere to go—and no time at all to get out of the way. The flying cement mixer cut across Schofield’s view of the big Frenchman and with a deafening crash smashed into the steel wall where moments before, he had been standing.

“Jesus Christ . . .” Schofield breathed.

He and Champion struggled to stay on their feet as the plane rocked with the explosion, when a second RPG fired from the other Strela hit one of the turboprop engines on the Antonov’s right wing and that engine burst apart.

The plane lurched dramatically.

Having lost the weight of one engine on its right side, it tilted sharply to the left, and now with its balance seriously disturbed, water started rushing in through the open rear ramp. It quickly rose to a foot in depth.

“They’re trying to sink us before we reach the waterfall!” Schofield called, catching hold of a handrail as the whole hold lurched wildly.

The wounded Champion, however, had not been able to find a handhold.

The plane’s dramatic tilt threw her completely off the steps at the fore end of the hold and she landed awkwardly and lost her grip on the Samsonite case in her hand. It went tumbling away into the foot-deep water . . .

. . . where it splashed to a halt right in front of the nimble berserker who had been harrying Baba.

The berserker saw it, immediately recognized its importance, and scooped it up.

Then, right on cue, as if this whole situation wasn’t already outrageous enough, an amphibious Strela came roaring in through the rear opening, kicking up a bow wave as it deliberately ran aground in the shallow water now covering the floor of the hold.

With Mother cut off by the Strela, Baba gone and Schofield too far away, the nimble berserker hopped, skipped and jumped his way down the semi-flooded hold and leapt onto the Strela’s bow-deck, yelling to its driver words to the effect of “We have them! Go!”

The driver didn’t waste any time. The Strela’s engines whined as it reversed out of the hold, dropping back into the swirling waters of the river, about to get away when—

Roooaaaar!

Schofield heard it before he saw it.

Heard the roar of the cement mixer’s engine firing up before he saw the big truck, with its heavy mixing tub on its back, reverse—at speed—toward the rear of the semi-flooded hold.

The truck, driven by Zack, carved through the knee-deep water and went flying out the rear opening, where it crunched down onto the bow of the retreating Strela. Such was the weight of the cement mixer that its rear bumper drove right into the Strela’s driver’s compartment, horrifically denting it, crushing the hapless driver and gunner inside.

It had been a last-ditch ploy by Zack: he’d seen the berserker grab the case and had done all he could do to stop his escape.

But it wasn’t over yet.

For it was then that the bizarre cement-mixer-embedded-in-the-Strela hybrid began to float away from the plane!

It separated from the plane quickly—a few feet suddenly became twenty, and it drifted southward across the river’s surface, heading for the bank opposite the runway.

But it still had a bad guy aboard it: the berserker who had leapt onto the Strela with the sphere-case. He started firing crazily at the cab of the cement mixer that had thwarted his triumphant escape.

The cement mixing tub prevented him from getting a clear shot but his angry rounds still managed to impact all around Zack and Emma in the cab. They ducked their heads as glass showered over them.

Zack risked a glance in the rear-view mirror and saw their nimble attacker coming toward the cab, gun raised, a second before the mirror itself exploded under the crazed man’s gunfire.

Zack and Emma ducked away from the mirror’s exploding shards but when they looked up again, it was to see the berserker standing in the cab’s doorway, the sphere case in one hand, his AK-47 in the other, leveled at their faces.

He cackled crazily. “Bye-bye, birdies!” he squealed with glee as he pulled the trigger.