Scarecrow Returns

AS SCHOFIELD’S jeep had tipped out the back of the Antonov, it had dropped away toward the ocean with Typhon still on it, screaming. He had screamed all the way down.

But Schofield hadn’t.

As the jeep had dropped out the back of the plane, he had called upon his trusty Maghook—small compared to the Magneteux and not nearly as sexy or strong—but it was all he had.

Leaping off the falling jeep, he’d fired the Maghook back up at the plane before he fell too far and the Maghook’s bulbous magnetic head thunked against the underside of the rear ramp and held. The jeep had fallen away beneath him, but he hadn’t. He was still in the game.

Schofield then reeled himself up using the Maghook’s internal spooler, arriving under the ramp just as a submersible of some kind came rumbling out of the hold and dropped into the sky, issuing some parachutes.

“That son of a bitch,” Schofield said as he climbed back up into the blustery hold, now the doomed Antonov’s only occupant. “But this isn’t over yet.”

Schofield hurried through the windblown hold and up into the empty cockpit.

He took it all in quickly: the autopilot, the spectroscope’s screen showing that the plane was now inside the flammable gas cloud, the fearsome warhead, and on the warhead, a timer that currently read:

00:34 . . . 00:33 . . . 00:32 . . .

“Thirty-two seconds to the end of the world . . .” Schofield breathed. “How do I get myself into these situations?”

He looked about himself for options, ideas, solutions.

He was basically on a flying bomb, one that would ignite a global atmospheric firestorm.

00:30 . . . 00:29 . . . 00:28 . . .

He stared at the warhead. Calderon had replaced all its exterior panels and they were all screwed shut. He’d never be able to extract the uranium sphere from it in time.

How do I stop this? How can I?

I can’t.

It’s too late . . .

And for the first time in his career, Schofield knew that it was true: he had finally run out of time.

Twenty-eight seconds later, the warhead detonated with all its mighty force.