Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (14 page)

As they raced out onto the bridge, Schofield raised his pistol and shot the first one in the chest, but he just kept on coming—still shrieking and firing—and it took four more shots until he snapped backwards and dropped off the bridge, his gun
still
spraying bullets. Mother took five shots to drop the other one.

‘Mother
fucking
crazy bastards . . .’ she breathed.

‘Retract that first bridge!’ Schofield yelled.

Baba scanned the console for the correct switch and punched it.

The first bridge began to retract into the outer wall of the circular pit, creating a fifty-foot-wide chasm between Schofield’s position on the central platform and the dock’s doorway.

‘Mother! Take the Kid and your new French friend and go!’ He glanced downward. Veronique Champion was almost up the ladder. ‘I’ll cover you guys, then you cover us when I come over with Ms Champion!’

With those words, he stood suddenly and laid down a shitload of fire—causing his attackers to take cover—while Mother, the Kid and Baba hustled across the second bridge, firing as they went, and joined the others at the far door.

Champion rejoined Schofield on the central platform, rising up through its hatch.

‘Mother! You ready to return the favour?’ he called.

‘
Gotcha, boss
,’ Mother’s voice replied in his earpiece.

‘Okay, let’s go—’ Schofield said to Champion as he broke cover and ran, just as three things happened at once:

First, his enemy’s machine-gunners unleashed a new burst of tracer fire that pinged off the second bridge, sending sparks flying up all around Schofield’s feet.

Second, that volley of sizzling tracer bullets sliced through the air
between
Schofield and Champion, separating them, forcing Veronique Champion to dive
back
to the platform.

And third, the second bridge began retreating into the far wall of the pit as Schofield ran across it—it was retracting, its segments reverse-telescoping into each other inches behind his running boots. One of his opponents had found a control panel by the dock’s doorway and had retracted the bridge, isolating the central platform, leaving Champion stranded out on it.

Covered by Mother’s fire and running at full speed, Schofield dived over a crate and tumbled to a halt beside the others at the far door.

‘Sexy French Chick is still out there!’ Mother shouted above the gunfire.

Schofield spun to see Champion huddled behind the console out on the island-like platform, hopelessly pinned down.

‘Leave her!’ Mario yelled. ‘She wanted to kill us before!’

‘We don’t leave anybody,’ Schofield said. ‘Dr Ivanov, what’s behind this door?’

Ivanov said, ‘A stairway leading up to a structure we called the Stadium.’

‘Does it take us toward Dragon Island?’

‘There’s a pontoon bridge on the other side of the Stadium that connects this islet to Dragon Island, yes.’

‘Then we keep going that way,’ Schofield said. ‘Kid! Mario! You two take the lead, get everyone out of here! Get to this Stadium! Mother, stay with me.’

The others all started up the stairs with the Kid and Mario—except for Baba and Dubois. They stood their ground.

‘I will not leave Renard,’ Baba said simply.

‘I wasn’t going to leave her, either. I’m gonna try to get her out of there right now,’ Schofield said.

With Baba and Dubois hovering behind them, Schofield and Mother watched the attacking force pummel the central platform on which Veronique Champion was stranded.

‘Mario does have a point,’ Mother said to Schofield softly. ‘She did want to kill us before . . .’

‘We need every able-bodied soldier we can get,’ Schofield whispered, unholstering his Maghook.

‘Oh, here we go . . .’ Mother said.

‘Just cover me, please.’

Mother sprang up and opened fire as Schofield stood suddenly and aimed his Maghook up at the girders supporting the huge domed roof—

But he caught himself in mid-action and didn’t fire.

For at the exact moment that he rose, Veronique Champion did something similar. In fact, she did exactly the same thing.

She
sprang up from her crouched position, and aimed a device very similar to Schofield’s Maghook and fired it up at the overhead girders. Schofield only caught a glimpse of it, but her Maghook-like device was larger than his, bulkier, and the tip of its grappling hook was sharper, like an arrowhead.

It shot upwards, its pointed silver tip slicing through the air, a cable wobbling behind it like a tail. With a crisp
whack
, the sharp hook lodged, three inches deep, right
into
one of the metal girders and held.

Schofield stared as Champion then sprinted into the open, gripping her device’s gun-like launcher, and leapt out over the pit, into open space, and swung . . . just as he would have done.

She swooped out over the bear-infested pit, a graceful sixty-foot swing—covered by Mother’s fire—before her swing-arc brought her perfectly to the outer platform, where she landed deftly right in front of Schofield.

‘Nice move . . .’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ Champion said. With the flick of a switch, she reeled in her ‘Maghook’ and within seconds, they were away, dashing through the doorway after the others.

As they fled, neither Schofield nor Champion noticed the closed-circuit TV cameras surveying the lab from above.

Those cameras had caught everything, including clear shots of both their faces.

From his position inside the loading dock, the commander of the small enemy force also watched them go.

His name was Wilhelm Mauser, but everyone who knew him called him ‘Bad Willy’. Technically, he was a German citizen and once upon a time he had been a sergeant in the German Army. But an unhealthy taste for young girls that became apparent during a multinational peacekeeping mission in Africa had seen him dishonourably discharged. It was also the source of his nickname.

Bad Willy smiled.

‘Thresher Team, this is Bad Willy,’ he said into his throat-mike. ‘Just flushed them out of the Bear Lab. They’re coming right to you.’

‘
Copy that, Willy. We’re ready and waiting in the Stadium
.’

OVERHEAD VIEW

SIDE VIEW

THE ‘STADIUM’ ON BEAR ISLET

‘Everybody got all their fingers and toes?’ Schofield asked as he hurried up a long dark flight of stairs, moving past the members of his little team.

They all nodded.

‘What do we do now?’ the Kid asked.

‘No choice,’ Schofield said. ‘Either we keep going forward or we die trying—’

Gunfire cut him off. A volley of bullets slammed into the stairs at the bottom of the passageway.

‘Come on.’

He led them onward.

Schofield emerged from the stairway inside a squat, cube-shaped building that seemed to burrow into Bear Islet’s mountainous core. It contained a few drab offices and a wider open-plan space, long abandoned.

‘These were the offices for the scientists who worked on this islet,’ Ivanov said.

Schofield’s eyes never stopped roving.

The building seemed to straddle a narrow waist-like section of the islet. Schofield saw daylight through a bank of windows at the far, southern, end. Their only option was to keep going that way.

‘Mother, Kid. I need you two to hold the stairway behind us for as long as you can. We’re going south.’

‘Roger that, Scarecrow.’

He ran southward, came to the bank of windows and looked out through them.

‘Good God . . .’ he breathed.

Beside him, Veronique Champion also stopped short. ‘What is this place?’

They were looking out over a vast oval-shaped crater bounded by sheer hundred-foot-high rocky walls. There was a network of trenches cut into the near half, a watchtower in the middle and a semi-frozen lake at the far end. A covered walkway extended out across the space, half-buried in the earth before it delved
below
the lake to finally emerge at another cube-shaped building at the opposite end of the crater, a twin of the one they were standing in. Atop that building stood a second watchtower, gazing out over the crater.

Over the top of it all, four massive girders reached skyward, joining above the first watchtower in a t-shaped junction 150 feet above the floor of the crater. From those girders hung floodlights that presumably illuminated the great space at night. It really did look like a football stadium, or perhaps a gladiatorial arena.

‘This,’ Ivanov said, ‘is the Stadium. This is where my colleagues tested the bears in combat.’

‘Scarecrow!’ Mother called from the top of the stairway leading back to the Bear Lab. ‘They’ve got too much firepower back here! Do some of that officer shit and make a decision!’

A steep flight of stairs covered by a clear glass awning led down to the Stadium’s floor, where it met the half-buried walkway that ran down the length of the enormous crater. A section of the glass awning over these stairs was shattered, leaving a thirty-foot segment of the stairway open to the sky.

Something inside Schofield’s brain baulked.

He didn’t like this. Something about it was wrong. But then, they had no choice.

‘Everybody! Down the stairs! Get to that walkway!’

They took off down the awning-covered stairs, bounding down them, with Mother and the Kid as the rearguard, firing at the wetsuit-clad members of the Army of Thieves now emerging from the other stairway behind them.

As Schofield and the others hurried down the stairs toward the Stadium, they suddenly burst out into the segment where the overhead awning was broken and they could see the sky—

A withering burst of gunfire cut through the air all around them, bullets raking the exposed segment of stairway.

Chad dived away, covering his head, as beside him the third Frenchman, Dubois, was hit several times and fell. He was still alive but badly wounded, and Champion scooped him up, pulling him out of the line of fire.

Emma Dawson shrieked as a stray round clipped her left leg. She stumbled and Zack dived to her side, dragging her back up the stairs to safety.

Everybody else fell back, too.

A hailstorm of enemy rounds hammered the stairs. Some hit the glass awning, but its reinforced glass deflected the long-range shots. Sparks exploded everywhere.

‘Goddamn it!’ Mario shouted, ducking his head.

Zack shielded Emma with his body while Schofield and Champion frantically scanned the Stadium for the shooters and found them right where they expected them to be: on the second watchtower atop the far building, with a perfect line-of-sight looking straight down the central walkway.

They’d been waiting for Schofield’s people to appear.

Schofield swore. He’d walked right into a fucking trap.

He opened fire with his MP-7—a useless spray that wouldn’t hit anything from this range, but it would make the shooters at the other end of the crater duck. Mario, Champion and Baba did the same and the enemy’s fire stopped for a moment.

‘We can’t stay here!’ Schofield yelled. ‘Military people! Rolling cover fire!
We must not stop firing or else we are dead!
’

He then looped Dubois’s arm over his shoulder and helped the wounded Frenchman as they all hurried down the stairs, the military people firing as they ran.

Zack helped Emma and she limped along as fast as she could as they entered the flat covered walkway that ran down the length of the Stadium. Rounds from the enemy shooters peppered the glass awning but bounced away.

As he hurried along under Dubois’s weight, Schofield yelled, ‘I should’ve seen it! They weren’t even
trying
to kill us back in that lab. They were flushing us out here, into this Stadium. It’s a turkey shoot.’

‘So how do we get out?’ Zack shouted with Emma draped over one shoulder and Bertie gripped in his spare hand.

Schofield peered at the area around them. From the crashed Beriev to the exploding submarine to the race through the leads to the Bear Lab to this, he hadn’t had a chance to get his bearings at all.

‘Right now, I have no idea,’ he answered truthfully. ‘We’ll just have to keep running and firing till I get one.’