Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (20 page)

Dave turned to see two more big men materialise from the darkness behind them, subtly blocking the way back to the River Entrance.

‘These men aren’t here to take you to the White House,’ he whispered. ‘They’re here to kidnap you.’

Retter glanced from Dave to the man who’d said his name was Thornton.

And, just slightly, ever so slightly, his eyes flickered. ‘Is there a problem, ma’am?’

‘You see it now?’ Dave asked.

‘Yep,’ Retter said.

‘Run.’

They broke into a run, dashing suddenly right, heading for the entrance to the Metro system twenty metres away.

The two men by the cars took off after them. So did the two blocking the way back into the Pentagon, all four drawing silenced Glock pistols as they did so.

Fairfax and Retter bolted down the stairs to the subway station, hurdling the turnstiles and arriving on the platform just as a train pulled to a halt and opened its doors.

They dived into it, melding in with the members of the evening commuter crowd, just as the train’s doors shut and it moved off, a moment before their pursuers arrived on the platform, flushed and out of breath, their pistols now concealed beneath their coats and their faces furious at the fact that their quarry had got away.

DRAGON ISLAND 1042 HOURS 18 MINUTES TO DEADLINE

No sooner had the cable car stopped beside the platform of the upper terminal on Dragon Island than Schofield was racing out of it at full speed.

He joined Bertie in the doorway, arriving there in time to see the two enemy trucks skid to simultaneous halts twenty yards away. The main tower soared skyward before him. With its white exterior, it looked futuristic, imposing and impenetrable.

‘Bertie, cover us,’ he said. ‘Hold this doorway for as long as you still have bullets.’

‘
Yes, Captain Schofield.
’

Army of Thieves troops began pouring out of the two trucks. Bertie started firing at them and they dived for cover.

As the little robot held the main doorway, Schofield led the others westward, toward the garage Ivanov had said was on that side. Schofield threw open a door to reveal a darkened garage with two small trucks parked inside it. The first was a medium-sized fuel truck with a rusty cylindrical aluminium gasoline tank on its back. A steel rung-ladder ran up the back of the tank and along the length of its upper side. The second truck, parked behind the tanker, was a compact cement mixer with a rotatable barrel mounted on its back.

Schofield pointed at the tanker as he moved. ‘Mother, Baba. Onto the tanker. Mother, start her up. Everyone else, when we drive out of here and get their attention, go as fast as you can to your assigned positions.’

The others—Champion, Ivanov, the Kid, Mario, Zack and Emma—all nodded at him in reply.

Schofield gave them a look. ‘If this doesn’t work, Mother, Baba and I won’t get out of it alive. Then it’ll be up to the Kid and Mario. Good luck. I’ll either see you all later or see you on the other side.’

Behind him, the engine of the tanker truck came alive.

‘Captain.’ Baba was peering at a gauge on the side of the tanker truck. ‘This tank still has fuel in it. Given the plan, it might be wise to empty it. It’ll make it lighter.’

‘Do it.’

Baba turned a spigot on the back of the truck’s cylindrical tank. Diesel fuel started pouring out of it, splashing to the ground.

Schofield then climbed into the driver’s seat, while Mother and Baba clambered up the steel rung-ladder on top of the truck’s tank, weapons ready.

‘Open the door,’ Schofield said.

Ivanov hit a switch and the garage’s roller door slid upward. Daylight flooded into the garage.

Schofield gunned the truck and it roared outside, into battle.

As Schofield’s tanker truck sped out of the garage, Zack turned to check on Bertie back in the terminal’s doorway.

He saw the little robot firing out through the open door, saw enemy rounds ping harmlessly off his flanks.

‘Come on, Zack.’ Emma pulled him away. ‘We have to get into position. Bertie’ll be okay.’

Just as she said those words, however, a rocket-propelled grenade hit the doorway in which Bertie stood.

A fireball erupted all around the little robot, consuming him, and a split second later Bertie came flying out of it, hurled backwards through the air at alarming speed.

Bertie sailed back across the terminal and slammed into the opposite wall—a few feet from the gaping aperture through which the cable car had entered the terminal; a sweeping view of the northern bay and the islets lay beyond that aperture, as well as a three-hundred-foot sheer drop.

Bertie lay on his side, looking dazed and confused, if a robot could look that way. His fat rubber tyres spun but got no traction.

Zack shouted, ‘No!’ but then Bertie righted himself, rolling back up onto his tyres and seemed okay—

—just as the first Army of Thieves man, moving low and fast, entered the terminal with another RPG on his shoulder, crouched and fired it at Bertie.

This time the robot stood no chance.

The RPG lanced across the space toward him and detonated.

This blast sent Bertie sailing
out through
the aperture in the northern wall of the terminal into nothing but air.

With a squealing whistle, Bertie disappeared from Zack’s view and fell a full three hundred feet down the face of the cliff before disappearing into the freezing waters of the bay with a tiny splash, his part in this battle now well and truly over.

The sudden emergence of Schofield’s tanker truck from the garage attached to the western side of the terminal caught the other Army of Thieves troops assailing the terminal’s main entrance by surprise.

The tanker truck, with Mother and Baba crouched on top of it and a gushing trail of diesel spilling out behind it, thundered out of the garage and sped toward the circular chasm containing the main tower.

The Army men raised their guns, but Mother and Baba sprayed them with a deadly burst and half of them fell. The others took cover—and so didn’t see some of Schofield’s other people scamper out of the garage on foot.

It didn’t matter. The tanker truck had seized the Army men’s attention completely.

Chiefly, this was because its path was very unusual.

For it wasn’t heading toward either of the two crane-bridges that granted access across the moat to the tower.

No.

It was speeding in a dead-straight line—not on any road, but over open ground—a line that ran directly from the cable car terminal to the tower, a line that would end at the sharp concrete edge of the moat.

‘What the hell are they doing?’ one of the Army men breathed.

The Lord of Anarchy was watching the speeding tanker truck from his command centre on the tower.

‘What the hell is he doing?’ he said.

The tanker truck picked up speed as it rushed toward the edge of the moat.

It was only twenty metres from the moat and still accelerating when the remaining Osprey thundered by overhead, cannons blazing.

Sizzling rounds strafed the ground all around the speeding truck, raking the dirt behind it,
igniting
the leaking trail of diesel fuel there.

The line of diesel fuel burst to life, erupting as an elongated wall of flames behind the speeding truck!

Schofield saw it in his side mirror. ‘As if this wasn’t crazy enough,’ he muttered as he kept driving toward the edge of the moat. ‘Mother! Baba! You ready?’

‘Ready up front!’ Mother called back.

‘Ready at rear!’ Baba shouted.

‘Please God, this better work . . .’ Schofield whispered before he floored it completely and the tanker truck rushed toward the edge of the moat and flew off it into empty, open air.

Wheels spinning, the tanker truck shot off the outer edge of the circular chasm and soared out into space; a small concrete gutter on the rim of the moat kicked its nose upward as it did so.

As the truck’s tyres left the ground, Baba fired both of his Magneteux’s two grappling hooks
back at
the concrete rim of the moat. With loud twin
thunks!
the two drill bit–tipped hooks plunged deep into the concrete and held. Their cables—unspooling rapidly—stretched back to Baba on the truck and he quickly looped the Magneteux’s launcher under the tanker truck’s steel ladder.

At the same time, crouched at the forward end of the truck’s roof, Mother waited. Waited . . . waited . . . and waited . . . for the truck’s flight to get them as far out into the void as possible. Then, as the truck’s nose dropped, she fired the two hooks from the Magneteux that she held—Champion’s—only Mother fired her pair of hooks at the disc-shaped tower
in front of
the flying truck.

Her French-made grappling hooks soared out into the air, trailing their cables, and slammed into the thick concrete flank of the disc, just above the windows of the disc’s middle level. Then, just as Baba had done, Mother looped her launcher around the steel rung-ladder that ran along the top of the truck’s tank and held on as tightly as she could, waiting for the jolt.

When it came, it was stomach-dropping.

The truck, sailing out through the air, came to a sudden, lurching, swinging halt.

The combined effect of the two co-ordinated launchings was remarkable: the truck didn’t fall into the great moat.

Instead, as it began to drop in its natural arc, the four cables—two in front, two at the rear—went taut, and like a rope bridge hanging across a mountain gorge, the truck now hung suspended from the four cables
out in the middle of the chasm!

It looked totally bizarre.

A one-and-a-half-ton fuel truck hanging in the middle of the void, like a fly caught in a spider’s web, suspended by the four cables between the outer rim of the moat and the colossal tower, hanging a dizzying two hundred feet above the concrete base of the moat, with the tiny figures of Baba and Mother on its back and . . .

. . . without missing a beat, Shane Schofield emerged from the cab of the truck and, moving fast, attached Champion’s motorised ascender to one of the cables stretching up to the disc-shaped tower.

The ascender whizzed him up the cable at tremendous speed, and in a few seconds he arrived at the windows of the second level of the disc—where with his spare hand he raised his Desert Eagle pistol and blasted the windows to shit.

They shattered and he used the momentum of the motorised ascender to swing in through them.

And suddenly he was inside.

He checked his watch.

10:57.

Three minutes to go.

He dashed into the tower.

In an attempt to cut off access to the tower structure, the Lord of Anarchy had raised his two crane-bridges—but now, as Schofield had hoped, that order would work against him.

Now the bulk of the Lord’s men would not be able to get across onto the tower until those bridges were lowered back into place again; for most of his Army was on the outer rim of the moat in a conventional defensive deployment.

Lowering the two bridges would take time—maybe a minute—and that meant sixty precious seconds that Schofield could use to get past the much smaller force of Army men on the tower itself, and get to the shorter spire and the lab inside it containing the spheres.

He sprinted as fast as he could.

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 centre. ‘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.