Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (27 page)

The big, bearded and soaking wet form of Baba lay before the Lord of Anarchy.

His captors couldn’t know it, but when the cement mixing truck had been hurled across the hold toward him, Baba had thrown himself out the side door of the Antonov an instant before the cement mixer had slammed against the wall.

‘He washed up on the shore a few minutes ago,’ Big Jesus said. ‘A French commando, in league with the others.’

The Lord of Anarchy stared at the slumped figure of Baba.

‘This is most fortuitous,’ he said. ‘He will be of use to us in our hunt for his companions. We will torture him and broadcast his cries to his companions on the island. Few can tolerate the wails of a friend being tortured and as you are well aware, Big Jesus, I have forgotten more about torture than most men will ever know. Take him to the gasworks.’

Mother charged through the undergrowth at the base of the mountain, pushing ice-encrusted branches out of the way, hustling across the slope. Zack and Emma hurried along behind her, Zack carrying the compact Samsonite case with the spheres in it.

‘Mother!’ he called forward as he ran. ‘What do we do!’

Mother was trying to figure that out.

‘I’m working on it!’ she said between panting breaths. ‘Usually I got the Scarecrow around to think for me! He does the thinking and I do the shooting. It’s not often I have to think for myself.’

She kept running, her mind whirring. She kept hearing Schofield’s last words to her: ‘
You’re on your own this time
.’

So she asked herself,
What would Scarecrow do?

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘First, we gotta stay off the road. They can’t drive a truck through brushland. Second, we either find a way to the coast—which doesn’t look likely—or we find somewhere to hide these spheres.’

‘You can’t hide them on land,’ Zack said. ‘They might be small and their radioactivity minor, but they
are
still radioactive. Even if you buried them in the dirt, they could still be found with a Geiger counter.’

Mother said, ‘Then we hide
with
them, while staying as mobile as possible. If we can stay out of sight for long enough, maybe the cavalry will arrive before these bastards find us.’

Emma said, ‘When we were looking at the map before, I remember seeing a quarry or a mine in this part of the island. Some kind of rare granite—’

As she said this, they crested a low rise and beheld a wide open-cut quarry before them, its sheer, square walls carved deep into the base of a small mountain.

Sloping ramps of hardpacked earth zigzagged their way into the great pit, while a network of steel ladders provided access from ramp to ramp; long-abandoned mining trucks stood like ghostly mechanical statues at various places on the ramps, rusted solid. Two very basic buildings provided a pair of entrances to the mine system.

Mother stopped for a moment, her eyes narrowing. She whispered to herself: ‘All right, you stupid grunt,
think
. What would Scarecrow do?’

And it hit her. ‘I know what he’d do. Okay, lovebirds. Listen up.’

Minutes later, a pursuing Strela from the Army of Thieves pulled to a halt on the crest overlooking the quarry—just in time to see Mother, moving backward, gun up, disappear inside one of the entrances to the mine.

‘They’re going inside the mine,’ the pursuit group’s leader, the Caucasian officer known as Mako, said into his radio.

Typhon’s voice came over the line. ‘
There are only two entrances. Secure them, then go in and kill them all.
’

‘Roger that,’ Mako said. ‘This won’t take long.’

It didn’t take long.

Mako’s team moved with speed and precision. They sealed off the mine and then went in hard, leapfrogging each other in a coordinated rolling formation.

The mine system wasn’t that complicated—it was just a basic rock mine from which granite was extracted—and within a few minutes, they were fired upon from a shadowy corner.

Mother.

That stand-off didn’t last long, either, maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Mother fought bravely, but she was woefully outnumbered and outgunned, and eventually, she ran dry. Mako’s men steadily flanked her until she stopped firing and stood up, arms raised in surrender.

Mako’s team swarmed all over her position . . .

. . . to discover that she was alone.

Zack and Emma weren’t there, and neither was the all-important case.

Mother had done what Scarecrow would’ve done: she’d lured her pursuers into the mine and kept them occupied for as long as she could, giving Zack and Emma time to escape with the spheres.

Mother stepped out from her position, arms raised, her face illuminated by half a dozen barrel-mounted flashlights.

Mako keyed his radio: ‘Sir, this is Mako. We got one of the Marines, but she was a decoy. The other two are gone and they have the case. They’re somewhere else on the island.’

The Lord of Anarchy said: ‘
One of the Marines, you say? Is it the woman, the big one? Newman?
’

Mako jabbed Mother with his gun. ‘Are you Newman?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yes, it’s her.’

‘
Bring her to me, alive
,’ the Lord of Anarchy said. ‘
Do not harm her. I intend to enjoy that pleasure myself.
’

Elsewhere, Zack and Emma hurried through scrub, icy branches lashing their faces, running as fast as they could, away from the quarry-mine.

They knew full well that Mother would eventually be caught—that her fake last stand was designed to give them valuable time to get away and hide—and they didn’t want her sacrifice to be in vain.

Staying on the south side of the island, however, was not an option. While mountainous, it was too barren and treeless, too exposed. There was nowhere to hide. Nor was there any way to get in touch with anyone back home—to tell them that the Army of Thieves was being prevented from effecting their plan.

That meant venturing back north into the sprawling main complex of Dragon Island—to both hide and find some communications gear, and maybe even link up with the Kid and Mario.

Zack and Emma dashed across a shallow rocky ford in the river and headed back north, toward the main complex.

A mile or so behind them, two Army of Thieves Strelas stopped on the road overlooking the quarry-mine. The tattooed men on it glared at Mother—and offered a few lewd obscenities—as she was led away by Mako and his men.

One man ambled a short distance away from the main group, where he crouched on one knee and peered at the muddy ground.

It was Bad Willy. His left ear was now bandaged, but the gauze had leaked and an ugly splotch of blood stained it.

Bad Willy gazed long and hard at the muddy ground . . .

. . . at the fresh shoeprints in it, including one kind of print that was not often found on secret Soviet bases.

Nike hiking-boot prints.

‘Oh, Zacky-boy . . .’ Bad Willy said. ‘I told you I’d find you.’

Calling his men to follow—on foot, since it was quieter, better for hunting—Bad Willy set off after Zack and Emma.

ICE FIELD TO THE WEST OF DRAGON ISLAND 4 APRIL, 1155 HOURS

Veronique Champion woke with a start.

She coughed a few times, blinking back to her senses and then looked around: to find herself sitting in an orange inflatable life raft, moving slowly through a tranquil Arctic lead, paddled by Shane Schofield. High walls of ice rose on either side of her.

A thick waterproof field dressing was wrapped tightly around her belly and lower back, staunching the flow of blood from her gunshot wound.

‘What—how did we get here?’ she asked. ‘The last thing I remember is . . .’

Her voice trailed off as she peered upward, in the direction of Dragon Island. She could just see the peaks of Dragon’s southern mountains over the top of the lead’s walls.

Schofield smiled grimly. ‘You passed out. I dressed your wound and gave you a shot of AP-6.’ AP-6 was a field drug developed by SEAL Team Six. It was both a painkiller and a stimulant; it dulled any pain but also jacked up a wounded soldier long enough to allow them to get to a field hospital.

‘You won’t be doing any somersaults or jumps,’ Schofield said, ‘but you’ll be mobile enough. I managed to dispose of four of the spheres, but there are still two out there: Zack and Emma have them, back on the island, and Mother’s with them. We’re going back in now.’

‘Going back? How?’

‘I’m taking us through these leads toward the north of Dragon Island, to the old whaling village. I figure the cable car and gantry elevators will be more closely watched now and the submarine station is way over on the other side of the island, so the village is our only choice, the only place where we can land.’

‘That’ll take a while.’ Champion tried to sit up in the life raft but fell back, grimacing. ‘Ah . . .’

Schofield glanced at her. ‘You’ll live but you won’t be doing any more fighting today. The bullet missed your spleen by millimetres and, luckily for you, went right through.’

Champion groaned, blinking away the pain, and lay back against the inflatable bow of the raft. It was unusually peaceful here: the air silent, the water perfectly calm and the ice walls white as snow. It was like floating among the clouds.

‘I figure it’ll take us about ten more minutes,’ Schofield said, paddling slowly but firmly.

‘Un moment, s’il vous plaît. You saved me from that sinking plane?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why? Why would you do this? I was sent to kill you. I even told you that when all this is over, I would have to carry out my original mission.’

Schofield stopped paddling for a moment. The boat drifted. He looked at Champion long and hard.

‘I saved you because this situation is bigger than your country’s vendetta against me and I think you’re smart enough to know that.’

Champion returned his gaze. ‘You . . .
trust
me? Why?’

‘Because you didn’t come to kill me just for France. You came because of your cousin. You thought he was wronged, an innocent civilian murdered by a professional soldier: me. Your premise was wrong but the motive wasn’t. It shows you have a sense of justice, of right and wrong, and I figure if you have that, you’re a decent person, and decent people can be reasoned with. They also deserve to be saved if it’s possible and it was possible.’

Champion cast her eyes downward. She seemed to be looking deep within herself. But when she looked up again, her gaze was hard.

‘You’re wrong. I once had a sense of justice. I was once decent. Now I am an assassin. When this is over, wounded or not, I must carry out my orders. I must make sure you are dead.’

Schofield didn’t flinch.

‘But you weren’t always an assassin, were you?’ he said. ‘Sorry, but you’re not the type. You’re too thoughtful. Most assassins are cold-blooded for two reasons: one, they can’t empathise, and two, they’re stupid and any idiot can pull a trigger and feel powerful that way. But you’re neither of those things. Something happened to you.’

‘You want to psychoanalyse me?’

‘Got nothing else to do right now.’

‘All right.’ Champion lay her head back and gazed skyward, gripping her stomach. ‘I shall tell you about me, but only if you tell me about you, in particular: how a Marine recovers from the execution of his girlfriend by a psychopath.’

Now it was Schofield who looked down, but only briefly. ‘Okay, fine. You first.’

Champion said, ‘Before I was in the Action Division, I was in the DGSE’s Directorate of Intelligence. I monitored Islamic extremist groups in Algeria, Morocco and Yemen. In particular, their increasing enlistment of women. I befriended a Yemeni mother of five, named Hannah Fatah. She fed me excellent information for three years, information that prevented two attacks on Paris—one on the Eiffel Tower and another at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

‘Then one day, Hannah asked to be brought in. She was pregnant again and she feared that her superiors had discovered that she was a leak. I brought her in, took her back to the DGSE field office in Marseilles. When she walked into the debriefing room, with my boss—my husband at the time—and his boss watching through a two-way mirror, she set off a small wad of Semtex that had been surgically implanted into her uterus.

‘I never suspected anything—Hannah already had a scar on her stomach from the caesarean birth of her last child, and the explosive was concealed from our X-ray and cathode ray scanners by a wrapping material made of human bone, designed to appear as a foetus. She passed through four security scanners before she got into that room and killed two very senior DGSE agents, one of them my husband, and three of my other colleagues. I alone survived. She had waited three years to do it.’

Schofield was silent.

Champion said, ‘My empathy for Hannah Fatah got my husband killed. My closest colleagues, too. So I decided that I would no longer live with empathy. I became cold. I transferred to Action Division, and made my first kill within a month. I’ve been doing it ever since.’

She paused. ‘Strange. In my research on you, Scarecrow, I struggled to find a defining reason why
you
became such an efficient killer of men.’