Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (34 page)

‘I thought you already figured that out? It’s his second plane,’ Mother said.

‘No, the exit strategy
for his entire plan
, a secret CIA plan that’s been in operation for over twenty years,’ Schofield said. ‘It’s his final exit strategy, one that leaves
no trace
of the Army of Thieves and thus no witnesses.’

Schofield gritted his teeth, looked around for a nearby vehicle, and spotted one, a jeep. ‘I have to stop him taking off in that plane or else this whole island and everyone on it is history.’

‘What!’ Mother said.

‘Are you serious?’ Baba said.

‘Trust me. There’s no time to explain. Right now, I need you two to take care of that train. Do whatever you have to do to stop them launching a missile from it. I’ll take Zack and go after Calderon and his plane. Zack—’

He turned.

Zack was nowhere to be seen.

He was gone.

‘Now where the hell did he go?’ Mother said.

Schofield gazed back into the gasworks and thought of Emma. ‘I have an idea, but that’s Zack’s fight. I wish we could help him, but if we don’t stop Calderon now, a whole lot more people will die. Now go. You take the train. I’ll take the plane.’

And with those words, they split up—Mother and Baba dashed back inside the gasworks, heading for the railway platform, while Schofield leapt onto the nearby jeep and gunned it off the mark, speeding as fast as he could in the direction of the runway in a last desperate attempt to stop Marius Calderon.

Zack crept silently across the bottom level of the gasworks, wending his way through the maze of industrial-sized piping. He passed hissing valves and vats of steaming liquids. On the sides of all the vats were warning labels written in Russian. The only text he recognised was on one huge vat marked ‘TEB’ followed by a warning in bold red letters.

He was following Bad Willy.

As he’d stood with Schofield, Mother and Baba at the exit door, he had glanced back inside the gasworks—and glimpsed Willy, with Emma, down on the bottom level.

During the mayhem of Schofield’s resurrection, Zack had hit the ground and covered his head with his hands. He hadn’t seen where Bad Willy had gone with Emma.

But now he knew.

When Schofield and Bertie had started firing, Bad Willy must have dived with Emma—his hard-earned prize—down a nearby ladder and hidden with her down on the lower level.

As soon as he’d seen them in the gasworks, Zack had taken off after them, not even bothering to tell Schofield and the others where he was going. Nothing they could have said would have stopped him anyway. They could save the world, but it would mean nothing to Zack if Emma was defiled by Bad Willy before then.

And so he’d grabbed a pistol from beside the corpse of an Army of Thieves man and hurried down to the lower level and commenced his pursuit.

Mother and Baba raced through a different section of the gasworks, the uppermost level, heading for the massive train parked at the railway siding on the northern side of the vast space.

As she ran, Mother saw the megatrain start to move. Big Jesus and his six-man team were all over it, AKs in hand.

The train was only five cars long, but each car was huge, oversized in the extreme. There was an armoured locomotive at each end, then a double-levelled cargo carriage—capable of conveying jeeps, trucks and other large loads—then in the middle, a long flatbed car on which sat two huge SS-23 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, currently lying horizontally side-by-side on big hydraulic risers.

‘The Russians built many train-launched missile systems,’ Baba said as he ran. ‘But the train needs to be stationary in order to fire the missile, otherwise it will misfire.’

Mother said, ‘So they need to drive the train out of this building
and then stop it
to fire the missile?’

‘Correct.’

Mother pursed her lips again. ‘Think, Mother. What would Scarecrow do?’

‘What?’

‘Never mind,’ she said, as it hit her. ‘He wouldn’t let them stop the train. He’d keep it
moving
. Come on, Baba. We gotta get aboard, seize control of the lead locomotive and keep that train moving.’

Schofield sped along in his stolen jeep, skirting the massive moat surrounding the disc tower, heading toward the runway.

With him was Bertie, but in a most unusual configuration—the configuration that had made Zack smile.

Bertie was mounted on Schofield’s back, clipped securely to it by virtue of the flamethrower harness Schofield had taken from the dead Army of Thieves man in the gasworks. The harness’s four main carabiner clips—usually used to hold a tank on the user’s back—had clipped perfectly to points on Bertie’s metal exoskeleton so that now he sat on Schofield’s back, piggyback style.

Bertie’s stalk-mounted eye looked out eagerly over Schofield’s right shoulder, panning left and right, while his M249 cannon poked out over Schofield’s left shoulder.

Schofield drove hard.

He saw Calderon’s jeep heading round the wide circular moat, making for the steep road that led to the runway.

There hadn’t been time to tell the others about the significance of Calderon’s short stop at the cable car terminal.

The satellite dish that Typhon had grabbed was the uplink—the satellite uplink keeping Dragon Island safe from Russian and American nuclear missile strikes.

When he had first arrived on Dragon via that very same cable car terminal, Schofield had scanned the area for the uplink in the hope of disabling or destroying it, but it had been hidden, as it turned out, right above his head.

Typhon’s recent snatching of the uplink, however, had terrible ramifications.

Calderon and his key lieutenant were getting away from Dragon Island, leaving their fake terrorist army behind. Presumably, the Army of Thieves believed he would come back for them once the sky was alight.

But he wouldn’t be coming back at all, Schofield realised.

No. Watching from his escape plane, as soon as his men on the train launched their missile—or if he got away and ignited the sky with
his
sphere—Calderon would then simply switch off the uplink.

Russian Missile Command, still monitoring Dragon with their own satellites, would immediately detect that the defensive uplink was down and, enraged at Calderon’s previous reversal of one of their nuclear missiles, immediately fire a nuke on Dragon.

Calderon would destroy China, while he would get away with his small leadership group and his fake terrorist Army would be annihilated by the Russian nuclear missile. The world would be irrevocably changed, the blame would be laid on the mysterious terrorist group, and Calderon would make a clean getaway, unconnected to any of it.

Mission accomplished.

Which was why Schofield had to stop Calderon’s plane. If he could keep Calderon on Dragon Island, Calderon wouldn’t switch off the uplink, as it would mean condemning himself to death—

Gunfire hit Scarecrow’s jeep.

Schofield spun to see an Army of Thieves troop truck thundering along behind him, with men hanging off it, firing.

‘Bertie! Take them out!’

‘
Yes, Captain Schofield.
’

As Schofield kept looking forward, driving hard, weaving and swerving, Bertie swivelled both his eye and his cannon around and loosed two booming shots.

The first shot hit the truck’s grille, puncturing the radiator, causing it to release a hissing plume of steam; the second hit its front left tyre, causing the truck to wobble, then fishtail, then skid out of control before it tumbled onto its side, spilling men everywhere.

Schofield smiled grimly. While deafening, it was like having eyes—and a gun—in the back of your head.

‘Good robot,’ he said.

Up ahead, he saw Calderon’s car take the left-hand fork and shoot down the steep road leading to the airfield. He made to follow, but some Army of Thieves sentries quickly stepped out onto the road there and unleashed a heavy rain of gunfire. One man had a flamethrower and sent forth a blazing tongue of fire.

Schofield swore. He couldn’t run that blockade.

So, without any loss of speed, he yanked his steering wheel right and took off up the right-hand fork. He could still reach the runway by going the long way, around the higher ground to the north.

It would take time and he wasn’t sure if he had enough of that.

But he had to try. With Bertie on his back covering him, Schofield floored the jeep.

Zack heard them before he saw them.

He heard Emma struggling. ‘No!
No!
Leave me alone!’

A sharp slapping sound followed.

‘Shut up, bitch!’ Bad Willy’s voice echoed through the tangle of pipes, tanks and vats. ‘No knights in shining armour left to save you now.’

Zack rounded the corner and beheld the scene: Emma on the ground with Bad Willy standing over her.

‘There’s still one left,’ he said loudly.

They both snapped around. Emma’s face lit up with both hope and horror. Bad Willy’s face transformed from surprise to wicked glee.

‘Zacky-boy,’ he grinned. ‘Who’da thunk it? The weedy little poindexter coming to save the girl from the nasty fucking rapist?’

Zack raised his pistol.

Bad Willy said, ‘I don’t have a gun, Zacky. You’d shoot me in cold blood?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t miss.’

His jaw clenched, Zack fired. Twice.

And missed high with both shots. They sparked off a large pipe behind Willy’s head.

He pulled the trigger again, several times:
click-click-click
.

Bad Willy grinned more darkly. ‘I am going to kick the fucking shit out of you, you little pansy-assed dandy, and then I’m going to do every
kind
of nastiness to your woman here.’

Willy shoved Emma into a nearby storage cage and snapped its bolt home, locking it.

Emma shook the gate, but it was no use, she was trapped there, trapped to watch what was to come: a fight between Bad Willy of the Army of Thieves and Zack Weinberg of DARPA.

Willy lunged at Zack, teeth bared, fists flying.

Zack ducked beneath Willy’s first two blows, bobbed up, and managed to land a killer punch on Willy’s face. Willy froze in mid-stride.

Zack paused. Had he—?

Willy started laughing.

‘Is that it? Is that the best you’ve got? Oh, this is not fair. Not fair at all.’

Quick as a rattlesnake, Willy hit Zack in the face and Zack dropped to the ground, nose bleeding.

Then Bad Willy grabbed him by the collar and headbutted him, dropping him again.

Emma screamed.

As he stood over Zack, Bad Willy called back to her: ‘Keep doing that, honey. Keep screaming. I
love
screams, feed off ’em.’

He lifted Zack and rammed him up against a thick round pipe, narrowly missing a pressure valve sticking out of it.

Dizzy and in considerable pain, Zack’s vision was becoming blurred. He felt ill. He was about to pass out, and if he passed out, this was all over. Willy would kill him and then take Emma and—

Through his blurred vision, Zack saw something on the valve beside his head. Letters that gradually came into focus:
T . . . E
. . .

Suddenly Willy was right in his face.

‘You blasted my ear off, you little fuck,’ Willy growled. ‘To pay you back for that, I’m gonna hack off both your ears and make you eat ’em. Then I’m gonna slash your fucking throat and drink your blood.’

Willy unsheathed a long-bladed hunting knife and held it up to Zack’s eyes.

Zack gasped, coughing.

Willy said, ‘Got something to say, eh?’

Zack whispered something.

‘Speak up! I can’t hear you!’

‘I said . . .’ Zack began as, with his last ounce of strength, he quickly reached up and yanked hard on the lever on the gas valve beside his head, the valve whose label read ‘
TEB
’.

The valve opened and a high-pressure spray of green liquid came blasting out of it, directly into Bad Willy’s eyes.

Willy wailed as the searing-hot liquid gushed into his face. He dropped his knife and clutched at his eyes as the skin on his forehead, cheeks and chin immediately began to
melt
.

His wails became shrieks as the searing explosive fuel mixture—the undiluted raw concentrate that was the basis of the combustible gas in the sky—ate through the skin of his face.

Willy clawed at his cheeks, but this only served to pull away the melting skin, revealing flesh and bone. Then his hands came away and Zack saw that Willy’s
eyes
were melting, too. The whites of his eyeballs dribbled down his melted-away cheeks and stuck to his fingertips.

Willy shrieked a hideous, inhuman scream.

He lunged at Zack, clutching at him with his disgusting hands, but Zack kicked him hard in the chest, pushing him away and Bad Willy fell to the ground, whimpering.

Moments later, the acid ate into his brain and Bad Willy lay still, dead.

Zack ran to the cage, threw it open, and Emma leapt into his arms and sobbed as he held her.

As the megatrain left the siding, Mother and Baba ran up alongside it and leapt onto its last carriage, a backward-facing armoured locomotive.

The train lumbered forward. It was truly a Soviet monster, double-sized in every way: two storeys high, two train-widths wide and riding on two sets of train tracks.

But it wasn’t designed for speed. It had been designed for heavy cargo freight, to carry the building materials for Dragon Island from the north-east dock—now reconfigured as a submarine dock—to the central complex, which meant it was a relatively slow beast.

Today, however, it only had to clear the station and stop in a firing position to launch one of its missiles.

‘We have to get to the forward locomotive,’ Mother called to Baba, ‘to keep this train moving!’

Blocking their way, though, was the Chilean lieutenant, Big Jesus, and his six-man team. While two men drove, Big Jesus and the other four had established a defensive position around the central missile carriage—where Big Jesus was currently busy bent over the missile, inserting the uranium sphere into its warhead.