Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (8 page)

Most Force Recon NCOs used the standard-issue M4, but Mother preferred the venerable German assault gun, and hers came with all the optional extras: it had a 100-round C-Mag drum magazine, underslung AG36 grenade launcher with the new anti-tank zinc-tipped incendiary grenades, a Zeiss RSA reflex sight and Oerlikon Contraves LLM01 laser light module. With all the additions, it looked like something out of a science fiction movie.

Scarecrow glanced from his compact MP-7 to her G36. ‘Could you have attached anything else to that thing?’ he asked.

‘Quiet, you,’ she said. ‘Weapons options are like good commanders: you love ’em when you’ve got ’em, and you wish you had ’em when you don’t.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

Mother scanned the area. ‘It’s too quiet here.’

‘Yeah, it is. Bertie, acquire and identify that object up in the sky, please.’

‘
Yes, Captain Schofield
.’ Bertie’s optical lens tilted skyward.

As the robot did this, Scarecrow and Mother approached the crashed plane, guns raised.

Standing before the Beriev, Schofield pulled down the thermal-vision scope on his helmet.

He saw the crumpled plane in infra-red, saw the strong residual warmth of its intact wing-mounted engine plus two man-shaped blobs in the cockpit, dim but pulsing.

‘I got two human signatures,’ he said. ‘Looks like they’re still alive in there—’

Suddenly, Schofield’s earpiece crackled to life.

Ironbark Barker’s voice growled: ‘
SEAL team in position off the north-east corner of Dragon Island. Commencing underwater insertion via the old submarine dock
.’

Ironbark and his team were going in.

Scarecrow returned his attention to the plane and stepping cautiously forward, arrived at its cracked cockpit windshield. Since the Beriev was rolled on its side, he couldn’t get in via its side doors, so he smashed one of the cockpit windows while Mother covered him, her G36 ready to fire.

Schofield saw two figures slumped in the plane’s flight seats. Still strapped into the pilot’s seat was an older man with a bushy grey moustache and ‘
IVANOV
’ stenciled onto his parka. He groaned as Schofield reached in and touched his carotid artery.

‘This must be the guy who sent out the distress call. He’s alive.’ Schofield pulled out a heat-pack from his first-aid pouch and pressed it against Ivanov’s chest. Ivanov immediately started breathing more deeply.

Mother crawled in and checked the other man, a young Russian private by all appearances. He was pale and pasty-faced, but after a few slaps, he came to with a grunt.

Beside him, Vasily Ivanov regained his senses. He blurted something in Russian before, seeing the US flags on Schofield’s and Mother’s shoulders, he switched to English: ‘Who are you?!’

Schofield said, ‘We’re United States Marines. Our people picked up your distress signal and we’re here to—’

Gunfire.

Schofield spun. Mother did, too.

But it wasn’t
here
. It was in their ears, in their earpieces.

Then Schofield heard Ironbark’s voice again and it was shouting desperately.

Cut into the cliffs on the north-eastern flank of Dragon Island was a Soviet-era submarine dock. It was essentially a rectangular concrete cave that had been carved into the rocky cliff face, and like all such edifices of the once mighty Soviet Union, it was enormous.

It featured two berths that could hold—at the same time, completely sheltered from the elements—a nuclear ballistic missile submarine and a 30,000-ton bulk carrier. The tracks of an oversized railway system ended at the edge of the two docks. In the old days, Soviet freighters had unloaded their cargoes—weapons, weapons-grade nuclear material or just steel and concrete—directly onto the carriages of a waiting megasized train.

Today, one of those berths was occupied by a most unusual sight: a huge red-hulled Russian freighter lay half-sunk beside the dock, deliberately scuttled. It was tilted dramatically forward, its bow fully under the surface while its stern remained afloat. The stricken vessel’s name blared out from that stern in massive white letters:

OKHOTSK.

It was the mysterious Russian freighter that had gone missing with an army’s worth of weapons and ordnance on board: AK-47s, RPGs, Strela anti-aircraft vehicles, ZALA aerial drones, APR torpedoes and even two MIR mini-submarines. One of those compact glass-domed submersibles could be seen tilted on its side on the half-submerged foredeck of the freighter.

Apart from the
Okhotsk
lying alongside the dock, the rest of the vast concrete cavern lay empty, long unused, its many ladders, catwalks and chains doing nothing but gathering dust and frost.

The first of Ironbark’s Navy SEALs emerged silently from the ice-strewn water, leading with a silenced MP-5N. He was quickly followed by a second man, then Ironbark himself.

It was a textbook entry. They never made a sound.

There was only one problem.

The force of a hundred armed men stationed at various positions around the dock, using the ageing debris and the half-sunk wreck of the
Okhotsk
as firing positions. They formed a perfect ring around the water containing the SEALs.

And as soon as all twelve of the SEALs had breached the surface, they opened fire.

What followed was nothing less than a shooting gallery. The SEALs were annihilated in perfectly executed interlocking patterns of fire.

Schofield heard Ironbark’s voice shouting above the rain of gunfire: ‘
Fuck! Go under! Go under!—Jesus, there must be a hundred of them!—Base, this is Ironbark! SEAL assault is negative! I repeat, SEAL assault is fucked! They were waiting in the submarine dock! We’re being slaughtered!
Miami
, we have to get back to you.
Miami
, come in
—’

Ten miles away, the Los Angeles–class attack submarine, the USS
Miami
, hovered in the blue void beneath the Arctic sea ice.

Inside its communications centre, a radio operator keyed his mike: ‘Ironbark, this is
Miami
. We read you—’

‘What the hell . . .’ the sonar operator beside him said suddenly before shouting: ‘Torpedo in the water!
Torpedo in the water!
Signature is of an APR-3E Russian-made torpedo. Bearing 235! It’s coming from Dragon and it’s coming in fast!’

‘
Launch countermeasures!
’

‘
It’s locked on to us
—’

Schofield listened in horror to the frantic commands being given on the
Miami
.

‘—
Take evasive action
—’

‘—
can’t, it’s too close!
’

‘—
too late! Brace for impact! Fuck! No!
—’

The signal from the
Miami
cut to hash.

Schofield heard Ironbark yell: ‘Miami
? Come in. USS
Miami
, respond!
’

There was no reply from the
Miami
.

Mother looked at Schofield in utter shock.

Schofield kept listening.

‘
Ah! Fuck!
’ Ironbark shouted in pain before, in a hail of louder gunfire, his signal also went dead and the airwaves went completely silent.

Schofield and Mother listened for more, but nothing came.

‘Holy shit . . .’ Mother whispered. ‘A hundred men waiting? A force that can take out a SEAL team and a fucking Los Angeles–class attack sub? Who in God’s name is this Army of Thieves?’

Schofield was thinking exactly the same thing.

‘Whoever they are,’ he said, staring out the cockpit’s shattered windshield at Dragon Island on the southern horizon, ‘our little team just became the last people on Earth capable of stopping them.’

Back in the assault boats, the rest of Schofield’s team waited tensely.

The Kid and Mario manned the controls of the boats, in case a swift departure was required.

Emma and Chad stared up at the ladder rising out of the lead, waiting for Schofield and Mother to return.

Zack, however, was busying himself with the wristguard. The high-tech device was one of his pet projects at DARPA and its failure frustrated him. There was no reason it shouldn’t be working fine. Also, tinkering with it took his mind off the mission at hand.

He had the wristguard’s upper panel flipped open and was peering at its internal workings.

He flicked it on—and suddenly the wristguard started pinging urgently, a red light blinking.

Zack frowned. ‘It’s saying there’s a three-hundred-foot-long object alongside us again.’

‘The sea ice?’ the Kid said, glancing at the ice walls around them.

‘No, it’s a metallic signature. The wristguard’s sensors can distinguish between ice and steel.’ Zack shook his head. ‘
Why?
Why is it doing that—ah-ha . . .’

He spotted something deep inside the wristguard’s internal wiring. ‘The emitter mirror’s been bent sideways. It must’ve got bumped somewhere. The emitter’s been pointing
down
the whole time.’

Now it was the Kid who frowned.

‘Wait a second. Are you saying that, right now, your wrist gizmo is picking up a three-hundred-foot-long metal object
underneath
us?’

Zack said, ‘Well, yes, I suppose so . . .’

‘How far away is it?’ the Kid asked.

‘Two hundred yards . . . no wait, one-ninety . . . one-eighty. Whatever it is, it’s getting closer.’

The Kid’s face fell. He looked up in the direction of the Beriev. ‘This is not good.’

A beep from just outside the Beriev’s smashed windshield made Schofield turn.

‘
Captain Schofield
,’ Bertie said. ‘
Object identified
.’

‘Let me see.’ Schofield was still inside the Beriev with Ivanov. Bertie came over, stopping next to the side-turned windows of the cockpit. Schofield looked at the display screen on the little robot’s back.

When he saw what was on the screen, he said, ‘Oh,
shit
. . .’

Bertie narrated: ‘
Object is a Russian-made ZALA-421-08 unmanned aerial vehicle. Vehicle is designed for reconnaissance and surveillance purposes. It carries no weapons payload. Electric engine, wingspan of eighty centimetres; maximum flight duration: ninety minutes. Standard payload: one 550 TVL infra-red-capable video camera, one 12-megapixel digital still camera
.’

Schofield was moving quickly now. He scrambled out of the Beriev, got to his feet and scanned the sky.

And found it: the high-flying, bird-like object he’d seen earlier.

Only it wasn’t a bird.

It was a drone.

A small, lightweight surveillance drone.

‘They know we’re here,’ he said aloud.

As if in answer, four dark aircraft appeared above the southern horizon, two big ones hovering in between two smaller ones, coming from Dragon Island.

They grew larger by the second.

They were approaching. Fast.

His earpiece came alive again.

‘
Scarecrow!
’ It was the Kid. ‘
Zack’s got the wristguard’s proximity sensor working. I think he’s picked up a submarine lurking out here and it’s closing in on us!
’

Schofield’s mind spun.

Drones, incoming aircraft, the loss of Ironbark’s team and the
Miami
, and now
another
submarine here . . .

Damn
.

This was all happening too fast, way too fast for a commander out in the middle of nowhere with no support, few combat troops and nothing in the way of serious hardware.

His brain tried to put it all together, to somehow order it all.

You can’t figure it out now
.
You can only stay alive and figure it out as you run.

‘Kid!’ he yelled, diving back inside the Beriev. ‘Keep those engines running! Mother! Get these two out of the cockpit! Things are about to get hairy!’

The four aircraft were two V-22 Ospreys and two AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters, all of which had been stolen from the Marine Corps staging base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, four months earlier.

The Ospreys were, quite simply, aerial beasts. With tiltable rotors, they were capable of both swift aeroplane-like flight and helicopter-like hovering. And these Ospreys were the variant known as the ‘Warbird’: they were armed to the teeth. They each had not one but two 20mm six-barrelled M61 Vulcan cannons, door-mounted .50 calibre AN/M2 machine guns, and missile pods slung under both wings. The Warbird was the mother of all gunships—big and strong, yet also fast and manoeuvrable—and the Army of Thieves had two of them.

The two Cobras weren’t shy either: they carried slightly smaller M134 six-barrelled miniguns underneath their sharply-pointed noses.

The two Ospreys thundered over the ice plain, flanked by the Cobras, sweeping over the network of watery leads, rushing toward the crashed Beriev.

A short distance from the crash site, one of the big Ospreys broke away from the other three aircraft and zoomed off to the north-west. The remaining three attack aircraft kept coming straight for the Beriev.

‘Base, this is Hammerhead,’ the pilot of the Osprey that had stayed on course said into his mike.

While he wore a Marine Corps tactical flight helmet and a Marine Corps winter warfare parka, he was not a United States Marine.

Flowing tattoos lined his neck and lower jaw—images of snakes, skulls and thorny vines. In addition to the Marine parka, he wore Uzbek gloves and Russian boots. The eight armed and similarly tattooed men sitting in the hold behind him had the broad faces, dark eyes and olive skin of native Chileans. They, too, wore a hodgepodge of Arctic gear, including Marine Corps parkas, and they held AK-47 assault rifles in their laps with easy familiarity.

‘We’re coming up on Ivanov’s plane,’ Hammerhead said. ‘The drone spotted two people approaching it. They must’ve come by boat through the leads, so the tower radars on Dragon couldn’t spot them.’

A calm voice replied in the pilot’s ear.

‘
Just as we suspected. It’s the American testing team
.’ The speaker grunted a short, cruel laugh. ‘
The Pentagon must be desperate if it’s sending product testers against us. Take out Ivanov’s plane with missiles, then find this test team and kill them all.
’