The bear did not pause as it fell upon Willy’s point man: it thumped him to the ground and had already ripped out his throat by the time Bad Willy recovered his wits and opened fire, blowing the bear away in a storm of bullets. The bear dropped to the ground with a heavy thud.
But the distraction had been enough for Zack and Emma to glimpse Bad Willy—he was a short man with wiry, sinewy muscles, a bald head and a bony, hollow face. A silver chain hung suspended between a piercing in his left eyebrow and a ring in his left nostril.
For a brief, fleeting moment, Zack and Bad Willy locked eyes.
Zack froze.
Willy grinned.
And raised his gun.
‘Bertie, fire!’ Zack said, still gripping Bertie in his hand like a suitcase.
The little robot opened fire with its machine gun. Zack hadn’t aimed at all and the spray of gunfire was totally wild.
Willy’s men dived for cover, but not before Zack’s blaze of robot gunfire had taken out the man standing beside Willy. He went flying backwards, convulsing horribly. The roving burst then found Bad Willy and the right side of his head exploded with blood and Bad Willy screamed before falling to the ground.
Zack’s eyes went wide at the sight, and the thought, of what he had just done.
He yelled, ‘Bertie! Cease fire!’ and started running again, hauling Emma along.
Rounding the next corner, they saw Mother kneeling atop a trench wall, waving to them and reaching down with her hand.
A minute later, as Mother lifted them out of the trench, Zack heard a familiar nasal voice call out:
‘Zacky-boy! Oh, Zacky-boy! You shot off my fucking ear, you little piece of no-good ratshit! I am going to hunt you down, you candy-ass fuck, and the tasty Emma, too, and when I do, I am going to tie you up, rip your eyelids off, and make you watch me fuck her to death! You hear me, Zacky!’
A cruel cackle echoed out from the fog-enshrouded trenches.
‘You’re just making new friends everywhere you go, aren’t you, Science Boy?’ Mother said. ‘Come on.’
Then they were off, racing through the underwater section of the walkway, covered by Schofield’s sniper fire.
The three of them joined the others inside the cube-shaped building at the southern end of the Stadium.
Like the office building at the northern end, it bored through Bear Islet’s high volcanic cone, its cracked, frost-covered windows looking north over the Stadium and south at the one remaining islet that lay between them and Dragon Island.
Once Mother, Zack and Emma were safely at his side, Schofield looked southward.
Beneath him, a decrepit pontoon bridge connected Bear Islet to the next islet—the final islet bore a warehouse-sized building on its back; beyond the warehouse, on higher ground, Schofield saw a cable car station whose long swooping cable stretched up to reach Dragon Island.
It was one way to get to Dragon Island, but there was another one nearby: halfway along the pontoon bridge that joined the two islets was a second and longer pontoon bridge that branched away at right angles from the main one. This second bridge stretched eastward, where it met a large, rust-covered, corrugated-iron shed that had been built into the base of the nearest cliff, on the edge of the bay, on Dragon Island itself. Two towering industrial-sized gantry elevators ran up and down the face of the cliff, having once serviced the shed.
‘Dr Ivanov,’ Schofield said, ‘the pontoon bridge or the cable car?’
‘We call that last islet “Acid Islet”,’ Ivanov said, ‘as it houses a substantial acid research laboratory. Its cable car, however, is very old; it was built when this facility was originally constructed back in 1985. It works but it is rarely used these days. The extreme cold has always made it quite unreliable, which is why the pontoon bridge was built in 1990. The bridge is newer and would definitely be faster.’
‘Faster is better,’ Schofield said, eyeing the elevators at the end of the pontoon bridge.
He checked his watch: 10:26 a.m. God, had it only been twenty-six minutes since they’d blasted into the Bear Lab?
At his feet lay the bodies of five members of the Army of Thieves, dressed in their stolen Marine Corps parkas. Crouching beside one of the corpses, Schofield pulled off the man’s helmet and goggles. An ordered series of tattoos ran down the side of his throat: images of a Russian ship, the letters ‘USMC’, a building with ‘Moskva’ written over it.
The other Thieves, Schofield saw, bore similar tattoos on their throats, although some had more than others.
‘What do they mean?’ Chad asked.
Schofield was silent for a moment. Then he got it. ‘They’re medals. Markers of participation in certain military engagements.’
‘Holy shit. What kind of army is this?’ Chad said distastefully.
Schofield stood and turned back to face his team. They were variously breathless, dirty and bloodstained—Chad looked particularly pale, and the older Ivanov was sweating profusely. Only the big Frenchman named Baba seemed okay: he looked like he was out at a picnic, fresh as a daisy.
Having lost Dubois, they were down to ten now, and in a dark corner of his mind Schofield wondered how many more of them would be lost on this mission.
‘So what’s the plan now, boss?’ Mother said, coming alongside him and peering out at the last remaining islet.
‘Now we get across to those gantry elevators.’
‘How?’ Champion asked.
Schofield stared out at the pontoon bridge that angled toward the supply shed and the gantry elevators.
‘By going backwards,’ he said.
Inside the command centre on Dragon Island’s high disc-shaped tower, the Lord of Anarchy gazed at a freeze-frame of Shane Schofield, caught on a surveillance camera inside the Bear Lab.
‘So who is he?’ he said.
‘He’s a Marine, sir. Captain Shane Michael Schofield. Call-sign Scarecrow,’ Typhon said. ‘He’s got a history.’
The Lord of Anarchy stared intently at the headshot of Schofield on the screen.
Then he read the accompanying bio . . . and grinned meanly. ‘How very interesting.’
He looked up. ‘What about the others?’
Typhon said, ‘We counted eleven of them in the Bear Lab, including the Russian, Ivanov, but it looks like one of their people was killed in the Stadium. Of those remaining, in addition to Schofield, I got hits on five in the military databases.’
‘And?’
‘Three more Marines and two French paratroopers who are now with the DGSE.’
‘Let me see.’ The Lord of Anarchy took a seat at the console and clicked through the service records of Mother, the Kid, Mario, Champion and Baba.
When he was done, he leaned back in his seat and smiled to himself.
NORTHERN BAY AND SURROUNDS
NORTHERN BAY OF DRAGON ISLAND
4 APRIL, 1026 HOURS
34 MINUTES TO DEADLINE
The northern coast of Dragon Island was shaped like a gigantic U, in the middle of which lay the last islet.
Ivanov had called it ‘Acid Islet’—after the enormous acid research laboratory that stood on it—and while it was actually quite large, the three-hundred-foot-high cliffs of Dragon Island that ringed it on three sides made it look tiny.
At the northern end of the islet was the pontoon bridge that joined Acid Islet to Bear Islet. Branching eastward from that bridge was its longer side-bridge that led to the shed and the gantry elevators on the eastern side of the bay.
Overlooking the whole bay from a commanding position on top of the eastern promontory was a lighthouse that also acted as a watchtower.
On that lighthouse, two sentries from the Army of Thieves looked out at the Stadium on Bear Islet with keen interest. They knew that Bad Willy had been sent in from behind to flush the intruders toward Thresher Team, which had crossed the pontoon bridge not long ago—
Suddenly, four parka-clad members of Thresher Team came dashing out across the bridge from the S
tadium, running for their lives, heading back toward the shed. The first man helped the second who limped along as best he could; the third and fourth ones covered them, firing defensively back at Bear Islet as they fled.
They then stopped firing as four more Army of Thieves men followed, also running desperately, and also firing behind them as they ran. All around the fleeing figures, the wooden posts and floorboards of the bridge shattered and splintered under heavy-calibre gunfire.
The Army sentries on the lighthouse spotted two or three figures firing from an oversized doorway at the Bear Islet end of the pontoon bridge.
The intruders.
They were forcing Thresher back.
The retreating men from Thresher Team reached the halfway point of the bridge, the spot where it intersected with the longer side-bridge that would take them to the shed and the gantry elevators—when suddenly one man convulsed and fell, hit. He was scooped up by the man beside him.
As this happened, the junior of the two sentries keyed his radio. ‘Base, this is Lighthouse. Intruders appear to have established a position at the south end of Bear Islet. They’re forcing Thresher back across to the supply shed and the elevators.’
‘Copy that, Lighthou—’ came the reply.
‘Wait!’ the more senior man on the lighthouse said abruptly. He was a very large and very capable Chilean lieutenant known in the Army of Thieves as Big Jesus.
He was watching the retreating men on the pontoon bridge closely.
‘That’s not Thresher Team . . .’ Big Jesus said slowly. ‘Members of the Army of Thieves are trained to leave any wounded men behind. It’s the intruders, wearing Thresher’s uniforms. Cliff team: RPG that pontoon bridge now! Destroy it!’
Down on the pontoon bridge—sixty yards from the shed and the elevators—dressed in a bulky Marine Corps parka that he’d taken from a dead Army of Thieves man on Bear Islet, Shane Schofield started down the longer side-bridge, racing backward toward the shed.
In his ear was a very high-tech radio earpiece/mike he’d also stolen from the dead Army of Thieves man—it was small, earbud-sized, with a tiny 10mm-long filament microphone that he had switched off for the moment. But it could still receive, and through it he’d been listening to a conversation between his enemies that had sounded very promising: a sentry on the lighthouse high above him had bought his illusion, that he and the others were actually Army of Thieves men in retreat.
As he listened, Schofield fired back at Bear Islet—each shot, of course, going wildly high—while helping the ‘wounded’ Kid. Beside him, Baba did the same with a similarly ‘wounded’ Champion, who had done a stellar job imitating that she had been shot. Emma, Zack, Chad and Ivanov, also dressed in stolen parkas, ran along behind them.
At the Bear Islet end of the bridge, Mother and Mario—with Bertie—were crouched in a doorway, ostensibly firing at the fleeing team, but hitting only the timber of the bridge, completing the deception.
But then the radio conversation turned sour. Someone had figured out their plan, ordering: ‘It’s the intruders, wearing Thresher’s uniforms. Cliff team: RPG that pontoon bridge now! Destroy it!’
Gunfire came blazing out from the clifftop above Schofield, and out of it emerged an RPG, screaming downward. It slammed into the pontoon bridge right in front of Schofield and the bridge went flying up into the air, water spraying all around it. When the geyser settled, Schofield saw that his route to the shed was gone: a broad section of the pontoon bridge had been destroyed. There was no way across it now.
He called as he turned. ‘We’re made! Everybody! Go the other way! Get to the next islet! Mother and Mario! Haul ass!’
Their cover blown, Schofield, Champion and Baba opened fire on the clifftop, covering the others as they all turned and ran full-tilt across the shorter pontoon bridge toward Acid Islet. Mother and Mario scooped up Bertie and raced out into the open, also firing up at the clifftop as they went.
But Schofield’s cover fire wasn’t enough. As they all changed direction, the terrified Chad was hit in the back by a line of bullets and his chest burst with bloody exit wounds and he fell into the water beside the intersection of the two bridges. He was dead before he hit the surface.
Zack and Emma paused wide-eyed beside his body, but Champion pushed them on. ‘He’s dead! You can’t help him! Allez! Allez!’
Schofield also glanced silently at Chad’s floating corpse as he hurried past.
Mother came alongside him as he did so. ‘These assholes aren’t stupid, Scarecrow!’
‘No, they’re not.’
Once they were all across the shorter bridge and on the islet, huddled inside a small abandoned guardhouse there, Schofield tossed a grenade behind them onto the pontoon bridge and it detonated. The near end of the bridge blew apart, so that it now had a gaping void in it. No-one would be following them that way.
But they still hadn’t made it to Dragon and now the Army of Thieves knew exactly where they were.
‘What do we do now?’ Mother said, breathless. Beside her, Emma had started sobbing and Zack looked horrified.
‘Emma, Zack,’ Schofield said sharply, making them look up. ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t grieve now. We knew this was going to be bad and we knew people might get shot. Trust me, Chad’s in a better place. He doesn’t have to go through any more of this.’
Schofield turned to gaze southward, across this new islet at Dragon Island. His eyes fell on the cable car station at the southern tip.
A steeply sloping cable rose up from the station, soaring out over the waters of the bay to meet a much larger terminal that hung off Dragon Island, off the summit of the nearest cliff. Made of grim grey concrete, the cable car terminal looked about as inviting as a World War II gun emplacement. But it was their only choice now.
‘We just lost any element of surprise we ever had,’ he said, ‘and since we don’t have the advantage of numbers, all we have left is speed. So we go in fast and we go in hard, and we absolutely do not stop.’
‘Keep moving, keep moving,’ Schofield urged, hustling everybody along a bitumen road that led up to the large warehouse-sized building that occupied the central section of Acid Islet.
They entered the building and a vast space met them: a huge hall the size of a football field.
A single grated super-catwalk suspended from the ceiling ran down the length of the space, hanging above two dozen menacing-looking industrial vats. Minor catwalks branched off the main one and from them ladders reached down to the floor where the vats lay.
Each vat was round with steel walls, about the size and shape of an above-ground backyard swimming pool. Some bore pressurised lids on them, while others were open to the air, revealing their strange contents: liquids of various putrid colours—off-green, off-brown, off-yellow—some frozen, others not. A couple of them bubbled. A tangle of pipes and valves linked some of the vats. Suspended from chains above one of the vats was a man-sized cage with semi-melted bars.
‘The acid laboratory,’ Ivanov said as they moved. ‘We experimented with acids for use in chemical weapons, grenades and, well, torture.’
‘Torture?’ Mother asked.
‘Trust me, when you are lowered into an acid bath and you start to see your own skin boil, you will tell your questioner everything he wants to know,’ Ivanov said grimly.
‘Charming,’ Schofield said, pushing them along. ‘Keep moving.’
He glanced downward as he said this and glimpsed a thick lead door down on the lowest level, partially obscured by the minor catwalks. It looked like a walk-in safe at a bank, but the big nuclear symbol on it, accompanied by a warning in Russian, gave away its true character: radioactive material storage.
‘Don’t stop.’ He pushed everyone along. ‘We gotta get to that cable car.’
A few minutes later, they emerged from the acid warehouse and raced up a short road that ended at the cable car station.
Dragon Island loomed before them, impossibly huge, protected by its mig
hty cliffs, the only method of access: the long swooping cable that joined the cable car station to the terminal hanging off the cliff.
As Schofield arrived at the cable car station, he saw it waiting there, sitting by the platform, suspended from the cable: a long bus-sized cable car.
‘It’s very likely our enemy will have men waiting at the other end of this cable,’ Champion said. ‘Like those gantry elevators, this is an obvious entry point.’
‘And easily defended,’ Mother added.
‘I know,’ Schofield said, ‘which is why I think we should go in all guns blazing.’
It took a few tries and some tinkering from Mario, but after a couple of minutes the cable car’s engine came to life.
Shortly after that, with a laboured mechanical groan, it rumbled out from the station on Acid Islet and began its ascent to Dragon Island.
It took two minutes to make the three-hundred-metre climb—two tense interminable minutes. It moved upward at a steady pace.
And the whole time it was being observed.
By the ten Army of Thieves men waiting in the upper terminal.
‘Thermal scan is in,’ one of those Thieves said. He stood at the very end of the terminal’s platform, practically at the edge of the cliff itself, holding an infra-red scanner pointed at the rising cable car. ‘There’s nobody in it . . .’
The commanding officer of this group of Thieves frowned darkly. His call-sign was White Tip.
‘They might be using thermal blankets to hide their heat signatures. Gentlemen, ready your weapons. When it comes in, shoot the shit out of it.’
The cable car entered the upper terminal, its multi-wheeled overhead unit creeping along the cable.
White Tip and his terminal team were waiting for it, guns raised, safeties off. One man wore a flamethrowing unit clipped to a chest-harness. Its pilot flame flickered, ready.
Thunk!
The cable car shunted to a halt. Its doors began to slide open . . .
White Tip’s unit prepared to fire . . .
The doors slid fully open . . .