The Antonov was halfway down the runway and almost at take-off speed—
The Strelas’ missile pods began to lower, taking aim—
‘We’re gonna make it . . .’ Schofield breathed, an instant before he caught sight of a lone Army of Thieves trooper off to the right of the runway, holding a Predator RPG launcher on his shoulder. The lone man fired the Predator and Schofield watched in horror as it zeroed in on the accelerating Antonov and disappeared under its nose.
A colossal thump shook the Antonov.
A second later, the entire cockpit lurched downward, throwing Schofield and Ivanov forward in their seats, and an ear-piercing shriek of metal-on-bitumen assailed their ears as the big plane’s nose slammed down against the runway and started grinding terribly, kicking up sparks.
The Antonov’s forward wheels had been completely destroyed by the Predator and all of its forward momentum was lost. It peeled away to the left, turning sideways as it slowed, fatally wounded, a little more than halfway down the runway.
And as the big plane ground to a halt, Schofield saw all of the Army of Thieves’ pursuit vehicles converge on it like hyenas closing in on a wounded water buffalo: the two Strelas from in front, the many trucks from behind.
His mission—a desperate and daring snatch-and-grab—was over.
In record time, he had island-hopped across bear-infested islets, penetrated Dragon Island by cable car, got across the moat, taken the lab at the summit of the spire, grabbed the spheres, got out of there by toppling the spire while he was in it and now he had failed within sight of the coast.
He bowed his head. ‘Fuck.’
The situation on the runway quickly became a stand-off.
The Army of Thieves’ vehicles formed a wide circle around the halted Antonov, which was parked at right angles across the snow-rimmed runway, its forward landing gear destroyed, its nose pointed down.
‘Cover the entrances!’ Mother called as she and Baba quickly took up positions in the Antonov’s two side doors, while Schofield rushed to its still-open rear ramp and hit ‘CLOSE’.
The ramp didn’t close.
A bullet from the surrounding Army of Thieves force smacked off a steel strut beside his head and he ducked back inside.
‘The ramp won’t close!’ he called.
Ivanov came back from the cockpit. ‘Many things in my country do not work. Ramps, doors. This is a very old plane.’
Suddenly, a familiar voice came alive in Schofield’s ear: ‘Oh, Captain, so close!’ the Lord of Anarchy said. ‘My, that was exciting! You came so very close to getting away. I bet you can see the ocean from where you are.’
‘Screw you.’
The Lord of Anarchy chuckled.
‘I still have your spheres,’ Schofield said.
‘You do indeed, but that doesn’t concern me greatly. You see, while it may look like one, this is not a stand-off. It is a woefully one-sided siege. Because you are isolated with a finite amount of ammunition, while my men surrounding you have all the time and firepower in the world. No, Captain, now it is time for me to screw you. Mako, send in three berserkers, as an example to Captain Schofield.’
Schofield frowned. What—
Suddenly three men burst forth from the surrounding force: they were Africans, each holding two AK-47s and firing madly as they ran toward the stricken Antonov. They had the same excessive facial piercings that the two suicidal maniacs in the Bear Lab had had.
Their bullets hammered the plane. Some rounds whizzed in through the open rear ramp and Schofield had to dive behind the jeep parked there before he could raise his MP-7 and return fire. Mother and Champion joined him, blasting away with their guns.
The first mad runner convulsed as he ran, but he must have been juiced up on ganja weed or some kind of hyper-stimulant because he took at least ten hits to his body before he finally stopped moving forward; then Mother shot him in the face and his whole head popped in a spray of red and he flopped to the ground, still.
But the other two berserkers kept coming, their rain of gunfire undisturbed.
Schofield, Champion and Mother fired and fired, using an inordinate amount of ammo to bring them down. The second madman fell, then finally so did the third—he skidded hard onto his face at the base of the ramp, having almost made it inside the plane.
Silence.
Gunsmoke.
Schofield was completely fucking shocked. If the Lord of Anarchy had more of these crazy suicide runners, then it was only a matter of—
‘Captain, I’m sure that by now the mathematics of your situation is becoming clear: if I keep sending in my berserkers, eventually you will run out of bullets. And I have many such men, who will gladly run to their deaths for me, if only to use up your ammunition. Mako, three more, please.’
There came another battle cry and three more crazed, multi-pierced runners came charging across the open runway firing wildly at the Antonov and Schofield and his team were forced to cut them down, too.
Mother shook her head. ‘This is fucking nuts! It’s like a shooting gallery where the targets fire at you! Who the hell does suicide runs like this?’
‘And how does their leader get them to do it?’ Champion asked.
‘Addictive drugs, conditioning, torture, I don’t know,’ Schofield said.
‘However the fuck he does it,’ Mother said, ‘I can’t keep this up much longer. I’m down to my last clip.’
Baba said grimly, ‘Me, too.’
Schofield bit his lip in thought. There was only one way this could end—and that was very ugly. Out of ammo and with nowhere to go, they’d be at the mercy of the Army of Thieves. Death at their hands would not be quick and—if only for a fleeting instant—Schofield actually considered putting a bullet through each of his people’s brains; it might be the most humane thing to do in this—
‘How are you feeling in there, Captain? Getting low on ammo now, aren’t you? Feeling desperate? Thinking of cutting a deal? I mean, how will you feel when your people are completely defenceless and my men storm that plane? My men, I fear, are not the kind of boys you bring home to meet mother. They are very zealous in their fanaticism, sometimes a little overzealous. They truly are the children of anarchy and I am their lord and master.
‘Of course, you could nobly kill your own people: line them up, smile kindly and then put a bullet in each of their heads, so that their deaths are quick. Let me assure you that such a death will be better than the one I will provide them.’
Champion shot a look at Schofield as she heard this, too.
Schofield returned her worried glance. It also didn’t escape his notice that the Lord of Anarchy had practically read his mind. He looked around himself for options, but there were none. They were screwed.
‘Captain, go to the cockpit of your plane. Switch on the video communication screen.’
Schofield went into the cockpit where he found a video screen attached to the instrument panel—a modern addition to an old plane—and flicked it on. It was like a laptop screen, with a small camera on its upper rim.
The Lord of Anarchy’s face appeared on the screen, smiling.
‘Hello, Captain. I thought we should do this face to face.’
‘Do what?’
‘I want to show you something. This.’
On the screen, the Lord of Anarchy lifted something up into the frame.
Schofield’s blood turned to ice.
It was a red uranium sphere, another one, a seventh one. The Lord of Anarchy held it between his thumb and forefinger.
Schofield’s face fell. The Lord of Anarchy saw this and he grinned malevolently.
‘You see, Captain. I don’t need your spheres at all.’
Schofield’s mind was racing, trying to put all this into some kind of order, and suddenly it all made sense: that extra sphere had come from the emergency bunker Ivanov had mentioned before, the one buried deep beneath the main tower, the bunker that the Russian traitor, Kotsky, couldn’t know
about . . . but which the Lord of Anarchy evidently did know of.
On the screen, the Lord seemed to peer intently at Schofield, trying to read his reaction to this.
‘It occurs to me, Captain, that you and I are very much alike. We will do anything to achieve our goals. You will risk your life to save the world, while I will do the same to destroy it. We are both passionate about what we desire. It’s just that we each desire the opposite of what the other does. Which is why I will take so much pleasure in letting you see this. I will see the world go up in flames. You will see your own failure.’
With those words, the Lord of Anarchy stepped away from his camera . . .
. . . to reveal that he was not inside his command centre anymore but rather outside, standing in front of a sixteen-wheeled missile launcher: a classic snub-nosed semi-trailer-sized ‘transporter erector launcher’ that bore a single Russian SS-23 intermediate-range ballistic missile on its back.
The Lord of Anarchy handed his red uranium sphere to a pair of subordinates who placed it into an insertion capsule which was then slotted inside a waiting warhead. The warhead was attached to the missile and the missile was slowly aimed skyward.
Schofield could only watch helplessly as all this happened. There was nothing he could do—
Wait.
He keyed his own radio: ‘Kid? Mario? You anywhere near the missile battery yet?’
The Kid’s voice came in. ‘We just arrived at the bridge leading to it, as ordered. But that bridge is guarded like Fort Knox. They got men all over it. We can’t get to the battery. Why?’
‘Because they’re already there and they’re about to launch,’ Schofield said sadly. ‘They have an extra sphere and they’re going to fire it right now.’
He bowed his head.
Now there really was nothing he could do but watch the end of the world.
‘Oh, Captain,’ the Lord of Anarchy said suddenly in his ear, ‘keep an eye out for berserkers.’
A sudden spray of bullets pummelled the outside of the Antonov. Down in the hold, Baba and Mother fired back, cutting down another three berserkers.
Champion came alongside Schofield in the cockpit, stared at the screen. ‘SS-23,’ she said. ‘Medium-range ballistic missile, capable of striking a target perhaps 250 to 300 miles away. The Soviets claimed they discontinued building them under the INF Treaty of 1987.’
They could see at least four more transporter erector launchers parked behind the one on the screen, each with an SS-23 on its back.
‘Looks like they ended up here,’ Schofield said. ‘This island is the graveyard of the Cold War.’
The missile’s slow rise stopped.
It was vertical.
Ready for launch.
Ready to ignite the atmosphere and there was not a damn thing Schofield could do about it.
The Lord of Anarchy turned to the camera. ‘Witness your failure, Captain. Witness the end of the world as we know it. Launch the missile.’
A switch was thrown and the SS-23’s thrusters burst to life, spewing flames and a billowing cloud of smoke. It rose into the air.
Schofield looked away from the screen and up into the southern sky.
Lancing up into the atmosphere, a tail of thick smoke extending out behind it, was the missile carrying the uranium sphere.
It rose rapidly and in a few moments it was a tiny speck high above the southern horizon, a speck that in a few seconds would change the face of the planet.
Schofield stared at it helplessly as the Lord of Anarchy said in his ear, ‘Detonate.’
A blinding flash lit up the southern sky.
What followed was a sight the likes of which neither Schofield nor Champion had ever seen in their lives.
A dazzling, incandescent, white-hot body of air expanded laterally from the point where they had last seen the SS-23 missile. The blast flame expanded with shocking speed, at an exponential rate. And in a single, horrifying instant, the entire sky to the south of Dragon Island went from pale blue to flaming yellow-white.
The atmosphere had been ignited.
The Earth was on fire.
THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM
WASHINGTON, D.C.
SAME TIME
In the Situation Room, an Army tech manning a satellite console turned sharply.
‘Sir!’ he called to the Army general in the Crisis Response Team, ‘I have a missile launch from Dragon Island!’
The President strode over and saw a real-time overhead satellite image of Dragon Island and the Arctic Ocean surrounding it.
‘They’re igniting the gas cloud,’ DIA deputy director Gordon said. ‘Our efforts have failed . . .’
No sooner had she said this than, on the monitor, a section of the ocean to the south of Dragon Island flared suddenly with blazing white light.
The tech said, ‘Missile detonation detected . . .’
The President stared at the image, horrorstruck. ‘God help us.’
If someone were looking down on the Earth from space, Schofield figured, they would have seen a blinding flash from up near the North Pole, and then they would have seen the extending yellow-white inferno advancing around the globe in a spiral of fiery devastation.
At that thought, Schofield whipped up his wristguard and flicked on its satellite imagery, bringing up his own real-time overhead view of Dragon Island and the Arctic Circle.
On the black-and-white screen, he saw the atmospheric inferno.
It reached outward from Dragon Island like the claw of some mythical creature, reaching southward before curving eastward, following the course of the jetstream.
Schofield felt ill. He was literally watching the end of the—
And then suddenly the expanding wave of devastation and destruction stopped.
Abruptly and without warning, as if it had come up against an invisible wall in the atmosphere.
Schofield frowned. ‘What the hell . . . ?’
By his crude reckoning, the roaring atmospheric fire had only gone about six hundred miles before it hit the invisible wall and stopped.
Then he heard the Lord of Anarchy’s voice, only it wasn’t directed at him: ‘What the fuck just happened!’
Another voice: ‘Sir! We just caught an intruder in the gasworks under the main vents! He cut the TEB pipes feeding the vents! By the look of the oxidisation around the valves, he must’ve cut them two hours ago! We’ve been pumping useless gas up into the sky for the last two hours!’
‘What? Who is he?’ the Lord of Anarchy demanded.
‘Says his name is Barker. Navy SEAL. Musta slipped past us when we killed the others in the submarine dock.’
Schofield’s mind raced.
It was Ira Barker.
Ironbark.
Somehow, Ironbark had survived the clusterfuck in the submarine dock and while Schofield and his people had been islet-hopping to Dragon Island and stealing the spheres, Ironbark had penetrated Dragon, got to the gas vents and, unknown to anyone, sabotaged them.
The SS-23 missile had detonated its quasi-nuclear payload but thanks to Ironbark, the gas cloud close to Dragon was not combustible, so the missile had ignited nothing—or perhaps it had just ignited some leftover trace particles of the gas, causing the ‘smaller’ incandescent flash in the sky that he had just seen.
At that exact moment something else became clear to Schofield . . . at exactly the same time as it appeared to dawn on the Lord of Anarchy.
‘Thanks to Ironbark’s sabotage,’ Schofield said aloud, ‘the sky for a few hundred miles is safe, but the atmosphere over the rest of the northern hemisphere is still contaminated with combustible gas. This isn’t over. If the Army of Thieves gets another sphere, they’ll fire the next missile past the safe zone and detonate it inside the infused atmosphere. Which means . . .’
He snapped to look outside.
‘. . . they need our spheres again. They’re not going to toy with us anymore. They’re going to attack this plane with overwhelming
force right now.’
No sooner had he said it than twelve berserkers burst forth from the ring of vehicles surrounding the plane, AK-47s blazing, followed by the rest of the Army force on the runway.
The Army of Thieves had just declared war on Shane Schofield and his plane.
Mother and Baba started firing straight away and managed to take down the first rank of berserkers, but this attack was far larger than any of the previous ones. It was simply too big to repel.
‘We have ten seconds to do something!’ Champion said urgently to Schofield.
Beside them, Ivanov said, ‘But we have nowhere to go—’
‘There’s always somewhere to go . . .’ Schofield said, his eyes searching as the sound of gunfire increased.
His gaze landed on the broad river right in front of their plane, the one that flowed parallel to the runway, ending at the high western cliffs of Dragon Island in a mighty waterfall.
‘Why not?’ he said as he reached past Ivanov and jammed forward on all four of the Antonov’s throttles and—just as the next rank of berserkers reached it—the big cargo plane suddenly lunged forward, engines surging, tyres squealing, its destroyed forward landing gear shrieking as it scraped across the runway.
The plane shot forward and charged straight off the side of the runway and down a short embankment, rumbling toward the river.
Back in the hold, both Mother and Baba were thrown off their feet by the abrupt surge of power and the ensuing plunge down the embankment.
As she scrabbled for a handhold, Mother called, ‘Scarecrow! What are you doing!’
‘Keeping us alive!’
The Antonov picked up speed, bouncing wildly as it rumbled down the embankment and then—suddenly, crazily—shot off the edge of the riverbank and plunged nose-first into the fast-flowing waters of the river!
The Antonov sent up a massive splash as its belly hit the water. Like most planes it was designed for a water landing, and even with its rear ramp open, it immediately began to float, bobbing like a child’s bath toy.
Then, a few seconds after the great splash settled, the plane began to move, slowly at first, then more quickly. It pivoted on the surface of the river so that now it travelled forward, nose-first, carried downstream by the steady current toward the powerful waterfall that tumbled over the cliffs only six hundred metres away.