In the right-side doorway of the plane, Mother keyed her radio: ‘Remind me how this course of action helps us, boss?’
‘They need our spheres,’ Schofield’s voice replied in her earpiece. ‘We get to the waterfall and hurl them into the ocean.’
‘And what’re the bad guys gonna do about that?’
The answer to her question came a second later: the two Strela amphibious anti-aircraft vehicles came speeding along the airstrip, racing parallel to the floating Antonov before they veered off the runway, sped down the embankment, and without any loss of speed, leapt off the riverbank and plunged into the water alongside the free-floating plane. Their propellers kicked in and the two amphibious cars started moving in toward the Antonov!
‘Oh, this is just a new level of crazy,’ Mother breathed as she turned and, to her great surprise, found herself looking into the bloodshot eyes of a berserker rushing at her from the rear of the hold, brandishing a knife!
The crazy bastard was gunless—as the Antonov had accelerated off the runway, he and four other berserkers had been close enough to dive onto its rear ramp, some with their AK-47s, some without. This guy had discarded his AK as he’d leapt for the ramp, which was why he now rushed at Mother with a serrated knife and a cry of rage.
Mother parried his knife-hand away, but the madman tumbled into her, throwing her off balance, and he headbutted her hard and she fell backwards, toppling out through the open side doorway—she had to release her G-36 to clutch the doorframe and suddenly she was dangling out the door of the Antonov, dazed and reeling, just above the waves of the river, holding on with one hand.
Her attacker lunged forward, intent on pushing her out, just as Mother swung herself up, drawing her thigh-holstered Beretta M9, and jammed it into the berserker’s mouth and fired.
The man’s head exploded, spraying blood and brains, and he dropped, headless, to the floor while Mother hauled herself back inside.
On the other side of the hold, Baba spun to see Mother get attacked by her berserker—a split second before the walls all around him were hammered with impact sparks: two more berserkers were rushing down his side of the hold, firing their AK-47s as they skirted the jeep and the cement mixer to get to him. Baba fired back with his Kord.
Beside him, Zack and Emma cowered behind the cab of the cement mixer. Bullets whizzed past their faces, impacted against the walls above their heads.
Baba pushed Zack and Emma up onto the cement mixer’s running board. ‘Get inside!’ he yelled.
Zack and Emma didn’t argue. As Baba covered them, they clambered into the cement mixer’s cab, disappearing inside it just as its tub was hit all over by a burst of machine-gun fire, but the tub’s thick walls held and saved their lives.
As for Baba, he kept firing at the two berserkers, his Kord booming loudly. While clearly crazy, these berserkers weren’t totally mindless: in fact, they were cunning little bastards. They mocked him, popping up and firing from behind the jeep, while cackling with high-pitched laughter. It was like doing battle with a pair of demented jesters.
‘Merde!’ Baba growled as one of the berserkers leapt onto the rear seat of the jeep and levelled his AK-47 at him, but Baba adjusted his aim and fired his Kord at one of the rear wheels of the jeep, blasting the handbrake clamp to pieces and the car lurched suddenly, released, and rolled quickly backwards out the open rear ramp of the Antonov, with the berserker on it!
The jeep vanished out the back of the floating plane, dropping into the water rear-first with a great splash and Baba was facing one less enemy.
While all this was happening in the hold, Schofield peered out through the cockpit’s starboard-side windows. Beside him, Champion and Ivanov were still coming to grips with their unusual predicament.
Schofield saw the two amphibious Strelas enter the water to his right, saw them powering alongside the floating Antonov. Disturbingly, he saw one man on each Strela heft an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher onto his shoulder . . .
‘This is about to get very bad. Here, take this.’ He handed Champion one of the three small Samsonite cases containing the spheres. ‘When we get to the cliffs, throw it as far as you can out to sea.’
‘If we get that far—’ she began to say just as all the forward cockpit windows shattered under heavy gunfire from an unknown direction.
Champion ducked instinctively but then—whump! whump!—the boots of the last two berserkers who had boarded the Antonov thumped down onto the bonnet of the plane.
Schofield quickly realised what had happened: after somehow boarding the plane, these two had climbed up and over the top of it to take the cockpit.
‘Out! Now!’ he yelled, pushing Champion back through the cockpit door and pulling Ivanov from his flight seat a nanosecond before the whole cockpit was raked with gunfire.
The cockpit’s walls and seats were ripped to shreds.
Unfortunately, so too was Dr Vasily Ivanov.
The Russian scientist had moved a second too late and, still being pulled by Schofield, he was torn apart by the vicious storm of bullets. He exploded all over with bloody wounds and Schofield dived out the door an instant before the storm could sweep over him, too. In a distant corner of his mind, Scarecrow felt a pang of sadness for the Russian scientist: his help had been invaluable but he wouldn’t be seeing his children and grandchildren in Odessa again.
With bullets sizzling all around them, Schofield and Champion came tumbling out of the cockpit into the rear hold.
One round took a chunk out of Schofield’s left shoulder, while another plunged into Champion’s lower back, emerging from her stomach in a gout of blood.
She yelled in pain, doubled over and stumbled.
Schofield caught her as he quickly took in the scene in the hold: the cement mixer; Baba beside it, near the open port-side door, firing at the last nimble berserker, who was peeking around the mixer’s tub; various cables, folded seats and netting; the open rear ramp with daylight and the river beyond it, and lastly, Mother, crouched by the starboard-side door—
—through which an RPG suddenly rocketed in from outside, shooming low over her head before slamming into the cement mixer and exploding!
The cement mixer was thrown through the air . . . straight at Baba.
Baba had nowhere to go—and no time at all to get out of the way. The flying cement mixer cut across Schofield’s view of the big Frenchman and with a deafening crash, smashed into the steel wall where moments before, he had been standing.
‘Jesus Christ . . .’ Schofield breathed.
He and Champion struggled to stay on their feet as the plane rocked with the explosion, when a second RPG fired from the other Strela hit one of the turboprop engines on the Antonov’s right wing and that engine burst apart.
The plane lurched dramatically.
Having lost the weight of one engine on its right side, it tilted sharply to the left, and now with its balance seriously disturbed, water started rushing in through the open rear ramp. It quickly rose to a foot in depth.
‘They’re trying to sink us before we reach the waterfall!’ Schofield called, gripping a handrail as the hold lurched wildly.
The wounded Champion, however, had not been able to find a handhold.
The plane’s dramatic tilt threw her completely off the steps at the fore end of the hold. She landed awkwardly and lost her grip on the Samsonite case in her hand. It went tumbling away into the foot-deep water . . .
. . . where it splashed to a halt right in front of the nimble berserker who had been harrying Baba.
The berserker saw it, immediately recognised its importance, and scooped it up.
Then, right on cue, as if this whole situation wasn’t already outrageous enough, an amphibious Strela came roaring in through the rear opening, kicking up a bow wave as it deliberately ran aground in the shallow water now covering the floor of the hold.
With Mother cut off by the Strela, Baba gone and Schofield too far away, the nimble berser
ker hopped, skipped and jumped his way down the semi-flooded hold and leapt onto the Strela’s bow-deck, yelling to its driver words to the effect of ‘We have them! Go!’
The driver didn’t waste any time. The Strela’s engines whined as it reversed out of the hold, dropping back into the swirling waters of the river, about to get away when—
Roooaaaar!
Schofield heard it before he saw it.
Heard the roar of the cement mixer’s engine firing up before he saw the big truck, with its heavy mixing tub on its back, reverse—at speed—toward the rear of the semi-flooded hold.
The truck, driven by Zack, carved through the knee-deep water and went flying out the rear opening, where it crunched down onto the bow of the retreating Strela. Such was the weight of the cement mixer that its rear bumper drove right into the Strela’s driver’s compartment, horrifically denting it, crushing the hapless driver and gunner inside.
It had been a last-ditch ploy by Zack: he’d seen the berserker grab the case and done all he could do to stop his escape.
But it wasn’t over yet.
For it was then that the bizarre cement-mixer-embedded-in-the-Strela hybrid began to float away from the plane!
It separated from the plane quickly—a few feet suddenly became twenty, and it drifted southward across the river’s surface, heading for the bank opposite the runway.
But it still had a bad guy aboard it: the berserker who had leapt onto the Strela with the sphere case. He started firing crazily at the cab of the cement mixer that had thwarted his triumphant escape.
The cement-mixing tub prevented him from getting a clear shot but his angry rounds still managed to impact all around Zack and Emma in the cab. They ducked their heads as glass showered over them.
Zack risked a glance in the rear-view mirror and saw their nimble attacker coming toward the cab, gun raised, a second before the mirror itself exploded under the crazed man’s gunfire.
Zack and Emma ducked away from the mirror’s exploding shards but when they looked up again, it was to see the berserker standing in the cab’s doorway, the sphere case in one hand, his AK-47 in the other, levelled at their faces.
He cackled crazily. ‘Bye-bye, birdies!’ he squealed with glee as he pulled the trigger.
The berserker’s head snapped grotesquely backward, hit in the nose by a single bullet from Mother, appearing from the other side of the cement mixer, her M9 pistol aimed across the cabin.
Unseen by anyone, after Zack had reversed his cement mixer into the Strela, she’d dived after it and caught hold of the cement mixer’s side-rail.
The berserker swayed for a moment, just long enough for Emma to reach out and grab his Samsonite case before he fell off the running board and disappeared into the fast-flowing river.
‘Thanks, Mother—!’ Zack called, but he was cut off by a jarring jolt as their cement-mixer-Strela hybrid ran aground against an outcropping of boulders on the south bank of the river.
They were ashore.
Mother looked westward, in the direction of the waterfall: it was barely a hundred metres away—
—when suddenly her view was blocked by the second Strela, bursting up and out of the river ahead of her, wheels turning, surging out of the water onto the shore.
‘Fuck me,’ Mother said.
She glanced over at the Antonov—it was now almost at the waterfall.
‘Scarecrow!’ she said into her radio. ‘I got Zack and Emma and one sphere case, but we’re cut off from the cliffs!’
‘I’m up to my neck in bad guys here, Mother,’ came the reply. ‘I’m afraid you’re on your own this time—’
The signal cut off.
Mother pursed her lips.
‘Shit. Shit. Shit. Come on, kids, if we can’t get to the cliffs, we gotta find another way to dispose of these spheres before those bastards catch us.’
They leapt off their shipwrecked cement mixer and dashed across the shore, heading south into the rugged mountainous interior of Dragon Island.
Schofield was still stuck on the Antonov, rushing toward the waterfall with two Samsonite cases—four spheres—still to get rid of.
Things had got completely out of control.
The waterfall was fast approaching. Mother was gone, along with Zack and Emma. Baba had been flattened against the wall by the cement mixer. Champion was slumped on the floor at his feet, on the edge of consciousness. He’d been shot and he still had two berserkers up in the cockpit about to—
The cockpit door flew open. The two berserkers came rushing out of it, their gunfire raking the hold.
But their fire went high, and just as the berserkers caught sight of Schofield at the base of the steps beneath them and re-aimed their weapons, the entire plane suddenly tipped precariously forward, outrageously forward—
The plane had reached the waterfall.
And was going over.
THE ANTONOV AND THE WATERFALL
But then abruptly the Antonov lurched to a shuddering stop.
With an ear-piercing shriek of metal on rock, the big plane came to an unexpected halt right on the lip of the waterfall!
It was an incredible sight: the big cargo plane, with its right wing belching fire and smoke, perched on the edge of the mighty Arctic waterfall, its nose tilted dizzyingly downward, its outstretched wings hanging low over the surging waves of the river, waves that rushed past it before launching themselves out into the void and falling three hundred feet into the ocean far below.
On the nearby runway, the pursuing force of Army of Thieves vehicles skidded to a halt while on the opposite bank, one could see the two Strelas: Mother’s still with the cement mixer embedded in its bow, the other guarding the cliffs.
Everyone inside the plane was thrown forward by the sudden lurch.
Gripping Champion, Schofield was hurled forward and slammed against the wall, while the two berserkers—milliseconds away from killing him—were both flung by the inertia back into the down-turned cockpit.
It took Schofield a second to figure out what had happened.
The landing gear.
The Antonov’s rear landing wheels must have caught on the lip of the waterfall and were now preventing the plane from going over.
This wasn’t how I planned this at all, Schofield’s mind screamed. We were supposed to get across the river, then I’d get to the cliffs where I would throw the spheres into the sea. Now I’m hanging off the edge of a waterfall in a plane with two insane attackers who in about two seconds are going to try and kill me again.
His searching eyes found the side door, only eight feet above and behind him. Did he have time to clamber up there and toss the spheres out—
Movement in the cockpit. The berserkers had regathered themselves. They’d be coming in seconds.
‘Fuck it,’ he said aloud, aiming his pistol through the cockpit doorway.
Only it wasn’t aimed at either of the berserkers.
It was aimed at the landing gear retractor lever that hung from the ceiling above the pilot’s seat.
Blam!
He fired and a spark pinged off the landing gear lever and the lever swung forward.
The result was instantaneous.
With its landing gear retracted, the plane went over the waterfall.
If the sight of the Antonov perched on the lip of the waterfall was incredible, the sight of it falling down the face of the waterfall was just astonishing.
It fell nose-first in an almost perfect swan dive, falling at exactly the same speed as the water falling around it, and for a moment, one might have been convinced it would swoop upward at the last second and soar to safety. But that didn’t happen.
The Antonov hit the churning whitewater at the base of the mighty waterfall with a great splash.
The plane’s glass nose shot underwater, its pointed tip penetrating the surface like an Olympic diver, shooting downward in a rush of bubbles.
It was only the wings of the plane—or more specifically, t
he engines on them—that brought it to a halt: a bone-jarring, deadly halt. The plane’s cockpit had travelled about twenty feet under the surface when the wing-mounted engines hit the surface and the plane’s downward journey stopped instantly.
The experience of the two berserkers in the cockpit was utterly unique: as the plane hit the ocean’s surface, seawater rushed up at them through the shattered forward windows, a great foaming rush of it; but their downward inertia took them the other way and they were flung with terrible force down into the surging water.
In the hold behind them, Schofield sat with his back to the plane’s steel forward wall, flat against a flight seat, with the groaning Champion gripped tightly in his arms.
After firing into the landing gear lever, he had leapt into the seat and quickly buckled the seatbelt.
The shuddering impact of the plane against the ocean’s surface jolted him sharply, but the seat absorbed much of the shock and the belt held him tight. Champion was almost shaken from his grip, but somehow he managed to hold her.
But it wasn’t over yet.
The worst was still to come, for the Antonov around him was now vertical, bobbing in the water.
Then, with horrifying speed, it began to sink.
Water rushed up into the Antonov through its shattered cockpit windows, swarming up into the plane in a great roiling, bubbling rush, as if it were a sentient creature trying to swallow the plane from the inside out.
Schofield’s world was turned vertical—the plane was sinking nose-first, so his forward end of the hold was now the bottom end—and it was filling fast. Water swelled all around him.
He scrambled to unlatch his seatbelt, still holding the barely conscious Champion.
As he did so, a mini-waterfall of seawater started flowing in through the open side door directly above him, raining down in an unbroken stream.