Typhon hurried out the door with the sphere.
Fatigued beyond measure, his body aching, Schofield watched the awful scene play out.
Things couldn’t get any worse: Mother and Baba were dead, Emma was about to become way-too-intimately acquainted with a member of the Army of Thieves, and Typhon was about to launch a missile into the contaminated atmosphere and incinerate all of China, most of India, and much of the rest of the northern hemisphere in an act that had been conceived, planned and executed by one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s best minds.
Only then it got worse.
Calderon came over to him, smiling his smug torturer’s grin. When he spoke, he spoke softly, so that only Schofield could hear:
‘Congratulations, Captain, you have served your purpose. Alas, you are of no further use to me, which means you will not see the spectacular end of the world as we know it. I have no more speeches for you and no more torture either. Now you must simply die.’
He lifted Schofield’s reflective glasses off his head and appraised them like a jeweller examining a diamond. They bore many nicks and scratches, including the mark from the bullet that had sliced across them earlier.
Calderon said, ‘I like to keep a souvenir from the men I defeat, trophies that remind me of past victories. These glasses will be my reminder of the day I beat the Scarecrow.’
He pulled out a knife and scratched a deep A-in-a-circle into the wraparound lens of the Oakleys and then held the glasses aloft for the crowd to see.
They roared their approval.
Slipping the glasses into his jacket, Calderon stepped away from Schofield. ‘Mobutu, attach an extra electrode to his heart and apply 10,000 volts. Sorry, Captain, it was nice knowing you. You were a worthy adversary, but America needs me more than it needs you.’
Mobutu attached an extra electrode to the wet skin over Schofield’s heart and resumed his position by the transformer.
Calderon nodded once.
Mobutu turned the dial.
And Schofield jolted more violently than ever before.
Naked sparks flew off the bedframe this time.
Schofield spasmed terribly, his back arching as far as his bonds would allow. He head was thrown backwards and his eyes rolled up into his head and in an instant, it was over.
His body fell completely limp.
It hung from the steel bedframe, unmoving.
Mobutu flicked off the dial and as the Army of Thieves waited tensely, Calderon himself checked Schofield’s pulse.
And found nothing.
Calderon turned . . . and smiled.
He didn’t have to say anything. The crowd roared.
Shane Schofield was dead.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
3 APRIL, 2355 HOURS
1255 HOURS (4 APRIL) AT DRAGON
Dave Fairfax sped through the streets of Washington, D.C. with Marianne Retter by his side in a little Toyota Prius.
After they had opened Marius Calderon’s classified CIA plan to use Russia to destroy China—appropriately named Operation ‘Dragonslayer’—they had given away their position and so had had to run.
Which was why they were now driving in the Prius. It was actually part of the Zipcar network—an eco-friendly car-sharing network that Dave belonged to; Zipcars were parked at various sites around the city and if you had a Zipcard, you could access them. Dave guessed—correctly—that not long after he used his swipecard to access the car, someone somewhere would detect the ensuing deduction on his credit card and flag the car for immediate detention by the D.C. police. But it was worth the risk, because he didn’t plan on being in the car for long.
‘Where are we going?’ Retter asked.
Dave looked determinedly forward. ‘There’s only one place we can go: the one place they don’t want you to go.’
They swung onto the north-west arm of Pennsylvania Avenue and beheld the famous mansion at the other end, lit up by floodlights, glowing in the night.
‘We have to get you to your appointment at the White House,’ Dave said.
‘The CIA will be watching it for sure,’ Retter said as they cruised down Pennsylvania Avenue with the gentle flow of night-time traffic. ‘They’ll have people stationed all around it.’
‘I imagine they will,’ Dave said, ‘so we’re gonna need a little luck.’
They came to the corner of Pennsylvania and West Executive Avenue, the road that gave access to the West Wing Entrance. They turned onto West Executive Avenue.
Dave’s eyes fell on the West Wing Entrance and its boomgated guardhouse.
Retter scanned the wider area, searching for CIA agents. Lafayette Square was filled with the usual crowd: tourists, cops and . . . four pairs of men in suits positioned at strategic points, several of whom were touching their ears and whispering into their cuffs as they surveyed the area.
‘You see ’em?’ Dave said.
Retter said, ‘They could just be Secret Service—’
Suddenly one of the men pointed at their Prius and started running.
‘Shit!’ Retter said. ‘We’re made!’
Dave snapped to look at the West Wing Entrance.
‘Aw, fuck it,’ he said as he floored the gas pedal and yanked left on the steering wheel.
The little Prius squealed as it swung off the road, jumped the kerb and sped towards the West Wing Entrance!
As Dave had expected, uniformed Secret Service guardsmen in the gatehouse opened fire on the little car immediately—although he didn’t think many terrorists charged toward the White House in hybrids. He and Retter ducked as their windshield shattered.
The Prius veered wildly and smashed into a reinforced gatepost, coming to a crunching halt. Its bonnet crumpled and Dave and Retter were flung forward in their seats as the car’s airbags inflated with a sudden whoosh!
Hissing steam, the little car was quickly surrounded by no fewer than six Secret Service guards, all with their pistols raised.
The CIA men in the park who had briefly given chase on foot hung back—Dave and Retter were now in the Secret Service’s jurisdiction and when it came to the security of the White House, the Service guarded their turf jealously. They didn’t hand over anyone to anyone until they had done their own investigation.
‘Get out of the vehicle with your hands up!’ the lead Secret Service agent yelled furiously.
Dave and Retter exited the vehicle as instructed, and were promptly shoved to the ground, faces rammed into the dirt. They were then handcuffed while the car was searched.
‘No devices in or under the car,’ a guard reported.
The lead guard shook his head. ‘Check their IDs.’ He lifted Dave to his feet. ‘You just landed yourself in big trouble, buddy.’
As he came to his feet, Dave said in a loud voice that every guard could hear, ‘Sir, my name is David Fairfax, Defense Intelligence Agency. This is Marianne Retter, also DIA. Please check your visitor’s log. You’ll find that Ms Retter has an urgent appointment with the President.’
It took twenty minutes—time which Dave and Marianne spent in the back of a prison van parked just inside the West Wing Entrance—but eventually word came through.
The senior Secret Service guard opened the van himself. With him was a presidential aide in a suit.
‘Turns out the lady does have an appointment,’ the senior guard said. ‘And you, Mr Fairfax, have a distinguished record. I’ve been told that if the lady wants you with her, you may accompany her inside.’
Retter said, ‘You bet I do.’
‘Next time,’ the guard said, ‘just stop at the gate and wait your turn.’
‘Sorry,’ Dave said. ‘Couldn’t do that. This place was surrounded by people who wanted to prevent us getting in. If we’d stopped, we’d have been dead.’ He gave the guard a weak smile. ‘Sorry about your gate.’
And with those words, Dave Fairfax and Marianne Retter hurried inside the White House.
DRAGON ISLAND GASWORKS
4
APRIL, 1255 HOURS
Like Ironbark and Hartigan before him, Schofield’s body—still attached to the metal bedframe—was immediately and unceremoniously disposed of: it was tossed off the balcony.
The whole cruel contraption, bedframe and corpse, landed on the long industrial conveyor belt on the level below and commenced its journey toward the furnace fifty yards away. Before it reached the furnace, Schofield’s body would pass underneath the broad ramp that stretched out from the railway platform into the gasworks.
Because of this, Schofield’s corpse would be out of sight from the Army of Thieves men on the balcony for perhaps ten seconds.
Schofield’s immobile body passed under the ramp, disappearing from view.
‘Fire! Fire!’ the crowd chanted furiously, eager to see their enemy’s leader fall into the furnace.
Their eyes were glued to the conveyor belt on the other side of the ramp, waiting for Schofield’s body to reappear.
Marius Calderon also watched, keen to see Schofield destroyed forever.
It was he who frowned first when Schofield’s body didn’t reappear as it should have.
The conveyor belt kept rolling by, but in the spot where Schofield’s body and the bedframe should have been, it was bare, empty.
Calderon blinked, confused. Had something happened to Schofield’s body under the ramp? He sent two men down to check on it—only to hear a brief spray of gunfire from down there shortly after. When the two men didn’t return, Calderon started toward some steel stairs leading down to the lower level—
At which moment Schofield reappeared.
Only he wasn’t cuffed to the bedframe . . .
. . . and he wasn’t dead anymore either.
Shane Schofield stepped up onto the balcony, having climbed the steel stairs from the level below.
Calderon couldn’t believe it. And for the first few moments, neither could anyone else in the gathered group of Thieves.
Schofield stood there, stock still, looking like something out of a horror movie: bare-chested and barefoot, he was covered in sweat and water and foul scorch-marks, bloody scratches and open wounds. His jaw was clenched tight and his bloodshot, scarred eyes glared at Calderon with murderous rage.
Not only had he returned from the grave, he had returned from it armed: he held a Steyr TMP machine pistol in one hand and a SIG Sauer P226 pistol in the other.
As he’d stepped up from the stairs he had placed something on the floor beside him, before taking the SIG Sauer from its back. It now stood there next to him like a loyal dog.
A little silver robot.
If anything could be said about Bertie, it was that he was a damned determined little robot.
After being blasted out of the cable car terminal earlier, he had plummeted three hundred feet before landing in the freezing waters of the bay.
Of course, the landing hadn’t harmed him and he automatically inflated his buoyancy balloons and floated to the surface, bobbing there like a funny-looking mechanical duck.
Then his acquisition program kicked in: he searched for a buddy to follow.
His wheels spinning in the water, he made his way slowly but determinedly to the outer edge of the bay, where he saw to the west a point of access to Dragon Island: the abandoned whaling village.
It took him almost an hour to get there, but get there he did, and sure enough, shortly after he arrived, he saw his secondary buddy, Captain Shane M. Schofield, turn up with Veronique Champion.
When Schofield and Champion had been observed entering the whaling village, it had been Bertie doing the observing.
The little robot had hurried to catch up with Schofield, but Schofield had dashed away too quickly, to be outsmarted by Typhon at the roadblock and taken away.
Bertie could only watch in robotic dismay as this had happened.
But then, from out of nowhere, a woman’s voice had said to him, ‘Bonjour, little one.’
‘Bertie must reacquire his secondary buddy, Captain Shane M. Schofield,’ Bertie had said earnestly.
‘Oui, he must. And when you find him, I want you to give him a few things from me,’ Champion had said.
Getting past the roadblock had been a team effort: Champion had shot Schofield’s two smoke grenades—still lying near the roadblock, having been thrown to the ground by Typhon—and in the smoky haze that followed, Bertie had been brutal.
Guided by a thermal imager that could see through the smoke as if it wasn’t even there, his cannon had annihilated the roadblock team, ripped them to shreds, and within a minute, Bertie was whizzing up the steep road on his chunky little tyres, heading doggedly into Dragon Island in search of his secondary buddy.
Champion, wounded and unable to be of any more help, watched him go.
But she had given him one more instruction: follow the fresh tyre tracks of the jeep that had taken Schofield away from the roadblock. By following them diligently, Bertie had come to the gasworks.
There he scurried in through a side door and arrived underneath the ramp just in time to see Schofield’s body land with a thud on the conveyor belt right in front of him.
Recognising his secondary buddy, Bertie had whizzed forward and using his little robotic arms, pulled Schofield and the bedframe off the belt. A quick scan had revealed that Schofield had no pulse, so Bertie had unfolded his defibrillator and applied it according to his CPR programming.
Whack. Whack.
Schofield’s body jolted twice . . .
. . . before his eyes flew open and he gasped, sucking in deep rasping breaths to fill his lungs.
As Schofield recovered his breath, Bertie used his blowtorch to cut through his handcuffs and leg rope.
Thanks to the tough little robot, Schofield was alive and free again. Indeed, the only way for him to escape from Marius Calderon and the Army of Thieves had been to die.
He snatched Bertie’s first-aid pack, grabbed an AP-6 needle from it and jabbed himself with the painkiller/stimulant. His breathing evened out; he began to feel stronger.
It was then that he saw the three items sitting on Bertie’s back: Champion’s Steyr TMP, her SIG Sauer P226 pistol and a Magneteux.
He stood and nodded at Bertie. ‘Thanks, little buddy. You’re good to have around. Before we go, access your friend and foe memory bank, please.’
‘Memory bank accessed,’ Bertie said.
‘Delete Lance Corporal Vittorio Puzo from friend list.’
‘Entry deleted.’
‘Good. Now, come with me. It’s time to do some fucking damage.’
Facing off against Marius Calderon and his Army of Thieves in the gasworks—two against forty—Schofield and Bertie opened fire together.
Bertie blazed away with his cannon on full auto, sending forth a three-foot-long tongue of fire from the muzzle of his gunbarrel. His wave of heavy-calibre bullets cut into the crowd of Thieves, scything across them, and in the first burst alone, sixteen men fell, practically cut in half, bloody fountains spurting everywhere.
Schofield was more precise with his fire, but no less deadly.
The first man he took aim at was Calderon, but the Lord of Anarchy was quick. As Schofield fired, Calderon yanked Mobutu in front of him and Mobutu was hit twice in the chest while Calderon dived through the nearby exit door, disappearing outside, followed by Mario.
Next, Schofield took down the two men holding Zack, dropping them with one shot each before yelling, ‘Zack, lie down and stay down!’ Zack immediately dropped to his belly and covered his head with his hands.
Schofield then took rapid aim at the Thief holding Emma—a wiry bald man with a silver chain stretched between two facial piercings—but as Schofield fired, the man dropped down a ladder behind him, yanking Emma with him. Schofield wasn’t sure if he’d hit the man or not, but he didn’t have time to check, because right then a horizontal finger of fire rushed past him at very close range and he had to dive away.
It had actually been aimed at Bertie. The little robot had
been doing so much damage that a Thief with a flamethrowing unit slung from a harness over his shoulders had unleashed a lance of fire at him. The flames washed over Bertie, engulfing him completely, but the little robot just rolled out of them, his rubber tyres alight, and shot the flamethrowing Thief right between the eyes.
But then a far more dangerous attack came: the Caucasian officer known as Mako snatched up an RPG from the floor and fired it at Bertie.
The grenade shot across the wide space and hit Bertie square in the lower body.
Bertie blew apart.
His already-flaming tyres went flying out in four different directions while shards of titanium sprayed wildly outward. The little robot disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
Schofield saw it happen and his heart sank, but he couldn’t stop shooting. He was now alone in this fight, which meant he had to finish it quickly.
And so, in the single minute that followed, Shane Schofield, the Scarecrow, unleashed all of his fearsome skills as a warrior on the remaining twenty members of the crowd of Thieves.
He killed like a force of nature.
His face was blank, devoid of emotion. He just marched forward, firing coolly and calmly, without a single wasted bullet, an unstoppable, relentless, merciless Marine rifleman.
He nailed every man in sight.
The few members of the crowd who managed to raise a weapon in defence went down in sprays of blood, thrown off their feet by Schofield’s powerful fire. After firing the RPG, Mako used one of his own men as a human shield and took aim at Schofield but Schofield dropped them both with the same volley from his Steyr, firing it through the first man’s chest so that the same bullets lodged in Mako’s heart, too.
Schofield then saw Big Jesus and took aim at him, but the big Chilean lieutenant was smart and he dived out the exit door, shutting it behind him—and those who fled for the door after him found that he had locked it behind him, sealing them in with Schofield.