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.’
Inside the Beriev’s cockpit, Schofield and Mother were moving frantically now.
Mother released the young Russian private from his flight seat and they shimmied out the smashed cockpit windows.
Schofield slid to Vasily Ivanov’s side and had just started to extract Ivanov from his flight seat when, through the lopsided cockpit windshield, he saw one of the Cobras loose a pair of heat-seeking missiles.
The two missiles looped through the air, zeroing in on the stricken plane.
Scarecrow yelled, ‘Bertie! Missile scrambler! Now!’
Outside the Beriev, Bertie replied, ‘Missile scrambling initiated.’ He then emitted a powerful burst of short-range electronic jamming.
Almost immediately the two missiles peeled away and slammed into the ice plain a short distance from the Beriev in twin explosions of fire and ice.
Schofield struggled with Ivanov’s seatbelt. It was jammed with frost.
‘Mother!’ he called. ‘Get back to the boats! Before that Osprey lands and unloads ground troops!’
‘What about you?’ Mother shouted back.
‘I gotta get this guy out! I’ll catch up! Now, go!’
Mother bolted, hauling the dazed young Russian private with her. As they ran across the fifty yards of open ground between the Beriev and the lead containing their boats the second Cobra tried to loose another missile, but this one also went haywire and smashed into the ice.
‘Cobras, forget it. They’ve got anti-missile countermeasures,’ the pilot named Hammerhead said. ‘I’m going to unload the ground team. You take care of those two runners.’
The Osprey powered ahead of the two Cobras, up-tilted its rotors and swung into a hover.
As it did so, its side doors were pulled open from within and drop ropes were tossed out. Within seconds, eight heavily armed men in black balaclavas and Marine Corps parkas were sliding down the ropes and hitting the ground one after the other.
They fanned out in perfect formation, AK-47s up, moving in on the crashed Beriev.
At the same time, one of the Cobras pivoted in the air and aimed its M134 at the fleeing figures of Mother and the Russian private.
The minigun whirred to life, barrels spinning, and unleashed a thunderous burst of hypermachine-gun fire.
The ice behind Mother’s running feet leapt upward as bullets strafed it.
‘Dive!’ she yelled to the young private limping along beside her.
They dived forward, toward the ladder hooks looped over the edge of the ice, chased by bullets.
Mother hit the ice on her belly and slid forward like a batter trying to steal second, before she hit the edge and went flying off it into open space, falling suddenly as she felt a bullet slap against the sole of her left boot. She dropped in a clumsy heap onto the first boat waiting at the base of the ladder.
Behind her, the Russian private did the same, but he was a split second behind Mother and that made a world of difference to the result.
As he slid over the lip, he was literally ripped apart by the hail of bullets. Blood fountains spurted all over his body, but propelled by his own dive, his corpse continued off the edge and, like Mother, it also dropped into the first AFDV, right next to Emma Dawson, who screamed at the sight of the bullet-riddled body that thudded down next to her like a slab of meat on a butcher’s block. It was no longer recognisable as a human being.
Mother gasped, out of breath. ‘Motherfucker, that was close! Oh, Jesus, Scarecrow . . .’
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The roar of the hovering Osprey was deafening. A tornado of ice and snow swirled around the Beriev.
Inside the crashed plane’s cockpit, Schofield splashed some water from his canteen onto Ivanov’s buckle and the frost melted and the seatbelt unjammed. Schofield yanked the Russian from his flight seat.
‘Come on, buddy,’ he said, peering outside and seeing the eight-man balaclava-and-parka-wearing force approaching the Beriev from the south. He glanced eastward.
‘Mother, you okay?’
‘I’m clear, but my guy’s toast. What about you?’
‘On my way—uh-oh . . .’
One of the balaclava-clad men dropped to a prone position, took aim down the sights of a very powerful bipod-mounted machine gun and squeezed the trigger—
—braaaaaaaaack!
The gunman was himself thrown backwards by a terrible burst of machine-gun fire.
Schofield snapped up to see—of all things—Bertie’s gunbarrel smoking.
‘Oh, good robot,’ he said. ‘Good robot.’
Bertie lay down some more deadly fire and the other attackers variously dived for cover behind the Beriev itself or returned fire at Bertie. Bullets bounced off the little robot’s metal flanks while Bertie just kept panning left and right, emitting short controlled bursts.
But then while Bertie was facing right, Schofield glimpsed another enemy commando to their left—appearing between the Beriev and the lead containing their escape boats—as he swung a Russian-made RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher onto his shoulder.
The man was only just in Scarecrow’s field of vision. Schofield had to peer up through the cracked windshield of the Beriev just to see him. The angle was too narrow to fire at the man and in any case, Schofield didn’t have anything to match the firepower of an RPG.
He looked about himself for options.
Wait a second . . .
The parka-clad commando peered down the sight of his rocket launcher, steadied it on his shoulder—as inside the cockpit of the Beriev, Shane Schofield pushed Ivanov backward and said, ‘Cover your ears!’
Then Scarecrow yanked on the ejection lever of the Beriev’s copilot’s seat.