A gaseous whoosh filled the cockpit as a section of the plane’s roof was jettisoned and the co-pilot’s seat blasted out of the Beriev. Since the plane was lying on its side, the flight seat rocketed laterally through the air, shooting low over the ground on a flat horizontal trajectory before it struck the RPG-wielding commando with terrible force, square in the chest, cracking every one of his ribs before sending him flying backwards, all but breaking the man in two.
Vasily Ivanov’s eyes boggled as he looked out through the newly-opened hole in the roof of the cockpit and saw the dead commando on the ice plain.
‘You see that?’ Schofield yelled to Ivanov as the other parka-clad commandos opened fire again. ‘’Cause that’s how we’re getting out of here, too! Is that flightsuit you’re wearing good in Arctic waters?’
‘It is designed to survive in icy water for a short time, yes,’ Ivanov stammered.
‘Good enough.’ Schofield reached out through the smashed cockpit windshield with one hand, yanked Bertie back inside, and handed him to Ivanov. ‘Here, hold my robot!’ Schofield then sat on the remaining pilot’s seat and pulled Ivanov onto his own lap. ‘Now hold on to your breakfast.’
Then, with all three of them sitting on the pilot’s seat, Schofield pulled that seat’s ejection lever.
The flight seat shot out of the Beriev—with Schofield, Ivanov and Bertie on it—blasting through the ring of enemy commandos surrounding the plane!
The seat flew—on its side—a foot above the ice plain, the world around it blurring with speed, the force of its screamingly-fast lateral flight pushing Schofield and Ivanov down into it.
After about forty yards of this kind of flight, the speeding pilot’s seat hit the ground where it bounced twice like a skimming stone before shooting clear off the lip of the ice floe and out over the watery alleyway—out over the stunned faces of Mother and the others still in the two assault boats.
Having cleared the lip, the flight seat arced downward and speared into the freezing water of the lead, entering it with an almighty splash.
‘What was that?’ Chad asked, astonished.
‘That was the Scarecrow,’ Mother said, shoving the Kid out of the driver’s saddle, taking the controls and gunning the engine. ‘Hang on, people! We gotta grab him!’
Underwater silence.
As the flight seat shot under the water’s surface, Scarecrow and Ivanov separated, floating apart in the ice-blue haze. Bertie’s flotation balloons activated immediately on contact with the water and Schofield saw the little robot rise up and away to the surface.
Scarecrow felt the sting of the water against his face, the only part of his body not covered by his drysuit. It was outrageously cold, like daggers of ice.
The impact with the water had flipped his reflective glasses onto his forehead, and as he hovered there in the clear blue water of the Arctic, he was enveloped by eerie silence.
But not total silence. An odd thrumming could be heard.
It was then that Schofield realised that he was not alone.
There was something in front of him.
Something impossibly huge, black and enormous, hovering there in the void like a leviathan of the deep. Only it wasn’t an animal of any sort. It was man-made, mechanical.
It was a submarine.
A screaming sense of déjà vu overcame Schofield.
This had happened to him once before, during that mission in Antarctica, when he had come face-to-face with a French nuclear ballistic missile submarine. On that occasion, he had managed to destroy the submarine in question. It was one of the events that had made him a marked man by the French.
No. It couldn’t possibly be French—
And then Schofield saw the markings on the sub’s dome-shaped bow, saw the distinct blue-white-and-red flag painted on it.
Yes, it could. This submarine was French.
In the meta-time in which the brain operates, Schofield’s mind rapidly connected some dots.
The wristguard’s proximity sensor had picked up this submarine only minutes ago—which meant the sensor might not have been broken earlier in their trip and may actually have picked up the same submarine back then—the sub had followed them here—which meant it was a good guess that the sub wasn’t part of what was happening at Dragon Island—indeed, it was a better guess that this sub, this French sub which appeared to be following his team, probably had no idea at all what was going on at Dragon.
This French submarine, he realised with a shock, was up in the Arctic trying to find him.
Gazing at the gigantic submarine, Schofield suddenly noticed that there were three smaller submersibles mounted on its back, compact Swimmer Delivery Vehicles—similar to his AFDVs but smaller—carrying three frogmen apiece and which were at that very moment lifting off from the sub and coming toward Schofield.
It was an assassination squad.
A French hit team, coming for him, and yet totally unaware that they’d walked into a far more deadly firestorm.
Schofield swam for the surface.
Schofield burst up from the icy water and found himself treading water beside Ivanov and Bertie—the little robot was floating happily thanks to his flotation balloons, his fat tyres propelling him slowly but valiantly toward Schofield.
‘Captain Schofield, do you require assistance? My buoyancy features can keep you afloat till our colleagues arrive.’
Just then, like a shark rising from the depths, the first French SDV breached the surface ten yards from Scarecrow, Ivanov and Bertie.
One frogman drove while two more held short-barrelled FA-MAS assault rifles, raised and ready to fire—
With a roar, something slammed into the first French SDV, sending all three of the frogmen on it flying into the water.
It was Mother’s assault boat and it crunched over the top of the smaller French submersible, breaking it clean in two, before Mother swung her AFDV to a perfect halt beside Schofield.
‘Haul them out!’ she yelled to the Kid, Emma and Zack in the rear tray.
Schofield scooped up Bertie while the Kid and the two civilians grabbed him and within seconds he and the robot were in the boat. A moment later, Ivanov was, too.
‘Go, go!’ Schofield yelled. ‘This place is about to get really crowded and this might be our one and only chance to get out of here in one piece!’
That was the understatement of the year.
For in the next moment, several things happened at once:
First, the other two French submersibles surfaced, revealing more armed frogmen on their backs.
But then a Cobra thundered by overhead from the direction of the crashed Beriev, rotors thumping, minigun blazing, strafing the world. The skinny attack chopper’s wave of bullet-impacts traced a line across the water’s surface—a line that cut right across one of the newly-surfaced French submersibles, ripping the three frogmen on it to shreds.
That first Cobra was quickly followed by the second AH-1, which swooped into a deadly hover low over the water, right in front of Mother’s boat! It pivoted in the air, levelling its minigun at them.
‘Fuck me . . .’ Mother breathed.
The only weapon they had that possessed anywhere near enough firepower to threaten the Cobra was the grenade launcher on Mother’s G36 which right now lay at her feet, out of reach, and—
Schofield didn’t stop to think about it.
He quickly snatched up Bertie, held the little robot in front of him and instead of pulling a trigger—because Bertie didn’t have one—yelled: ‘Bertie! Fire! Fire! Fire!’
Bertie’s M249 came to stunning life.
Each shot emitted a deep puncture-like whump—whump!-whump!-whump!—yet the recoil was largely contained by Bertie’s internal compensator. The shots hit their mark. They erupted all over the Cobra’s body: cracking its canopy, slamming into its engine housing where they ruptured something, causing a thick plume of black smoke to stream out from the Cobra’s exhaust and the chopper banked wildly
away, wounded but not defeated.
Mother yelled, ‘Scarecrow! What now! Which way do we go?’
That was the question, Schofield thought. In the cacophony of clattering gunfire, booming robots and thumping choppers, he tried to think clearly.
We need to talk to this Russian guy, get some intel and make a decent plan. We don’t have much time but—he recalled the old military maxim—a good plan with less time is better than a bad plan with more time. Maybe we can double back north, regroup a little, and then head for Dragon—
He turned to face the intersection that led back north when a monstrous whooshing noise filled the air and, right in his path, the giant black hull of the French submarine exploded up out of the water, breaching the surface spectacularly.
The bulbous nose of the sub rose a full thirty feet into the air before it slammed back down onto the surface with a colossal splash that sent huge waves rolling out in every direction, causing Schofield’s two low-slung boats to rock wildly.
Schofield’s face fell.
It was completely blocking their path. They couldn’t go north.
Then, with a deafening roar, the V-22 Osprey shoomed overhead, cutting a beeline for the massive French submarine.
It’s going for the more dangerous prey first, Schofield realised. Once it takes out the sub, it can come after us at its leisure.
With its rotors tilted upwards, the Osprey did a low banking pass over the sub, in the process dropping two Mark 46 Mod 5A anti-submarine torpedoes from its wing-mounts.
The torpedoes hit the water with twin splashes and immediately zeroed in on the submarine. The Mark 46 is a fine torpedo: reliable, accurate and deadly. Fired from this range, the French sub would have no time to launch any countermeasures and the Mark 46s wouldn’t miss.
Sure enough, a few seconds later, they hit.
It sounded like the end of the universe: two terrific and immense explosions.
The massive French submarine was almost lifted completely out of the water by the blast. A geyser of whitewater sprayed a hundred feet into the air and rained down on the entire area. As the sub bucked skyward, its midsection cracked and folded, wrenched open like a beer can, and as the great sub lunged back down into the foaming water—fatally wounded, its innards literally ripped open—it immediately began to sink.
The rain of spray fell on Schofield’s thunderstruck face.
The scene before him simply defied belief:
The French submarine—smoking and flaming, its bow tilting unnaturally upwards—was sinking. Cries and shouts rang out from inside it. And all the while the Osprey hovered over it, pummelling it with relentless gunfire, taking down the sailors who now scrambled out of the conning tower, fleeing one form of death only to step into the line of fire of another.
Then there were the two Cobra attack choppers: the wounded, smoking one had backed off a little but the unhurt one was hovering low over the ice-walled intersection, nailing the three frogmen on the third and last French submersible, strafing their defenceless bodies with minigun fire, flinging them into the water, turning the hapless frogmen—killers who had walked into a much bigger fire-fight—into convulsing fountains of bloody pulp.
‘Captain!’ a voice called from behind Schofield. ‘Captain!’
Schofield turned.
It was the Russian, Ivanov.
‘We can go south from here without having to land on Dragon Island! There are a couple of small islets near the main island we can land on, if only briefly!’
‘Good enough for me.’ Schofield turned. ‘Mother—!’
He stopped short.
He saw the wounded Cobra chopper pivoting in the air a short distance away, turning its brutal minigun on the last three French frogmen in the water—the frogmen from the submersible that Mother had run over as it had approached Schofield; only now they were treading water, totally exposed, at the mercy of the smoking Cobra.
And something inside Schofield clicked.
Whoever was flying these Cobras and the Osprey were cold bastards, and even if these French assholes had been coming to kill him, they didn’t deserve to be shot like fish in a barrel. And in the back of his mind he thought that these French troops, if rescued, might even be of some help . . .
And so Schofield scooped up Mother’s G36, shucked its underslung grenade launcher and jammed down on the trigger.
A zinc-tipped anti-tank grenade zoomed out from the launcher and, trailing a dead-straight smoke tail behind it, rocketed inside the Cobra’s already-smoking exhaust and detonated.
The Cobra exploded.
It simply burst outward in a flaming fireball, spraying fragments of metal before it just dropped out of the sky and splashed into the icy Arctic water in front of the stunned French frogmen.
Mother called, ‘Oh, yeah, now you like those optional extras, don’t you!’
‘Quiet, you!’ He turned to face Mario and Chad in the other AFDV. ‘Mario! Chad! Get over here! Help us pick up these frogmen, then let’s get the hell out of here!’
‘What are you—?’ Mother frowned but Schofield just yelled, ‘Do it!’
The two American speedboats came to fast halts beside the three stunned frogmen. They were quickly yanked out of the water: two went into the rear tray of Mario and Chad’s boat while the third, a big fellow, dropped into Schofield’s rear tray, his wetsuit dripping.
‘Bonjour,’ Schofield said. ‘Welcome to our nightmare. Mother! South, now! Zack!’
The bespectacled geek looked up, alarmed, clearly not expecting to be called upon. Schofield pointed at the wristguard on Zack’s left forearm.
‘You’re gonna be our guide! Use the satellite imaging! Get us through this maze to the islets north of Dragon!’
Zack looked down at his wristguard: its display now showed a zoomed-out image of the labyrinth of ice-walled leads in which they found themselves.
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. And you’ll have to get it exactly right or we all die,’ Schofield said, taking the handlebars from Mother and handing back her G36. ‘You guide, I’ll drive, Mother will shoot. Let’s do it!’
He gunned the thrusters and the AFDV leapt off the mark, kicking up a tail of spray as it peeled out, closely followed by the second American assault boat.
They sped south, leaving the sinking French submarine behind them, and headed in the direction of Dragon Island.
It was a whole lot quieter back at Schofield’s old camp.
Jeff Hartigan was in his tent revising some of his test notes when he heard the distant sound of an aircraft.
He stepped out of his dome-shaped tent and peered south.
A lone plane appeared above the horizon, approaching.
For a brief moment, Hartigan felt a stab of fear—and wondered if perhaps he’d made a mistake staying at the camp alone—but then the aircraft came closer and he saw that it was an American V-22 Osprey with ‘MARINES’ painted in large black letters on the side.
He relaxed. He’d been right and Schofield had been wrong. The Pentagon had found some Marines stationed somewhere nearby to come and get them.
Hartigan started waving. The Osprey brought itself into a hover and landed near the camp.
Smiling, he went out to meet it.
Schofield’s two AFDVs shot like bullets through the narrow ice-walled leads.
Guided by Zack, Schofield swung the first low-slung inflatable speedboat left and right—dodging pancake-shaped ice floes and sweeping around corners—trying to put as much distance as possible between them and the Cobra and the Osprey, before the two deadly aircraft finished off the French submarine and came after them.
They’d come a good way south, maybe ten miles, since they’d seen the French sub get torpedoed by the Osprey.
Mother sat behind Schofield, eyes searching the sky, G36 at the ready. In the rear tray sat Emma, the Kid, Ivanov and the big French frogman, who still looked hopelessly confused.
‘Take the next left!’ Zack yelled over the
wind. ‘Then immediately go right!’
Schofield did so.
As he did, he glimpsed something up ahead between the walls of the lead.
Dragon Island.
The huge island looked completely out of place in the Arctic landscape. While the frozen sea around it was all white, flat and level, Dragon was dark, massive and jagged, a spiking upthrust of black rock that at some point in time millions of years ago had burst up through the pack ice and stayed. With its high snow-covered peaks and sheer cliffs looming over the ocean, it looked like an imposing natural citadel.
Schofield saw a light on one of the clifftops: the uppermost window of a watchtower or lighthouse; it seemed impossibly tiny compared to the scale of the island on which it stood.
In the foreground in front of the island, however, just as Ivanov had said, were a few small islets, low mounds of earth that rose above the ice field. They were covered in snow and mud and various oddly-shaped buildings.
‘Nice work, Zack,’ Schofield said when he saw them. ‘You got us here.’
‘Don’t stop at the first islet! It’s contaminated!’ Ivanov said, coming alongside Schofield. ‘Go to the second one. Are these boats submersible?’
‘Yes, why?’ Schofield was surprised that Ivanov might suspect that. The full capabilities of these AFDVs were classified.
‘The second islet has a small loading dock that is accessible only by submersible,’ Ivanov said. ‘We might be able to land there unseen.’
Schofield frowned. ‘Who builds a loading dock that’s only accessible by submersible?’
‘It wasn’t built that way,’ Ivanov said. ‘The dock was intentionally destroyed, because of an . . . accident . . . there.’
‘An acci—’
A line of minigun rounds cut across their path, ripping up the water in front of their boats and the remaining Cobra roared past overhead.
‘They found us!’ the Kid yelled.
‘Mother!’ Schofield called. ‘Go cyclic!’
‘On it!’ Mother raised her G36 and returned fire on full auto as they sped down the ice-walled alleyway toward the islets.