She fired hard but her bullets pinged off the Cobra’s armoured flanks. She tried firing her grenade launcher as Schofield had done before, but this Cobra’s pilot was ready for that: he released a showering spray of firecracker-like chaff and Mother’s grenades—confused into thinking that they had hit something solid—exploded too early and the Cobra remained unharmed.
It rained fire down on the fleeing, banking speedboats.
Schofield swung left and right, trying to put the ice walls between him and the chopper. He swept around a corner just as it was torn apart by minigun fire.
‘Kid!’ he yelled. ‘Keep an eye out for the Osprey! They probably split up to search for us and that Cobra will have told him where we are by now—’
With a deafening boom, the Osprey arrived, roaring low above them, its two six-barrelled Vulcan cannons blazing.
Chunks of ice and fountains of water kicked up all around the two speedboats as they shot behind another corner.
‘Goddamn it!’ Mother was still firing her G36 for all she was worth. The Kid joined her, firing with his much smaller MP-7. Even working together, they were nothing near a match for the firepower of the Osprey and the Cobra.
Schofield looked ahead: they were still about a mile away from the first—contaminated—islet.
Too far. They’d be dead in a quarter of a mile.
‘Scarecrow . . . !’ Mother yelled urgently.
‘I know!’ They were out of time and he knew it.
Unless . . .
‘Mario! Deflate skirts and prepare to submerge! Mother! I need one minute!’
‘I can give you maybe thirty seconds, honey buns!’
‘Give me whatever you can!’
He started flicking switches as Mother ejected one C-Mag and inserted another and prepared to fire again.
The Osprey swung around behind them. The Cobra dropped into the long alleyway in front of them, guns up, rotor blades blurring, cutting them off.
Shit! Schofield’s mind screamed. Caught in the middle.
Mother saw it, too. ‘Game over, dudes . . .’
‘Mais non,’ a gruff voice said from behind her, followed by a loud shuck-shuck.
Both Mother and Schofield turned to see the big French frogman—in fact, he was huge, easily six-feet-four—heft an absolutely gigantic gun that had been slung across his back, a gun that was nearly eight times heavier than Mother’s G36. It was a Russian-made 6P49 Kord, a brutish belt-fed heavy machine gun that was usually mounted on a tank turret and which fired 12.7mm ammunition. This Kord had been adapted for individual use and hung from two straps over the Frenchman’s impressively broad shoulders.
The burly frogman ripped off his scuba hood, revealing a wild tangle of brown hair and an equally wild beard that reached down to his collarbone. He hoisted the Kord into a firing position and let fucking rip.
A blazing three-foot-long tongue of fire roared out from the big gun’s muzzle, releasing an unimaginable torrent of heavy-bore bullets at the Cobra.
The chopper’s armoured flanks and windshield might have been able to resist Mother’s G36 fire but they were no match for the Kord.
The Frenchman’s bullets literally chewed up the helicopter.
Its windshield collapsed in a shower of spraying glass that quickly became intermixed with blood as the pilot behind it was chewed up, too. Then the chopper’s engine was hit and it flashed for a moment before the whole thing exploded under the awesome barrage of fire.
The chopper dropped into the water, a broken shell of an aircraft. Even the Osprey peeled away when the Frenchman turned his monstrous gun on it.
Schofield spun to see the big-bearded French frogman release his trigger with a satisfied grunt of ‘Hmph.’ He nodded to Schofield, ‘Allez! Go!’
Mother just stared at the Frenchman, stunned. She looked down at her G36 as if it were a peashooter.
As for Schofield, he didn’t need to be told twice.
He flicked more switches. ‘Mario! You ready? Let’s do this before that Osprey comes back!’
‘Ready for dive, sir,’ came Mario’s voice in his earpiece.
Schofield turned to the passengers on his boat. ‘Mother, open the regulator panel. Everybody, grab a mouthpiece, loop your wrists through a wrist cord, and slot your feet in the stirrups on the deck so you don’t float away. Zack, make sure Bertie doesn’t float or sink or whatever.’
Mother opened a small panel under the boat’s central saddle, revealing eight scuba regulators attached by hoses to a single compressed-air tank. Some extendable rubber cords with loops on their ends also popped out.
Schofield said, ‘Okay, Mario, follow me.’
As everyone scrambled for the regulators and wrist cords, Schofield deflated the AFDV’s outer rubber skirt, transforming the sleek black assault boat into a sleek black submersible. He threw his glasses into a pouch on his belt and reached for a scuba mask under the saddle and slipped it over his eyes. He then jammed a regulator into his mouth.
A moment later, their ‘boat’ slid under the surface and disappeared beneath the pack ice. Beside it, Mario’s AFDV—with Chad and the other two Frenchmen on it—did the same.
Ten seconds later, the Osprey came back for another pass, all guns blazing, but it hit nothing for by then the two Marine Corps assault boats were gone.
The two submersibles glided through the eerie underwater world of the Arctic.
It was a ghostly world of pale blue water and the white undersides of the pack ice. Everyone clung to the AFDVs by virtue of the wrist cords and foot stirrups.
As the two submersibles moved further through the haze, the ocean floor gradually rose up to meet them.
They’d reached the first islet.
Wearing a scuba mask and breathing through a regulator, Ivanov pointed to the right. Schofield skirted the edge of the islet, following its shoreline while still staying under the sea ice. A few minutes later, the two submersibles crossed another short channel, after which they saw the ocean floor rise up again to meet the pack ice: they’d come to the second islet.
Ivanov directed Schofield around the base of this islet until they arrived at a square concrete-walled entrance about the width of a train tunnel boring into the rocky landmass.
It was the loading dock Ivanov had mentioned.
Large chunks of broken concrete formed an ungainly roof above the entrance; bent and broken iron rebars protruded from it. At some time in the past, presumably during the ‘accident’ Ivanov had mentioned, the dock’s roof had caved in, blocking access to boats, but there was still room for a submersible to gain entry.
Beyond the tangle of concrete, there was only darkness.
Schofield hit the lights and two sharp beams lanced out into the murky tunnel.
Followed by Mario’s submersible, he carefully guided his Assault Force Delivery Vehicle into it.
About thirty yards in, he saw the surface. The water was so calm, it looked like a rectangular pane of glass.
Schofield signalled to Mother and the big French frogman to ready their weapons. They did so. Then Schofield brought their AFDV upward and broke the surface.
The AFDV breached inside a small concrete dock, its harsh white lights illuminating the space.
Schofield removed his mask. Shocking images greeted him.
Bloody smears on the concrete walls.
Cracked glass also stained with blood.
The half-eaten skeleton of what appeared to have once been a polar bear.
And the smell. Jesus. It smelt like an abattoir: a nauseating mix of blood and flesh.
A thick reinforced glass door with an illuminated keypad lock led further into the islet’s structure. Mercifully, the door was intact, but its other, inner, side looked like someone had thrown a bucket-load of blood onto it. Its wire-framed glass was etched with many deep animal scratch-marks.
‘What the hell is this place?’ Schofield stepped cautiously off the AFDV onto the concrete dock. Before anyone could answer hi
m, something rushed at him from the shadows.
It was huge and white and it moved with shocking speed, launching itself at Schofield with a roar.
Scarecrow had no time at all to react. He spun to see a blur of bared jaws, shaggy white fur and outstretched claws—
A burst of gunfire echoed in the close confines of the dock and the thing’s head snapped backwards, hit by a volley of tightly clustered rounds.
A second burst followed and the polar bear’s chest—for indeed it was a polar bear, though unlike any polar bear Schofield had seen—was ripped open, hit in the heart, and it toppled to the floor, dead.
Holy fucking shit . . .
Schofield turned to see who had saved him, expecting to see Mother or the big French frogman holding a gun.
But it hadn’t been either of them.
It had been one of the other two French frogmen. Indeed, this time it had been the smallest of the three French troops. He held a smoking Steyr TMP machine pistol—an Austrian-made weapon that looked like a teched-up Uzi—in a perfect firing position.
Then the frogman turned and aimed the TMP at Schofield. As he did so, Schofield glimpsed the assassin’s right wrist. Tattooed onto it were a series of tally marks: thirteen of them.
This was Renard.
The assassin from France’s external intelligence agency, the DGSE, who had requested to kill Shane Schofield.
Gun extended, the frogman yanked back his scuba hood . . . to reveal that he wasn’t a man at all.
A dark-haired woman stared at Schofield with deadly eyes.
‘’Allo, Captain Schofield,’ she said evenly, her French accent strong. ‘My name is Veronique Champion of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. Call-sign: Renard. As you are probably aware, I am here to kill you, but before I do, would you be so kind as to tell me what on Earth is going on here?’
Schofield stared down the barrel of Veronique Champion’s Steyr.
His team stood behind him—Mother, the Kid and Mario, plus the three civilians, Zack, Emma and Chad.
Champion’s two French companions stood behind her, their weapons raised. The big one’s Kord looked like a Howitzer in the tight confined space.
And off to the side stood the Russian, Vasily Ivanov.
An uneasy stand-off.
Champion—Renard—stared intently at Schofield, evaluating him. She was tall, as tall as he was, and in other circumstances, she would have been striking: she had an athletic figure, slender and lithe, a short bob of black hair pulled back off her angular face, flawless pale skin and eyes that were as black as pitch and which did not waver.
As far as weapons were concerned, in addition to the state-of-the-art Steyr, she wore a weapons belt with various smoke and stun grenades on it, a couple of five-minute scuba breathing bottles the size of energy drink cans, two knives, a silver SIG Sauer P226 pistol and in a small holster across her chest, a Ruger LCP, a pocket pistol of last resort.
Schofield cocked his head to one side.
‘Veronique Champion?’ he said.
‘You recognise the name?’
‘I once encountered a French scientist named Luc Champion at an ice station in Antarctica,’ he said carefully.
The woman did not blink. ‘I am aware of this.’
‘Luc Champion was related to you? Your brother?’
‘My cousin. I had known him since childhood.’
In his mind’s eye, Schofield could see Luc Champion as if it were yesterday: he had been the French scientist from Dumont d’Urville Station who had led a team of disguised French paratroopers into Wilkes Ice Station to kill everyone there.
‘He was a civilian, a scientist—’ Veronique Champion said.
‘—who intended to kill all the civilian American scientists at that station so that he could be the first man to study an alien spaceship which turned out not to be an alien spaceship,’ Schofield hit back.
Champion’s face went cold. ‘Did you kill him yourself?’
‘He was complicit in a murderous plan—’
‘Did you kill him?’
‘No. Barnaby had him killed.’ In the face of an overwhelming incoming force of British SAS troops, Schofield had fled Wilkes Ice Station with his people on some hovercrafts. He’d left Luc Champion behind, handcuffed to a pole. The SAS commander, Trevor Barnaby, had had Champion shot in the head. They’d found the body later.
Veronique Champion still had her gun pointed at Schofield.
Her dark eyes scanned him closely—for a long, tense moment—before abruptly she tilted her head, frowning in genuine confusion, and Schofield realised why.
She’d been searching for a lie but hadn’t found one. This had surprised her and Schofield imagined she wasn’t used to being surprised. She had come to kill a killer but had instead found—
‘Captain Schofield. As you are no doubt aware, the Republic of France wants you dead. For what you did at Wilkes Ice Station and for other actions elsewhere, including the destruction of the aircraft carrier, Richelieu. I also want you dead, for my own reasons. Yet a short while ago, you plucked me and my men from hostile waters knowing that we had been sent to kill you. Why would you do this?’
Schofield said simply, ‘I’m facing an almost impossible task here, something much bigger than your country’s vendetta against me. I figured if I rescued you and you were someone who would stop and listen for a moment, you might help me on my mission. You just lost an entire submarine and I need as many soldiers as I can get. I took the risk that you might hear me out.’
Champion didn’t move.
Her gun stayed level.
Then, very slowly, she lowered it.
‘All right, Captain. I’m listening . . . for now. But know this: if we choose to help you and we emerge from this alive, the old score must be settled.’ She waved at her men. ‘This is Master Sergeant Huguenot and Sergeant Dubois. Now, tell us what is going on.’
Schofield quickly told Champion and her men what he knew about the situation at Dragon Island, the Army of Thieves, and the atmospheric weapon they had initiated. It was, he added, the Army of Thieves that had destroyed her submarine when the French had inadvertently intruded upon their skirmish.
Schofield took the wristguard from Zack and used it to show Champion the video clip of the leader of the Army of Thieves addressing the Russian President. While he did this, Mother sidled up to the big French commando.
‘Hey,’ she said.
‘’Allo.’
‘Nice gun. A Kord.’
‘Merci beaucoup,’ he said with a quick nod. He glanced at her rifle. ‘G36. A fine weapon, too.’
Mother extended her hand. ‘Gunnery Sergeant Gena Newman, USMC, but everyone calls me Mother.’
‘I am Master Sergeant Jean-Claude François Michel Huguenot, on secondment to the DGSE from the First Parachute Regiment. I am known as Le Barbarian.’
With his shaggy hair and beard, Mother could see why. ‘Barbarian. Nice.’
‘Trust me, it is a title well earned. I eat like a bear, drink like a Viking, kill like a lion and make love like a silverback gorilla! Bah! My friends call me Baba and I have just decided that you, Gunnery Sergeant Mother Newman, with your impressive G36, may call me Baba.’
Mother eyed him sideways. Who was this guy? With his big physique, big gun, big hair, big beard and big mouth, he was—
‘Oh, God. You’re my mirror,’ she said aloud.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
Fortunately, at that moment she heard the French woman mention the Army of Thieves and she and Baba joined that conversation.
‘The Army of Thieves . . .’ Veronique Champion said, having just finished watching the mpeg of its leader addressing the Russian President.
‘You’ve heard of them?’ Schofield said.
‘The tracking of terrorist organisations is not the primary occupation of my division within the DGSE but, yes, I have been to briefings in recent months where this organisation has
been mentioned.’
‘And?’
Champion said, ‘DGSE has been monitoring a series of incidents perpetrated by this group over the last year, one incident per month, in accordance with a crude pattern. The CIA and the DIA know all this.’
‘We were sent this summary.’ Schofield showed Champion the DIA report by the agent named Retter on the wristguard’s screen. She scanned it quickly.
‘I have seen a similar report.’
‘So who are they and why are they doing this?’
‘Who are they?’ Champion shrugged. ‘A new terrorist group? A franchise of al-Qaeda? A renegade army with no allegiance to any nation? No-one knows.’
‘What about their leader? The guy who taunted the Russian President? Any idea who he is?’
‘The man who leads them is unknown to us. In the few pieces of CCTV footage that exist of the Army’s actions, he always wears large sunglasses plus a hood or helmet of some sort to conceal his identity. But he makes no effort to hide the acid scars on the left side of his face: the DGSE searched every military database we have for soldiers or specialists with such a distinctive facial feature but found nothing.
‘Having said that, some of his lieutenants have also been caught on closed-circuit cameras during those incidents and some of them are known. I recall that his right-hand man, for instance, is an ex-Chilean torturer named Typhoon or Typhon or something like that.’
Champion paused, thinking.
‘By all appearances, the Army of Thieves is an army of rogue soldiers led by a small cadre of very capable veterans. Its members are volatile but they are no rabble. On the contrary, it is a very effective and disciplined fighting force. It has successfully attacked Russian military vessels and United States Marine Corps bases.’
‘But what do they want?’ Schofield asked. ‘Groups like this always want something: recognition of a new state, the freeing of prisoners, the removal of American troops from their land. In that video clip, their leader told the Russian President that his Army was an alliance of the angry and enraged, the disenfranchised and the poor, the “dog starved at his master’s gate”. That last phrase, by the way, is a quote from William Blake, from a poem called Auguries of Innocence.’