Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (15 page)

They kept running and firing, hustling down the covered walkway.

A short distance ahead, the reinforced glass awning of the walkway had been shattered, leaving a long stretch of the trench open to the sky. Here a large mound of snow had fallen into the sunken path, filling it, blocking the way.

Schofield peered back down the walkway, searching for the original enemy force that would soon arrive behind them.

He tried to calm his mind. He only had a few seconds, but if they were going to get out of this, he needed to think clearly and make the right decision.

Okay. What do you have to do?

I need to get to Dragon Island to stop the ignition of the atmospheric weapon inside the hour
.

But my enemies are outmanoeuvring me at every turn. They’re carrying out a co-ordinated plan while I’m improvising as I go.

They know the terrain. I don’t. I only know where I am when I look around the next corner.

And now they’re both in front of and behind us and about to rip us apart.

I am seriously about to lose this battle . . .

So what do you need to do to stop that happening?

I need to alter the conditions of battle
.

Okay. How are you going to do that?

I need to disrupt their plan. I need to get out of this walkway and make them play a game of my choosing
—

His eyes scanned the area around them: the high rocky rim of the crater, the t-shaped girder structure above the whole space, the watchtower in the middle of the Stadium—

The watchtower
. . .

That was it. That was how you changed the state of this battle.

If I can just buy a little time
. . .

He recalled seeing a network of military-style trenches cut into the floor of the Stadium; trenches in which the Soviets had tested their polar bears in combat scenarios.

That might work
. . .

‘People!’ he called. ‘We can’t stay in this walkway! When you get to that open section up ahead, climb up the snow mound and go left into the trenches! They’ll give us some cover!’

A bullet whistled past his ear.

It had come from behind.

Their pursuers had arrived at the start of the walkway.

With Dubois still on his shoulder, Schofield whirled and opened fire with his spare hand. So did the Kid, Mario and Mother, forcing the attackers back up the stairs.

Leading the way, Zack and the limping Emma arrived at the open section of the walkway. The snow mound rose before them, white and huge, blocking the way—and the sightlines of the snipers on the far tower—but also providing an ungainly slope up which they could climb out of the sunken walkway.

Suddenly, more enemy rounds sizzled past their heads, smacking into the walls of the walkway. These rounds had come from the
side
, from more shooters stationed up on the rim of the crater, on both the eastern and western sides—these shooters were huddled beside the large steel buttresses from which the mighty girders that straddled the immense Stadium sprang.

Baba and Champion stepped up alongside Zack and Emma and returned fire.

‘Go!’ Champion yelled. ‘Get to the trenches!’

Zack—still carrying Bertie like a suitcase in his free hand—pushed Emma up the snow mound before joining her. They scrambled on their hands and knees across some open muddy ground, bullets impacting all around them, before they dropped into the safety of the nearest trench.

The two civilians landed inside the six-foot-deep trench. Its dark earthen walls were covered in frost. The trench stretched away from them, tight and narrow, branching off into several other trenches: a mini-maze of right-angled twists and turns.

From somewhere in those passageways, Zack heard a low growl.

‘I don’t think these trenches are empty . . .’ he said.

In the walkway, Schofield was still firing back at the pursuing force with Dubois hanging from his shoulder.

He jerked his chin southward. ‘Mother! I want that watchtower! Get to it via the trenches! Kid, Mario: protect Dr Ivanov and Chad, and catch up with Zack and Emma!’

‘Whatever you say, Scarecrow!’ Mother hurried up and out of the walkway, firing in every direction as she went. Mario and Chad went next, followed by the Kid who reached back down to grab Ivanov.

Veronique Champion came alongside Schofield, still firing nonstop.

‘Captain!’ she shouted. ‘We can’t continue like this! We need to change the conditions of this battle or we won’t last much longer!’

‘I know! I know!’

‘Do you have a plan?’

‘Yeah! We get into the trenches and work our way over to that watchtower!’

‘And then?’

‘From there, I’m going to—’ Gunfire cut him off.

‘Never mind! That is good enough for me for now!’ Veronique threw an arm underneath Dubois and, covered by Baba, helped Schofield drag the wounded French soldier up the snow mound.

They had almost made it up the mound when suddenly Schofield realised that the gunfire from
behind
them had stopped.

He frowned, peered back down the walkway.

There was now no-one at the base of the stairs at that end. No shadowy figures, nobody.

That wasn’t good. It meant they were up to somethi—

Clink, clink, clink
.

A small metal cylinder bounced down the stairs and rolled to a halt at that end of the walkway.

It looked to Schofield like a smoke grenade, only smaller. At first he thought it might be another acid grenade but this cylinder wasn’t painted silver. Rather, it was painted bright red with yellow bands at either end.

Up above Schofield, Ivanov had stopped and turned, too, and he saw the grenade.

His eyes went wide. ‘Captain! Get out of the trench now! It’s a red uranium grenade!’

Baba and Champion were already out of the trench. Champion was reaching back down, pulling Schofield—with Dubois on his shoulder—up the snow mound, when suddenly Dubois’ boots slipped and as he scrabbled for a purchase, Dubois—almost unconscious from loss of blood—lost his grip on Schofield’s hand and fell back down the mound, tumbling back into the walkway.

Schofield made to dive after him but before he could, he heard Ivanov yell to Champion: ‘No! It’s too late! Get the captain out!’ and Schofield felt Champion yank him up and out of the walkway and he fell face-first onto cold hardpacked mud a split second before the red-and-yellow grenade spectacularly went off.

A five-foot-high horizontal finger of yellow-red fire whooshed past Schofield, completely filling the walkway as it rushed by him: a blasting, rushing, rampaging stream of liquid fire.

Dubois never stood a chance.

The fire lanced right
through
him, liquefying his body in an instant. An entire human being just melted in the blink of an eye.

Schofield’s eyes boggled.

It looked like the elongated tongue of fire sent forth by a flamethrower, only bigger, much bigger: this was a tongue of fire eight feet wide by five feet high, contained only by the walls of the walkway. It was as if the walkway had suddenly been flooded not with water but with
fire
: blazing yellow liquid fire.

Before it destroyed Dubois, the finger of flame had rocketed down the roofed section of the sunken passageway, its intense heat shattering the reinforced glass awning, sending successive sections of the awning exploding skyward.

Then, after liquefying the Frenchman, the river of fire slammed into the snow mound and obliterated it, too, slicing through it like a hot knife through butter and sending an explosion of steam shooting a hundred feet into the air, engulfing the area around the walkway in a dense cloud of fog.

Schofield fell back from the blazing, glowing walkway.

When he regathered himself—wild bullets were still impacting all around him—he saw that the finger of fire had burned itself out, the snow mound was simply gone and the grey concrete walls and floor of the half-buried walkway glowed incandescent orange, like embers in a fireplace, the outer layer of the concrete having been melted by the intense heat.

Covered by the newly created fog, Schofield rolled backwards with Champion and dropped into the nearest trench, landing next to Mother, the Kid, Baba and Ivanov. Mario and Chad hovered nearby, both looking very anxious. Zack and Emma were nowhere to be seen.

‘What the hell was that!’ Schofield gasped.

‘That,’ Ivanov said, ‘was a grenade with a thermobaric core.’

‘But it was tiny . . .’ Mario said.

‘Its red uranium core would have been the size of a grain of rice,’ Ivanov said, ‘and its explosion was small because it only fed off the ambient oxygen in the air. An explosion that uses an incendiary gas cloud is far more potent.’

‘That was a
small
explosion?’ Mother said.

‘Doesn’t matter now.’ Schofield stood, gazing up at the watchtower looming above the mist-enshrouded trench system. ‘Unless we get out of this Stadium fast, we’re not going to be any use to anyone. We’re heading for that tower, people.’

As they hurried off, the Kid came alongside Schofield. ‘Sir, I can’t find Zack and Emma, and neither of them are wearing headsets.’

Schofield frowned for a second in thought, before he touched his throat-mike and said, ‘Bertie? Do you read me?’

‘
I read you, Captain Schofield
,’ Bertie’s voice replied.

‘Put me on speaker, please.’

‘
You are on speaker.
’

‘Zack? You hear me?’

Zack’s voice came in. It sounded distant, like someone on a speakerphone. ‘
I hear you, Captain.
’

‘Where are you? Is Emma with you?’

Zack was hurrying through a misty trench with Bertie whizzing along beside him and Emma draped over his shoulder, limping.

‘We’re in the trench system, but we must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. We’re lost.’

‘
Can you see the watchtower in the middle of the Stadium?
’ Schofield’s voice said through Bertie’s speaker.

Zack peered out over the rim of the trench he was standing in. At first he saw nothing but the rocky inner wall of the crater and the office building that they had come through.

‘No . . .’ He turned and jumped. ‘Oh, wait, I see it. Damn, we went the wrong way. I took us back toward the northern end of the crater.’

‘
Never mind. You did good. You stayed alive. Just head for that watchtower. We’ll meet you there.
’

‘Got it.’

Zack and Emma hurried off, unaware of the distinctive footprints Zack’s cold-weather Nike boots left in the mud behind them.

Schofield strode quickly through the trench-maze, moving fast and low, taking every turn decisively. Ahead of him, rising above the fog layer, was the watchtower, coming closer with every step.

‘So what’s your brilliant plan, Captain?’ Champion said.

‘Down here, we’re rats in a maze.’ He never stopped moving. ‘They have men all around us—three sniper positions to the south, east and west, plus the flushing team behind us to the north. If we stay here, it’s only a matter of time till they take us out. We need to turn the tables. We need to take some higher ground, take
them
out, and then roll on to Dragon Island without losing any more time. That watchtower is the key to it all.’

A stray bullet whistled down through the fog and lodged in the mud wall beside Schofield’s head. He barely noticed it, kept moving.

Champion said, ‘If they see you up in that watchtower, they’ll hit it with an RPG within thirty seconds . . .’

‘I know,’ Schofield said. ‘That gives me thirty seconds to do what I have to do.’

Schofield and his group came to the edge of the trench system, to the point where it was closest to the watchtower.

‘Okay, folks,’ Schofield readied his MP-7, ‘this little operation will have two phases. First phase, I’m the bait. I make a break for the watchtower . . . their snipers up on the eastern and western rims fire on me . . . you take them out. Got it?’

‘Oui,’ Baba said.

‘So long as you’re happy being bait,’ Mother said.

‘And the second phase?’ Champion asked.

‘I take out their other sniper position over on that southern watchtower.’

‘Which will of course depend on whether you survive the first phase,’ Champion said.

‘Yeah.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Okay, let’s roll.’

And with those words, he broke cover and sprinted for the base of the watchtower.

Muzzle flashes erupted immediately from the eastern and western rims of the crater and a line of bullets chewed up the dirt inches behind Schofield’s running feet.

The strafing was about to catch up with him when Mother, Mario, the Kid, Champion and Baba all rose together—Mother, Mario and the Kid pointing east, the French pair pointing west—and opened fire on the enemy positions.

The two sniper posts were ripped apart by their fire and in each position, three figures were hurled backwards. The muzzle flashes from up there ceased.

Schofield hit the base of the watchtower at a run as a new volley of gunfire pinged against its criss-crossing struts.

This gunfire came from the
other
watchtower, the one that stood on top of the office building at the distant southern end of the Stadium.

His heart pounding, Schofield clambered up his watchtower’s internal ladder.

‘Mother! That other watchtower!’

Bullets sizzled past him as he climbed, ricocheting off the tower’s struts, whizzing past his head. One round made a popping sound as it broke the sound barrier millimetres in front of his face and cut a slit-like mark on the lens of his glasses. Another hit his left hand, smashing into his little finger. Schofield grimaced with pain but kept climbing.

The others offered what cover fire they could, but the south-facing angle wasn’t as good as the eastern and western ones, and the fire from the southern watchtower was only minorly inhibited.

Schofield reached the cupola of the watchtower and he saw the whole massive crater spread out around him, a perfect 360-degree view.

But he didn’t stop to enjoy it. His thirty seconds were almost up.