Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (25 page)

Beside him, Champion groaned something that sounded like a warning and he turned and found himself looking at point blank range into the demented face of a berserker!

The man had come from the cockpit, having somehow survived the fall, and he came bursting across the foaming water screaming with rage, his teeth bared, his hands clawing at Schofield.

Schofield hit him with the second case.

The blow broke the berserker’s nose and the crazed attacker’s face sprayed blood and he went flying backwards, out into the water.

Schofield gripped the netting by the door, tensing himself for a second attack but it didn’t come because right then the wide square opening at the upper end of the hold went under the surface of the ocean and his whole world went to shit.

An unimaginable
torrent
of seawater came gushing into the hold from above.

Several thousand gallons dropped on top of Schofield, Champion and the berserker in an instant.

Schofield managed to cling to the hold’s side netting, and he pressed his body over Champion’s so she wasn’t ripped away from it. The berserker was less fortunate: out in the centre of the hold, he was forced under by the torrent of downward-rushing seawater.

The hold filled with water in an instant and the
whole
plane now went under—the Antonov had became the hollow tube of metal that Schofield had foreseen.

The plane soared down through the underwater haze, seemingly gliding on its outstretched wings, heading for the bottom a thousand feet below.

Inside its hold, the curved walls groaned loudly as the pressure from outside increased. Long before it hit the bottom, the plane’s fuselage would crumple catastrophically inwards, its ribbed metal skeleton unable to resist the pressure of the ocean.

Holding his breath, Schofield grabbed something from Champion’s weapons belt: one of her compact scuba rebreathers that offered five minutes of air and jammed it in his mouth.

When he had air in his own lungs, he grabbed a second mini-rebreather and stuck it in Champion’s mouth, enabling her to breathe underwater, too.

Then he set about finishing what he had to do: hovering in the now totally flooded hold, he opened the second Samsonite case and tossed its two uranium spheres out the open side door. They sank into the void, disappearing forever.

Once that was done, he reached up and untied something tethered to the hold’s wall beside Champion’s head.

He grabbed Champion and gripping her tightly, made to pull the ripcord on the object, only for someone to suddenly grab his boot!

It was the berserker. The fucker just wouldn’t die! And now he was stopping Schofield getting out of here.

The walls groaned. The skeleton of the plane creaked.

In seconds, the whole thing would implode and this maniac was stopping them getting out!

Schofield kicked at the berserker, but couldn’t get him to release his grip.

Fuck it
, Schofield thought.
This might do it
.

He yanked on the ripcord of the object he’d taken from the wall.

That object was a life raft.

As soon as Schofield pulled its ripcord, it inflated and shot up out of the hold like a bullet, wrenching Schofield free of the berserker’s grip and he and Champion went whipping up out of the opening at the rear end of the sinking Antonov, yanked upward by the air in the fast-inflating raft.

The raft shoomed upward, trailing bubbles, with Schofield hanging from it by one outstretched arm, gripping Champion in his spare hand.

Seconds after they blasted out of the plane, it crumpled like a tin can, surrendering to the ocean’s brutal pressure and the berserker inside it was crushed to nothing. The tangled wreck kept sinking, disappearing into the haze.

Aware of the effects of rising too fast through water, Schofield and Champion exhaled all the way up, until at last, the raft broke the surface.

The waterfall and Dragon’s cliffs rose behind them. Sheer and covered in snow and ice, they would be impossible to scale.

In the other direction, to the west, was an expanse of sea ice, shot through with ten-foot-deep leads.

Schofield quickly pushed Champion up into the raft—she tried as best she could to help but the wound reaching through her back to her stomach was clearly very painful. He climbed in after her and started paddling for the shelter of the nearest lead before any of their enemies arrived at the cliffs and saw them.

Within moments, they were in the shelter of the leads, and once there, Champion spat out her mouthpiece, fell back against the bow and closed her eyes, drifting out of consciousness.

Above her, Schofield swore.

His team was in complete disarray: Ivanov was dead, Baba too; the Kid and Mario were still at large, but now totally on their own; Mother, Zack and Emma had got away with the last two spheres, but Schofield knew that the Army of Thieves would already be hunting them. And lastly there was Champion and him: she had a gut-wound—if it didn’t kill her, it would at least immobilise her—while his left hand and shoulder bore bullet wounds.

He had lived to fight another day, only now—battered, bruised and wounded—he was a long, long way from the fight.

CRYSTAL CITY, VIRGINIA 3 APRIL, 2230 HOURS 1130 HOURS (4 APRIL) AT DRAGON

Dave Fairfax ushered Marianne Retter into his apartment in Crystal City and slammed the door shut behind them, breathless.

They’d come straight here by train from the Pentagon, where they had just escaped from a group of men posing as a VIP transport team. Dave’s place in Crystal City was pretty close to the Pentagon, just one Metro stop and a short walk away.

‘Okay, you are now officially a very important person,’ Dave gasped. ‘That was just brazen. A straight-out kidnapping at the Pentagon’s front doors.’

‘Who
were
those guys?’ Marianne asked.

‘Don’t know,’ Dave said. ‘But they knew who you were and where you were going and they didn’t want you to get there. We gotta hurry. If they can identify me, we can’t stay here for long. But if we’re gonna keep investigating this matter, I need a computer with some serious software on it . . .’

Dave unlocked a drawer and pulled his home laptop from it. He flipped the computer open, threw on an earpiece and started typing quickly.

‘They didn’t look foreign,’ Retter said to herself, her voice analytical. ‘And their accents were flawless; outfits, too. Could they have been
American
? And while brazen, sure, they made a small mistake that most people wouldn’t have picked up. But it was a mistake of speed—they could fake everything else, ID tags, cars, but they had to get to me before they could source a car with the right wheels, which means the decision to snatch me was made in a hurry—’

‘Wait.’ Dave held up a hand, touched his earpiece. ‘I’m tapping into encrypted radio airspace around D.C.—military, intelligence and police channels—using our names as keywords. Something like this goes wrong, people start calling their superiors over cell phones and radios . . .’

Text scrolled out on his screen.

‘Oh, shit . . .’ Dave said.

‘What?’ Retter leaned forward.

Dave nodded at the text scrolling out on the screen:

TRACK V-DATA SYSTEM

ECHELON SUBSYSTEM REGION: E-4 WASHINGTON, D.C. AND SURROUNDS

FREQUENCY RANGE: 462.741–464.85 MHZ

KEYWORDS: RETTER, MARIANNE, FAIRFAX, DAVID

KEYWORDS FOUND.

FROM USER: A9 (CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY)

VOICE 1: THE
RETTER
SNATCH AT THE PENTAGON WAS BLOWN. WHAT HAPPENED?

VOICE 2: SHE IDENTIFIED US AND GOT AWAY WITH SOME GUY.

VOICE 3: WE HAVE HIS NAME.
DAVID FAIRFAX
. HE’S ALSO DIA. GOT A HOME ADDRESS IN CRYSTAL CITY.

VOICE 1: GET THERE NOW.

Dave looked at Marianne. ‘And there you have it. You almost just got kidnapped by the CIA and we have to run
right now
.’

They fled from Dave’s apartment, taking his laptop with them, and dashed to a nearby mall that stayed open till midnight. There they hid in a bookstore, in the coffee shop by the magazine racks, with a good view of the entrance.

‘Okay,’ Dave said. ‘I think it’s time for some more information sharing between you and me.’

‘That assumes I can trust you,’ Retter said.

‘Navy Cross . . .’ Dave said. ‘On the run, too.’

‘Oh, yeah, right.’

Dave put his laptop on the table and typed as he spoke. ‘Okay, me first, here’s what I know: my Marine contact is up in the Arctic Circle. He said he was about to go into battle and asked me to look up two things for him: the Army of Thieves and Dragon Island, an old and very nasty ex-Soviet base up there.

‘My investigations into the Army of Thieves led me to you. My investigations into Dragon Island led me to
this
, which was why I was coming to see you. This is a list of American military and intelligence organisations who have made mention of or shown some interest in Dragon Island over the last thirty years.’

Retter’s eyes went wide when she saw the screen. ‘That’s the JCIDD. It’s only accessible to the Joint Chiefs and the highest ranking—’

‘Did I mention that I’m a code-cracker?’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Any names you recognise?’ he asked.

She scanned the list on Dave’s screen:

Retter bit her lip as she peered at the list.

‘The usual suspects,’ she said, ‘Army, Air Force, Navy, CIA, even the National Weather Service analysing the jetstream. But if you look closely at it, this gives you a sort of rough history of Dragon Island.’

‘How so?’ Dave asked.

‘Well, look. It starts with Dragon coming to the US Navy’s attention in 1979 as a run-of-the-mill northern repair facility for the Soviet ballistic missile fleet. Then the Weather Service found it, due to its position under the Arctic jetstream. But then it gets interesting.

‘Now, you told me earlier that the weapons base on Dragon was built in 1985. Look here: in 1986, Dragon appeared immediately on a CIA list of Soviet chemical and biological weapons sites
and
the Air Force’s list of high-value Soviet targets. It actually stayed on that second list until the USSR’s fall in 1991, but after that, it fell off it, no longer a high-value site. The other documents look like standard crap, like the 1984 CIA report titled
POSSIBLE LOCATIONS
by—wait a goddamn second—by “Calderon, M”.’

‘What?’ Dave asked. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Calderon, M is Marius Calderon,’ Retter said thoughtfully. ‘No way . . . this is one of
his
schemes. Fuck me, this could be the link you’re looking for, Mr Fairfax.’

‘What? Why? You know this guy?’

‘Do I ever. I’ve come across his name a few times in my research into the Army of Thieves. This could explain a lot.’

Now it was Dave who leaned forward. ‘So who is he and why is he writing about Dragon Island in 1984, a year
before
the base there was even built?’

A siren wailed outside the store, and they both spun, but it was just an ambulance, speeding away. They exhaled.

‘Marius Calderon,’ Retter said, ‘is a hotshot at the CIA, been there since 1980 when they recruited him straight out of Army Ranger training.

‘His original area of expertise was China: Calderon was assigned to observe and analyse China following its program of economic reforms that had commenced in 1978. But he’s served in almost every corner of the CIA since: from the Activity to the special-ops division. Importantly for our purposes, in the late 1980s, he was an instructor at the School of the Americas, that military training academy I was telling you about that the US Army ran out of Fort Benning, at which . . .’

‘. . . at which several Chilean members of the Army of Thieves learnt how to be really bad dudes,’ Dave said.

‘Right. The only reason I found out about this Calderon guy was when I was looking into those twelve Chilean officers broken out of that prison at Valparaiso. They all attended the School of the Americas
at the time Calderon was a teacher there
. All twelve were his students.’