Scarecrow ss-3 Page 2

  Gant, fresh from Officer Candidate School and now a First Lieutenant, was leading a Recon Unit in Afghanistan. Mother, an experienced Gunnery Sergeant who had helped Schofield himself when he was a young officer, was acting as her Team Chief.

  Schofield was supposed to be joining them, but at the last minute he'd been diverted from Afghanistan to lead this unexpected mission.

  The only one of his regulars that Schofield had been able to bring with him was a young sergeant named Buck Riley Jnr, call-sign 'Book II'. Silent and brooding and possessed of an intensity that belied his 25 years, Book II was a seriously tough-as-nails warrior. And as far as Schofield was concerned, with his heavy-browed face and battered pug nose, he was looking more and more like his father—the original 'Book' Riley—every day.

  Schofield keyed his satellite radio, spoke into the VibraMike strapped around his throat. Rather than pick up actual spoken words, the vibration-sensing microphone picked up the reverberations of his voice box. The satellite uplink system driving it was the brand-new GSX-9—the most advanced communications system in use in the US military. In theory, a portable GSX-9 unit like Schofield's could broadcast a clear signal halfway around the world with crystal clarity.

  'Base, this is Mustang 3,' he said. 'Sitrep?'

  A voice came over his earpiece. It was the voice of an Air Force radio operator stationed at McColl Air Force Base in Alaska, the communications centre for this mission.

  'Mustang 3, this is Base. Mustang 1 and Mustang 2 have engaged the enemy. Report that they have seized the missile silos and inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy. Mustang 1 is holding the silos and awaiting reinforcements. Mustang 2 reports that there are still at least twelve enemy agents putting up a fight in the main maintenance building.''

  'All right,' Schofield said, 'what about our follow-up?'

  'An entire company of Army Rangers from Fort Lewis is en route, Scarecrow. One hundred men, approximately one hour behind you.''

  'Good.'

  Book II spoke from inside the armoured Scout vehicle. 'What's the story, Scarecrow?'

  Schofield turned. 'We're go for drop.'

  Five minutes later, the box-shaped cargo-container dropped out of the belly of the Stealth Bomber and plummeted like a stone towards the Earth.

  Inside the container—in the car resting inside it—sat Schofield and his seven Marines, shuddering and jolting with the vibrations of the terminal-velocity fall.

  Schofield watched the numbers on a digital wall-mounted altimeter whizzing downwards:

  50,000 feet. . .

  45,000 feet. . .

  40,000 . . . 30,000 . . . 20,000 . . . 10,000 . . .

  'Preparing to engage chutes at five thousand feet. . .' Corporal Max 'Clark' Kent, the loadmaster, said in a neutral voice. 'GPS guidance system has us right on target for landing. External cameras verify that the LZ is clear.'

  Schofield eyed the fast-ticking altimeter.

  8,000 feet.

  7,000 feet. . .

  6,000 feet. . .

  If everything went to plan, they would land about fifteen miles due east of Krask-8, just over the horizon from the installation, out of sight of the facility.

  'Engaging primary chutes . . . now,"1Clark announced.

  The jolt that the falling container received was shocking in its force. The whole falling box lurched sharply and Schofield and his Marines all shuddered in their seats, held in by their six-point seat belts and rollbars.

  And suddenly they were floating, care of the container's three directional parachutes.

  'How're we doing, Clark?' Schofield asked.

  Clark was guiding them with the aid of a joystick and the container's external cameras.

  'Ten seconds. I'm aiming for a dirt track in the middle of the valley. Brace yourselves for landing in three . . . two . . . one . . .'

  Whump!

  The container hit solid ground, and suddenly its entire front wall just fell open and daylight flooded in through the wide aperture and the four-wheel-drive Commando Scout Light Attack Vehicle skidded off the mark and raced out of the container's belly into the grey Siberian day.

  The Scout whipped along a muddy earthen track, bounded on both sides by snow-covered hills. Deathly grey tree skeletons lined the slopes. Black rocks stabbed upward through the carpet of snow.

  Stark. Brutal. And cold as hell.

  Welcome to Siberia.

  As he sat in the back of the Light Attack Vehicle, Schofield spoke into his throat-mike: 'Mustang 1, this is Mustang 3. Do you copy?'

  No reply.

  'I say again: Mustang 1, this is Mustang 3. Do you copy?'

  Nothing.

  He did the same for the second Delta team, Mustang 2. Again, no reply.

  Schofield keyed the satellite frequency, spoke to Alaska: 'Base, this is 3. I can't raise either Mustang 1 or Mustang 2. Do you have contact?'

  'Ah, affirmative on that, Scarecrow,' the voice from Alaska said. 'J was just talking to them a moment ago—'

  The signal exploded to hash.

  'Clark?' Schofield said.

  'Sorry, Boss, signal's gone,' Clark said from the Scout's wall console. 'We lost 'em. Damn, I thought these new satellite receivers were supposed to be incorruptible.'

  Schofield frowned, concerned. 'Jamming signals?'

  'No. Not a one. We're in clear radio airspace. Nothing should be affecting that signal. Must be something at the other end.'

  'Something at the other end . . .' Schofield bit his lip. 'Famous last words.'

  'Sir,' the Scout's driver, a grizzled old sergeant named 'Bull' Simcox, said, 'we should be coming into visual range in about thirty seconds.'

  Schofield looked forward, out over Simcox's shoulder.

  He saw the black muddy track rushing by beneath the Scout's armoured hood, saw that they were approaching the crest of a hill.

  Beyond that hill, lay Krask-8.

  At that same moment, inside a high-tech radio receiving room at McColl Air Force Base in Alaska, the young radio officer who had been in contact with Schofield looked about himself in confusion. His name was Bradsen, James Bradsen.

  A few seconds before, completely without warning, the power to the communications facility had been abruptly cut.

  The base commander at McColl strode into the room.

  'Sir,' Bradsen said. 'We just—'

  'I know, son,' the CO said. 'I know.'

  It was then that Bradsen saw another man standing behind his base commander.

  Bradsen had never seen this other man before. Tall and solid, he had carrot-red hair and an ugly rat-like face. He wore a plain suit and his black eyes never blinked. They just took in the entire room with a cool unblinking stare. Everything about him screamed 1SS.

  The base commander said, 'Sorry, Bradsen. Intelligence issue. This mission has been taken out of our hands.'

  The Scout attack vehicle crested the hill. Inside it, Schofield drew a breath. Before him, in all its glory, lay Krask-8. It stood in the centre of a wide flat plain, a cluster of snow-covered

  buildings—hangars, storage sheds, a gigantic maintenance warehouse, even one 15-storey glass-and-concrete office tower. A miniature cityscape.

  The whole compound was surrounded by a 20-foot-high razor wire fence, and in the distance beyond it, perhaps two miles away, Schofield could see the northern coastline of Russia and the waves of the Arctic Ocean.

  Needless to say, the post-Cold War world hadn't been kind to Krask-8.

  The entire mini-city was deserted.

  Snow covered the complex's half-dozen streets. Off to Schofield's right, giant mounds of the stuff slouched against the walls of the main maintenance warehouse—a structure the size of four football fields.

  To the left of the massive shed, connected to it by an enclosed bridge, stood the office tower. Enormous downward-creeping claws of ice hung off its flat roof, frozen in place, defying gravity.

  The cold itself had taken its toll, too. Without an anti-freeze crew on
site, nearly every window pane at Krask-8 had contracted and cracked. Now, every glass surface lay shattered or spider-webbed, the stinging Siberian wind whistling through it all with impunity.

  It was a ghost town.

  And somewhere underneath it all lay sixteen nuclear missiles.

  The Scout roared through the already blasted-open gates of Krask-8 at a cool 80 kilometres an hour.

  It shot down a sloping road toward the complex, one of Schofield's Marines now perched in the 7.62mm machine-gun turret mounted on the rear of the sleek armoured car.

  Inside the Scout, Schofield hovered behind Clark, peering at the young corporal's computer screen.

  'Check for their locators,' he said. 'We have to find out where those D-boys are.'

  Clark tapped away at his keyboard, bringing up some computer maps of Krask-8.

  One map showed the complex from a side-view:

  Two clusters of blinking red dots could be seen: one set on the ground floor of the office tower and a second set inside the massive maintenance shed.

  The two Delta teams.

  But something was wrong with this image.

  None of the blinking dots was moving.

  All of them were ominously still.

  Schofield felt a chill on the back of his neck.

  'Bull,' he said softly, 'take Whip, Tommy and Hastings. Check out the office tower. I'll take Book II, Clark and Rooster and secure the maintenance building.'

  'Roger that, Scarecrow.'

  The Scout rushed down a narrow deserted street, passing underneath concrete walkways, blasting through the mounds of snow that lay everywhere.

  It skidded to a halt outside the gargantuan maintenance warehouse, right in front of a small personnel door.

  The rear hatch of the Scout was flung open and immediately

  Schofield and three snow-camouflaged Marines leapt out of it and bolted for the door.

  No sooner were they out than the Scout peeled away, heading for the glass office tower next door.

  Schofield entered the maintenance building gun-first.

  He carried a Heckler & Koch MP-7, the successor to the old MP-5. The MP-7 was a short-barrelled machine pistol, compact but powerful. In addition to the MP-7, Schofield carried a Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol, a K-Bar knife and, in a holster on his back, an Armalite MH-12 Maghook—a magnetic grappling hook that was fired from a double-gripped gun-like launcher.

  In addition to his standard kit, for this mission Schofield carried some extra firepower—six high-powered Thermite-Amatol demolition charges. Each handheld charge had the explosive ability to level an entire building.

  Schofield and his team hurried down a short corridor lined with offices, came to a door at its end.

  They stopped.

  Listened.

  No sound.

  Schofield cracked open the door—and caught a glimpse of wide-open space, immense wide-open space . . .

  He pushed the door wider.

  'Jesus . . .'

  The work area of the maintenance warehouse stretched away from him like an enormous hangar bay, its cracked-glass roof revealing the grey Siberian sky.

  Only this was no ordinary hangar bay.

  Nor was it any ordinary old 'maintenance shed' for a penal colony.

  Taking up nearly three-quarters of the floorspace of this massive interior space was a gigantic—gigantic—rectangular concrete pit in the floor.

  And mounted at Schofield's end of the pit, raised off the floor on a series of concrete blocks, was a 200-metre-long submarine.

  It looked awesome.

  Like a giant on its throne, surrounded by a complex array of structures that belonged to people of a vastly smaller size.

  And all of it covered in a crust of ice and snow.

  Cranes and catwalks criss-crossed over the top of the sub, while thin horizontal walkways connected it to the concrete floor of the shed. A single vertiginous gangway joined the three-storey-high conning tower of the submarine to an upper balcony level.

  Blinking away the strangeness of the sight, Schofield's mind processed this new information.

  First, he recognised the submarine.

  It was a Typhoon.

  The Typhoon class of submarines had been the jewel in the crown of the USSR's ocean-going nuclear arsenal. Despite the fact that only six had ever been built, the long-nosed ballistic missile subs had been made famous in novels and Hollywood movies. But while the Typhoons looked sexy, they had been terribly unreliable, requiring constant upgrades and maintenance. They remain the largest submarines ever built by man.

  This one, Schofield saw, had been having work done to its forward torpedo bays when Krask-8 had been abandoned—the outer hull around the Typhoon's bow torpedo tubes lay ripped open, taken apart plate-by-plate.

  How a Typhoon-class sub came to be inside a maintenance shed two miles inland from the Arctic Ocean was another question.

  A question that was answered by the remainder of the maintenance building.

  Beyond the Typhoon's enormous dry-dock—indeed, cutting the dry-dock off from the rest of the pit—Schofield saw a large vertical plate-steel sea gate.

  And beyond the sea gate was water.

  A wide rectangular indoor expanse of partially-frozen water, held out from the dry-dock by the dam-like sea gate.

  Schofield guessed that beneath that pool of water lay some kind of underground cave system that stretched all the way to the coast—allowing submarines to come into Krask-8 for repairs, away from the prying eyes of American spy satellites.

  It all became clear.

  Krask-8—two miles inland from the Arctic coast, listed on maps as a forced-labour facility—was a top-secret Soviet submarine repair facility.

  Schofield, however, didn't have time to ponder that issue, because it was then that he saw the bodies.

  They lay over by the edge of the dry-dock pit: four bodies, all dressed in US Army snow fatigues, body armour and . . .

  ... all shot to hell.

  Blood covered everything. It was splashed across faces, splattered over chests, spread out across the floor.

  'Motherfucker,' Clark breathed.

  'Christ, man, these were friggin' D-boys,' Corporal Ricky 'Rooster' Murphy said. Like Schofield—and maybe in imitation of him—Rooster wore silver anti-flash glasses.

  Schofield remained silent.

  The uniforms on the corpses, he saw, had been customised: some of the men had removed their right-hand shoulderplates, others had cut off the sleeves of their snow gear at the elbows.

  Customised uniforms: the signature of Delta.

  Two more bodies lay down in the pit itself—30 feet below floor level—also shot to shit.

  Hundreds of ejected shell casings lay in a wide circle around the scene. Fire from the Delta men. By the look of it, Schofield saw, the D-boys had been firing in nearly every direction when they'd gone down . . .

  Whispered voices.

  'How many in total?'

  'Just the four in here. Blue Team reports four more in the office tower.'

  'So which one is Schofield?'

  'The one in the silver glasses.' 'Snipers ready. On my mark.'

  One of the bodies caught Schofield's attention.

  He froze.

  He hadn't seen it at first, because the body's upper half had been hanging over the edge of the dry-dock pit, but now he saw it clearly.

  Alone among the six dead bodies, this man's head had been cut off

  Schofield grimaced at the sight.

  It was absolutely disgusting.

  Ragged threads of flesh hung from the corpse's open neck; the twin pipes of the oesophagus and the windpipe lay exposed to the open air.

  'Mother of God,' Book II breathed, coming up alongside Schofield. 'What the hell happened here?'

  As the four tiny figures of Schofield and his Marines examined the death scene down on the floor of the dry-dock hall, no fewer than twenty pairs of eyes watched them.

  Th
e watchers were arrayed around the hall, at key strategic points—men dressed in identical snow fatigues but carrying a variety of weapons.

  They watched in tense silence, waiting for their commander to give the kill signal.

  Schofield crouched beside the headless body and examined it.

  D-boys didn't wear ID tags or patches, but he didn't need to see a tag or a patch to know who this was. He could tell by the physique alone.

  It was Specialist Dean McCabe, one of the Delta team leaders.

  Schofield glanced around the immediate area. McCabe's head was nowhere in sight. Schofield frowned at that. The Delta man's head had not only been cut off, it had been taken—

  'ScarecrowV a voice exploded in his earpiece. 'This is Bull. We're over in the office tower. You're not going to believe this.'

  'Try me.'

  'They're all dead, all the Delta guys. And Scarecrow . . . Farrell's head has been fucking cut off

  An ice-cold charge zoomed up Schofield's spine.

  His mind raced. His eyes scanned the hall all around him—its cracked glass windows and ice-faded walls blurring in a kaleidoscope of motion.

  Krask-8. Deserted and isolated . . .

  No sign of any Chechen terrorists since they'd got here . . .

  Radio contact with Alaska lost. . .

  And all the D-boys dead . . . plus the bizarre extra feature of McCabe's and Farrell's missing heads.

  And it all crystallised in Schofield's mind.

  'Bull!' he hissed into his throat-mike. 'Get over here right now! We've been set up! We've just walked into a trap!'

  And at that moment, as he spoke, Schofield's searching eyes settled on a small mound of snow in a corner of the immense dry-dock hall—and suddenly a shape huddled behind the snow-mound came into sharp focus, revealing itself to be a carefully-camouflaged man dressed in snow-fatigues and pointing a Colt Commando assault rifle directly at Schofield's face.

  Damn.

  And with that the twenty assassins arrayed around the hall opened fire on Schofield and his men and the dry-dock facility became a battlefield.

  Schofield ducked reflexively just as two bullets swooshed low over his head.

  Book II and Clark did the same, diving in amongst the Delta bodies on the ground as a rain of bullets sparked against the floor all around them.