Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves Read online

As he said this, Ivanov once again saw the gaseous plume rising from the island’s massive vents and his blood went cold.

  Mother of God, he thought.

  ‘Base,’ he said. ‘Perform a UV-4 scan of the atmosphere above Dragon. I think whoever’s there has started up the atmospheric device.’

  ‘They did what . . . ?’

  ‘I can see a vapour plume rising from the towers.’

  ‘Good Lord . . .’

  Ivanov made to say more but suddenly the Beriev was hit from behind by a 9M31 surface-to-air missile fired by one of the Strelas. The entire tail section of the old plane disintegrated in an instant and the plane plunged out of the sky.

  A few seconds later, the Beriev hit the sea ice and nothing more was heard from Vasily Ivanov.

  His distress call to the Russian Army’s Signals Directorate, however, was heard by one other listener.

  A KH-12 ‘Improved Crystal’ spy satellite operated by the US National Reconnaissance Office.

  The message was downloaded and decoded by an automated system according to standard protocols—intercepts of Russian military signals were picked up all the time—but when the keywords DRAGON, UV-4 SCAN and ATMOSPHERIC DEVICE were all found in the same transmission, the message was immediately forwarded to the highest levels of the Pentagon.

  THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  3 APRIL, 1645 HOURS (45 MINUTES LATER)

  0545 HOURS (4 APRIL) AT DRAGON

  ‘Never mind that! Someone’s at Dragon!’

  Vasily Ivanov’s voice rang out in the wide subterranean room. As Ivanov spoke in Russian, a US Army linguist translated his words into English.

  The President of the United States and his Crisis Response Team listened in cold silence.

  ‘They were waiting for us and attacked my team as soon as they disembarked the plane! Shot them all to bits on the tarmac!’

  The CRT was composed of generals and flag officers from the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force, the President’s National Security Advisor and senior personnel from the NRO, CIA and DIA. The only woman in the room was the representative of the DIA, Deputy Director Alicia Gordon.

  ‘I managed to take off and am now being fired upon—’

  Manning the digital playback console was a young analyst from the National Reconnaissance Office named Lucas Bowling.

  ‘Base. Perform a UV-4 scan of the atmosphere above Dragon. I think whoever’s there has started up the atmospheric device.’

  Bowling turned off the recording.

  ‘What’s a UV-4 scan and have we done it yet?’ asked the Army general.

  The President’s National Security Advisor, a former four-star Marine Corps general named Donald Harris answered. ‘UV-4 is a region of the light spectrum invisible to the human eye, the fourth grade of the ultraviolet spectrum.’

  ‘I’ve got the scan here, sir,’ Bowling said, glancing at the President. ‘But if I may, before I show it to you, it would be helpful to take you back a bit. After we received this intercept, the NRO rescanned all our satellite images of the upper Arctic over the past two months using UV-4 overlays. This is a composite image of scans taken by six multi-spectrum IMINT reconnaissance satellites depicting the upper northern hemisphere in the UV-4 spectrum as it appeared six weeks ago.’

  A satellite scan appeared on the screen:

  It showed the northern hemisphere as seen from above the North Pole. One could see the Arctic Ocean and the larger island chains of Svalbard, Franz Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya; then Europe, Russia, China, Japan, the north Pacific and finally the United States and Canada.

  It was only barely noticeable, but streaming out from a tiny island not far from the pole was a dense black plume of dark smoke-like matter. In reality the plume was transparent, but through a UV filter it appeared black.

  The plume originated at a dot marked ‘Dragon Island’.

  Bowling narrated. ‘As I said, this image is six weeks old. It depicts a small plume of gaseous matter emanating from an old Soviet weapons laboratory complex in the Arctic known as Ostrov Zmey, or Dragon Island.’

  ‘Looks like that ash cloud that shut down air travel a while back, from that volcano in Iceland,’ the Army man said.

  Bowling said, ‘The atmospheric dispersal is very similar, but not the cloud itself. That ash cloud was composed of dust-sized particles of volcanic rock. This cloud is an ultra-fine gas seeded into the lower and middle atmospheres.

  ‘It’s so fine that to the untrained observer looking at it with the naked eye, it would look like a shimmering heat haze. But, as you can see, it is clearly visible in the ultraviolet spectrum. This is because it is a compound derived from triethylborane, or TEB. Soviet scientists experimented extensively with TEB and its derivatives back in the 1970s and 1980s.’

  ‘What is this TEB? It’s not an airborne poison, is it?’ the Navy admiral asked.

  ‘No, it’s not a poison. It’s worse than that,’ Air Force said. ‘TEB is a highly combustible explosive mixture usually stored in a solid state. Basically, it’s rocket fuel. We use it ourselves. TEB is a pyrophoric composition that has been employed as the solid-state fuel in ramjet engines like that on the SR-71 Blackbird. When mixed with triethylaluminum, it’s used to ignite the engines of the Saturn-V rocket.’

  ‘It’s one of the most combustible substances known to man,’ the National Security Advisor said to the President. ‘It burns bright, hot and big.’

  He turned to face the people from the DIA and CIA. ‘But I understood that liquid-state TEB and its variants were stable when stored in hexane solution and I thought the Russians keep it in hexane tanks.’

  ‘They do,’ the DIA deputy director said. ‘At bases just like Dragon. Only Dragon is different. It’s special. If our intelligence is correct, during the 80s that place was a goddamn house of horrors—a classified facility where Soviet scientists were allowed to do whatever they wanted. And they got up to some seriously messed-up stuff. Experimental electromagnetic weapons, flesh-eating bugs, molecular acids, explosive plasmas, special nuclear weapons, hypertoxic poisons.

  ‘During the last few years of the Cold War, among other things, Dragon was the epicentre of Soviet research into caustic Venusian atmospheric gases, gases which are highly toxic and which the Soviets brought back to Earth on two of their Venera probes. It’s believed that they managed to mix some of the more deadly Venusian gases with TEB.

  ‘Apparently, the Soviets wanted to create a skin-melting acid rain similar to that found in the atmosphere of Venus and loose it upon America. You create a gas cloud of TEB infused with an exotic Venusian gas, send the mixture up into the jetstream over the Pacific and, given the right weather conditions, a skin-searing superhot acid rain falls on America.

  ‘Even the location of Dragon is no accident: it sits at the top of the world, at the start of the spiralling wind pattern we call the jetstream. Anything hoisted up into the air above Dragon is quickly whisked around Europe, southern Russia, then China, Japan and across the Pacific to America. It’s the same jetstream that swept that volcanic ash cloud from Iceland across Europe. But the thing is—’ the DIA deputy director paused.

  The room was silent with anticipation.

  ‘—the Soviets couldn’t get it to work. The TEB-based acid rain project never got beyond the test phase. Instead, by accident, the Soviets created something much more dangerous.

  ‘There are rumours in the scientific weapons community that they found another use for their TEB/Venusian gas compound: namely, sending a combustible gas cloud up into the atmosphere and igniting it with a powerful catalytic blast, creating an “atmospheric incineration event”.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘They set the atmosphere on fire. The science is fairly straightforward: for a fire to burn, it requires oxygen. A device like this takes that principle to the ultimate extreme—technically it’s called a thermobaric weapon, or a fuel-air bomb, because, once ignited, the explosive uses oxygen in
the air as the main fuel for the blast. Weapons specialists call it a Tesla device, after the great Nikola Tesla who postulated a weapon that could ignite the entire atmosphere.

  ‘But such a weapon would require a massive amount of gas in the atmosphere and an ignition device of extraordinary heat and power—a semi-nuclear weapon, essentially—and we don’t believe the Soviets ever managed to build such a device.’

  A cough.

  It was the CIA’s representative. He cleared his throat and spoke for the first time.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘may not be entirely correct.’

  ‘Dragon Island,’ the CIA man said, ‘was indeed one of the crazy outliers of the Cold War.

  ‘Let’s not be delicate about it. What the Soviets did there was seriously fucked up. It was cutting-edge science, with no boundaries, ethical or otherwise—at Dragon, Russia’s best physicists were allowed to work with the most exotic and dangerous substances known to man, including those Venus samples you mentioned, all to create new forms of death. Dragon Island was the crown jewel of the Soviet Army’s Special Weapons Directorate. Its scientists not only pushed the envelope, occasionally they broke through it. Dragon was their Area 51, Los Alamos and Plum Island all rolled into one.

  ‘But when the USSR collapsed in 1991, Dragon Island’s program was terminated. Only thing was, the stuff they built there was so exotic, destroying it raised more questions than answers. And so the Russkies have been sending skeleton crews there ever since, just keeping the lights on, so to speak, making sure stable solids don’t become unstable liquids and that compounds meant to be stored at absolute zero stay at absolute zero. Put simply, Dragon Island still is a house of horrors.’

  He turned to the President. ‘And it is my unfortunate duty to report to you, sir, that the Russians did in fact build a Tesla device and it is kept at Dragon.

  ‘They call it the “Atmospheric Weapon” and it is a two-stage device: the first stage is the combustible gas which is belched up into the atmosphere via a pair of massive vents on Dragon; the second stage is the explosive catalyst that ignites the gas. This catalyst is basically a quasi-nuclear explosive composed of a spherical inner core of corrupted uranium-238—so-called “blood uranium” or “red uranium”, because of its deep maroon colour. Red uranium is not as potent or as radioactive as yellowcake but its corrupted atomic structure makes it react with TEB far more intensely than a regular thermonuclear blast would; indeed, a regular nuke wouldn’t set off such a gas cloud.

  ‘A red uranium sphere is small, roughly the size of a golf ball. You encase one in a standard beryllium bridgewire implosive detonator—the kind you find inside a regular nuclear weapon—and then fire the whole unit by missile into the gas cloud. The subsequent blast is hot enough to light the gas and set off the incineration—a rolling chain reaction of white-hot acid-fire follows, sweeping around the northern hemisphere, igniting the atmosphere itself. It’s like lighting gasoline with a match, only this creates a firestorm of global proportions.’

  The President shook his head in disbelief. ‘Who builds something like this? If it destroys the northern hemisphere, it destroys them, too.’

  ‘In fact, sir, that’s exactly why it was built,’ DIA deputy director Gordon said. ‘A device like this is called a “scorched earth” weapon: it’s the weapon you use when you’ve lost a war. When the Germans saw that they’d lost World War II, they retreated, burning farms as they went, scorching the earth. The idea was that if they were going to lose the war, then the victors would not gain anything by winning it.

  ‘The Soviet atmospheric weapon is similar: in the event of the United States disabling or destroying their stockpile of ICBMs in some kind of hostile exchange, the Soviets, facing certain defeat, would set off the atmospheric weapon, leaving nothing behind but scorched earth for the victors.’

  ‘Only this weapon doesn’t just scorch their country, it wipes out the entire upper half of the Earth,’ the President said.

  ‘That’s correct,’ Gordon said. ‘Mr President. If someone has taken Dragon Island and initiated its Tesla device, then, yes, we have a problem, but it appears we’ve caught it in time. Whoever is at Dragon Island would need to have spewed the combustible aerosol into the atmosphere for weeks for the weapon to be in any way effective.’

  Relief fell over the Situation Room.

  The NRO man, Bowling, however, swallowed deeply.

  ‘Then you don’t want to see this.’ He hit a key on his laptop that projected a new image onto the screen. ‘This image was taken four weeks ago:

  ‘And this one, two weeks ago:

  ‘And this last image was taken forty-five minutes ago, after we caught the distress signal.’

  ‘Holy shit . . .’ someone breathed.

  ‘Jesus Christ . . .’

  The murky cloud had swept around the entire northern hemisphere in an ugly elongated spiral, blanketing every major landmass in the top half of the world. It looked like an oil slick that had stained the planet, only this was in the atmosphere. The image of the befouled Earth loomed in front of the shocked faces of the Crisis Response Team.

  ‘Whoever took Dragon Island has been belching out combustible gas for nearly six weeks,’ Bowling said. ‘They sent it up into the jetstream and the jetstream did the rest. The entire northern hemisphere is now covered by this gas cloud.’

  At that moment, a young assistant ran into the room and handed a transcript to the DIA deputy director, Gordon.

  The deputy director read it then looked up sharply. ‘Mr President. This is from our Russian MASINT station. It just intercepted an emergency transmission from the head of the Russian Special Weapons Directorate in Sarov to the Russian President in Moscow. It reads:

  SIR,

  DRAGON ISLAND TAKEN BY AN UNKNOWN FORCE.

  SATELLITE ANALYSIS HAS REVEALED THAT ATMOSPHERIC GAS DISPERSION FROM DRAGON HAS BEEN ACTIVATED FOR SOME TIME, PERHAPS AS LONG AS 41 DAYS.

  REMOTE ANALYSIS HAS CONFIRMED THAT SIX URANIUM SPHERES AT DRAGON ARE BEING PRIMED FOR IMMINENT USE. PRIMING TAKES APPROXIMATELY TWELVE HOURS AND IT APPEARS THAT PRIMING BEGAN SEVEN HOURS AGO.

  WE HAVE FIVE HOURS TO STOP THIS UNKNOWN FORCE INITIATING THE ATMOSPHERIC WEAPON.’

  Gordon put down the transcript.

  Silence gripped the room.

  The President looked at a wall clock. It was now 5 p.m., or 6 a.m. at Dragon. ‘Are you telling me that in five hours an unknown force is going to set off some kind of superweapon that will ignite the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere?’

  ‘That’s correct, sir,’ Gordon said. ‘We have five hours to save the world.’

  The President stood up. ‘Get the Russian President on the phone right now—’

  The door to the Situation Room was flung open.

  A young Air Force major charged in. ‘Mr President! The Russians just launched an ICBM from Omsk in Siberia! It’s bearing down on a target in the Arctic Ocean, a remote island base. They’re firing a nuclear missile at one of their own islands!’

  THE KREMLIN

  MOSCOW, RUSSIA

  At that exact moment, in a similar underground room in Moscow, the Russian President and his own crisis response team were watching a live feed from a missile-tracking satellite.

  A blinking dot indicated the nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile heading directly for Dragon Island.

  ‘Impact in four minutes,’ a console operator said.

  The blip pulsed closer to Dragon.

  The room was deathly silent.

  Every eye was on the display.

  ‘Three minutes to—wait! Missile is changing course. What the hell—?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ the Russian President demanded.

  ‘The missile. It’s . . . it’s turning around. It’s coming back toward its launch silo . . .’

  In the White House Situation Room, the President and his Crisis Response Team watched on a similar screen as the Russian missile retraced its flight path.

&nb
sp; ‘It’s going back toward its launch site?’ the President asked. ‘How?’

  ‘They’ve hacked the missile’s guidance system . . .’ Alicia Gordon said ominously.

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘Whoever’s at Dragon Island.’

  ‘Is that even possible?’

  ‘We can do it,’ Gordon said simply. ‘And it looks like whoever’s taken Dragon can do it, too.’

  The Russian President watched in horror as the blip on the screen sped back toward its original launch location.

  The console operator beside him spoke urgently into his headset: ‘Omsk Missile Control, listen to me! It’s coming back at you!—No, we can see it! Issue self-destruct order—What do you mean, the missile is not responding—?’

  A moment later, the blip hit the launch site in Omsk, Siberia, and Omsk went off the air.

  The horrified silence that followed was broken by a second console operator.

  He turned to the Russian President.

  ‘Sir. I have an incoming signal from Dragon Island.’

  ‘Put it on screen,’ the Russian President said.

  A viewscreen came to life. On it, facing the camera, was a man wearing gaudy Elvis sunglasses and a snow-camouflaged Arctic parka.

  The parka’s hood covered his head. Combined with the glasses, this meant that the only part of his face that was visible was from the nose to the chin, but even that small area was distinctive: a foul strip of horribly blistered, acid-scarred skin ran from his left ear down the length of his jawline. He looked more like a demented rock star than a terrorist.

  ‘Mr President, good morning,’ the man said calmly in perfect Russian. ‘I could tell you my name, but why bother? Call me the Lord of Anarchy, the General of the Army of Thieves, the Emperor of Annihilation, the Duke of Destruction, call me whatever you want. My glorious, furious army—my Army of Thieves—an alliance of the enraged, the starving, the disenfranchised and the poor, is rising. It is the dog starved at his master’s gate that will starve no more. Now it is time for you, the masters, to be held to account. I am the instrument of that reckoning.