Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves Read online

  ‘My army of reprobates holds your nasty little island and we intend to use its terrible weapon. As you are clearly aware, I can detect and counteract any missile strike you send against me. Your missiles’ guidance systems are crude and easily corrupted. Be assured that the next nuclear missile you fire at me will be redirected not at its launch silo but at the nearest major city. The same goes for any other nation that dares to fire a nuke at me. And don’t even think about sending in a bomber or counter-terrorist force. I can see and will shoot down any aircraft that comes within five hundred miles of Dragon Island.

  ‘Mr President, you and I both know the weapon I have at my disposal. Instead of wasting time firing missiles at me, call a priest and make peace with your god. It would be a better use of the precious few hours you have left. Let anarchy reign.’

  The screen went black.

  THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

  The President slammed down the phone. He’d just spoken with the Russian President.

  ‘An air approach is out of the question,’ he said, ‘and the Russians don’t have any units close enough to get to Dragon by sea within five hours. What about us? Do we have any assets in that area? Anyone who’s close enough to get there—undetected, by sea or over the ice, within five hours—and stop that weapon from going off?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. The Air Force has no such assets in that region,’ Air Force said.

  ‘Neither does the Army, sir,’ Army said, shaking his head.

  ‘We do, sir,’ Navy said. ‘Got a SEAL team in a sub about seventy nautical miles north-east of that island. Ira Barker and his boys. Doing Arctic training. They’re tough, close and all geared up. They can get there in maybe three hours.’

  ‘Call them,’ the President ordered. ‘Call them now and send them in. Tell them to sabotage, disable or destroy anything in order to stop that device going off. And while they’re on their way to Dragon, dispatch a larger force that can get there later, just in case these SEALs do somehow succeed in delaying this.’

  While all this was happening, the Marine Corps representative had moved off to a corner of the room where he spoke into a secure phone. He hung up and turned to the President. ‘Sir. There’s also . . . well . . .’

  ‘What! What?’

  ‘I’ve got a small equipment-testing team up there, camped on the sea ice about a hundred miles north of that island. Been there for the last seven weeks. A few Marines, a DARPA guy and some civilian contractors testing new gear in extreme weather conditions. It’s not exactly an assault unit but it’s somebody and they’re up there.’

  ‘Who’s in command?’ the President asked.

  The Marine general said, ‘A captain named Schofield, sir. Call-sign, Scarecrow.’

  ‘Scarecrow?’ the President said, recognising the name. ‘The one I spoke to the French President about a few months back? The United States citizen that the French military put a floating bounty on?’

  ‘That’s him, sir. That French business is the main reason he’s up in the Arctic now. They sent hit teams to kill him twice when he was stationed at Parris Island. Both times, he survived. We wanted to get him out of harm’s way so we sent him north with that test team.’

  There were other reasons, too, the Marine general knew, but he didn’t feel they needed to be mentioned right now.

  The President’s face set itself in a fixed grimace. ‘I asked the French President to cancel that bounty and you know what he said to me? He said, “Monsieur, I will accede to your demands on finance, trade, on Afghanistan, even on Iran, but I will not belay that order. That man killed French soldiers, destroyed a French submarine and sank a French aircraft carrier. The Republic of France will not rest until he is dead.”’

  The President shook his head. ‘Call this Scarecrow. Send him in behind that SEAL team with the same orders: sabotage, disable, destroy. Tell him to do whatever he can to stop this madness.’

  DRAGON ISLAND

  AND NORTHERN SURROUNDS

  ARCTIC ICE FIELD

  4 APRIL, 0830 HOURS

  2 HOURS 30 MINUTES TO DEADLINE

  The two assault boats sped down the narrow ice-walled canal.

  They skimmed along at fifty kilometres an hour, thanks to their state-of-the-art pumpjet engines and bullet-shaped hulls, both of which had been designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And while the lead boat tore a fierce wake through the still waters of the alleyway, its engine barely made a sound.

  The boats were prototype AFDVs—Assault Force Delivery Vehicles—small and fast craft intended to deliver American troops to hostile shores quickly and silently. They looked a little like Zodiacs, only these boats were sleeker, with ultrathin inflatable rims that rode close to the waterline. Not yet in active service, they were still in the testing phase.

  Seated on the motorcycle-like saddle of the first boat was Captain Shane M. Schofield, USMC.

  In his mid-thirties, Schofield was about five-ten, with a rugged creased face and black hair. He usually wore his hair cut short and his chin clean-shaven, but after seven weeks in the Arctic, his hair was longer and he had a healthy stubble around his jaw. Schofield had striking blue eyes and would probably have been considered handsome were it not for the pair of hideous scars that cut down vertically over them, one for each eye. The scars were the source of his operational nickname: Scarecrow.

  They were wounds from a previous mission-gone-wrong, from a time when Schofield had been a pilot in the Marine Corps’ Air Wing. Shot down over enemy territory, he’d been captured and tortured, during which his eyes had been slashed with a razor blade. Surgery had saved his sight, but he had not been allowed to fly again, so he had retrained as a line animal, ultimately rising through the officer ranks of the Corps to command an elite Force Reconnaissance unit.

  Today, as usual, Schofield kept his damaged eyes concealed behind a pair of wraparound silver anti-flash glasses: military-grade Oakley Ballistics. The lower half of his face was wrapped in a scarf, Jesse James–style, to ward off the snow-flecked wind that assailed his face as he drove.

  In the first assault boat’s compact rear tray behind Schofield sat three passengers—one young Marine and two civilian members of his testing team.

  The second boat was being driven by Schofield’s second-in-command and loyal friend, Gunnery Sergeant Gena Newman, call-sign Mother.

  At six-foot-two, with a fully-shaven head and a burly imposing physique, her call-sign was not indicative of any special maternal instincts. It was short for Motherfucker. Her assault boat held two passengers in its rear tray: another Marine and one more civilian contractor.

  It had been just over two hours since Schofield and his test team had received an emergency transmission from Washington, informing them of the situation at Dragon Island. They had also received a bundle of digital documents over a secure data feed.

  These included an mpeg of the Russian President’s conversation with the mystery man holding the island and claiming to be the leader of a group calling itself the Army of Thieves; a DIA report by someone named Retter that mentioned seven incidents involving this Army of Thieves; a map of Dragon; and the co-ordinates of the downed Beriev that had called in the crisis.

  They also received a brief document titled ‘Operation of Atmospheric Weapon’ outlining the component parts of the device on Dragon Island: the two massive vents that spewed the gas, six small red uranium spheres, and the missiles that fired the spheres into the gas cloud. Broadly speaking, if they could destroy or sabotage any one of those three elements—before the spheres were primed to operating temperature—they could stop the operation of the weapon.

  Scarecrow was unimpressed: given that the vents had been belching gas for six weeks, that really only left the last two options. Although as he thought about it some more, perhaps there was one other way—

  But then he was informed that a SEAL team on a nearby Los Angeles–class submarine, the USS Miami, had already been dispatched to take the island by
force.

  Looking at his map of the island, Schofield didn’t like their chances.

  Dragon Island was a natural fortress. Its shores were made up almost entirely of three-hundred-foot-high cliffs, and in the only two places where the land came down to the water’s edge—a long-abandoned 19th-century whaling village and a submarine dock—there were all manner of fences, walls, gun emplacements and watchtowers. There was a third access point: three small islets nestled in and around the bay on Dragon’s northern coast, but that route was so easily guarded against as to be useless.

  In short, Dragon Island was perfect for a defending force and hell for an offensive one. Even a relatively small garrison could hold out a large attacking army for weeks.

  It was just as he was thinking about the SEAL incursion that a secure ULF signal came in from the USS Miami. It had already started powering toward Dragon and would get there a good hour before Schofield and his people could.

  A short and very one-sided exchange followed with the SEAL commander, a gruff but experienced specialist named Ira ‘Ironbark’ Barker.

  ‘Just sit back, Scarecrow. We’ll take care of this,’ Ironbark had said.

  ‘If you just wait an hour, we can catch up and go in with you,’ Schofield said. ‘I mean, we don’t even know how many men are on that isla—’

  ‘I ain’t waiting and my boys sure as hell don’t need your help,’ Ironbark said. ‘I’ve seen this sort of shit before. No amount of gun-toting thugs can match a fully-trained SEAL team. So I’m gonna say this once and once only: stay out of our way, Scarecrow. We are going to that island and we are going to shoot everything in sight. I don’t want you and your nerds stumbling in there afterward and getting in the way. Besides, who have you got with you anyway, a couple of Marines and some geeks from the science fair?’

  ‘I have seven people. Four Marines, including me, and three civilians.’

  ‘Which means you’ll be about as helpful as a fart in an elevator. Jesus, civilians. Why don’t you leave saving the world to the experts and stay in your heated tents.’

  ‘What about the plane, then?’ Schofield asked pointedly. ‘The Beriev that started all this? Shouldn’t you check that out before you go in? The pilot might still be alive, he might also have some better intel on disabling the device—’

  ‘Fuck the plane and fuck the pilot. I already have the layout of the island and I know enough to disable the weapon. That pilot can’t help me.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to check him out.’

  ‘Fine. Do that. I don’t care. I’ve heard about you, Scarecrow. Heard you got initiative, which to me means you’re unpredictable. And I don’t like unpredictable. Do what you want, just stay out of my way or else you might get shot. Understand?’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Ironbark, out.’ The line went dead.

  And that was how Schofield and his little team came to be zooming south through a maze of ice-walled canals, heading for the site of Vasily Ivanov’s crashed Beriev Be-12.

  SEVEN WEEKS IN AN ARCTIC CAMP

  MARCH–APRIL

  How Shane Schofield—a former commander of a crack Force Reconnaissance Unit—came to be in the Arctic with a small team of scientists was a story all by itself.

  Over the years, he and Mother had gone through a lot together: a mission in Antarctica during which they had defended a remote US ice station from French and British special forces units; that business concerning the former President at a secret base in the Utah desert called Area 7; and, of course, the bounty hunt in which a group called Majestic-12 had put an $18.6 million price on Schofield’s head.

  It was during that last incident that Schofield’s girlfriend, Lieutenant Elizabeth ‘Fox’ Gant, had been captured and brutally executed, for no reason other than to taunt Schofield. And although Schofield had ultimately prevailed in that mission, it had been at tremendous cost.

  Some people in authority believed that the matter had taken him to the limit of psychological endurance and even broken him. There were rumours that at one point in the mission he’d tried to take his own life. Even Mother had wondered if he’d ever be the same again.

  But after four months of mourning that was labelled stress leave, he’d gone to his superiors at Marine Headquarters in the Naval Annexe Building in Arlington and announced that he was ready to get back to work.

  Given the concerns about his mental state—and the wariness some Marines had about working with him—he was at first assigned to a teaching position at the Marine Corps’ recruit training facility at Parris Island in South Carolina.

  For such an experienced and decorated warrior, the appointment was seen by many as an insult, but it had actually been a good fit.

  As the former commander of a Force Recon unit, the new recruits at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island had hung on his every word. And Schofield had turned out to be an excellent teacher: generous with his knowledge, uncommonly patient, and always willing to stay late to work with a recruit who wasn’t quite getting it. His students adored him.

  That said, everyone at Marine HQ knew it was bullshit. It was just that no-one wanted to rush Scarecrow back into active service. (Although there were rumours that as a damaged and therefore expendable leader, he had been sent on a particularly bloody mission to an island in the Pacific Ocean called Hell Island. But no-one could verify these rumours and Schofield himself would not be drawn on them.)

  And then came the first French assassination attempt.

  They were waiting for him one Sunday night outside a restaurant in Beaufort as he emerged from dinner with his grandfather: a pair of DGSE agents looking to bag the French military’s five-million-euro floating bounty on the Scarecrow.

  Schofield had spotted them lurking across the street, had seen them follow him and his grandfather to the nearby parking structure. Upon entering the parking lot’s stairwell, he’d quickly doubled back, disarmed and disabled them both.

  The two French agents were now in Leavenworth in a special section reserved for protected inmates. The prisoners at Leavenworth, despite their own crimes, were oddly patriotic when it came to foreigners who tried to kill United States Marines and had not given the two Frenchmen a pleasant welcome.

  The second attempt had come six months later.

  It had happened on a quiet country road a few miles from Parris Island, as Schofield was driving back there late one night. Another pair of French agents had pulled up alongside his car and abruptly opened fire. A short running gun-battle had followed and it ended with Schofield firing back with his Desert Eagle pistol and killing the gun-toting passenger before ramming the rival car off a bridge, sending the second French assassin plunging into a swamp.

  The driver had survived. He was next seen sitting slumped on the front steps of DGSE headquarters in Paris, still covered in mud, handcuffed, with a pink bow tied around his mouth. A message was written in permanent marker on his forehead: ‘This belongs to you.’

  Despite a face-to-face meeting between the new American President and his French counterpart on the subject, the French resolutely refused to remove the bounty on Schofield’s head.

  And then this assignment had come up.

  The Corps needed experienced Marines to test new equipment in extreme climates. It would involve accompanying scientists from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the famous DARPA, and some private contractors to the ends of the Earth—baking deserts, steaming rainforests and the brutal cold of the Arctic—to test prototypes of new weapons, tents, armour and vehicles.

  Naturally, it wasn’t the kind of mission that the Corps wanted to waste on top talent, but as far as the brass were concerned it was perfect for Scarecrow: psychologically scarred, possibly unpredictable and the target of a vengeful foreign nation, it would keep him usefully occupied and out of harm’s way.

  Schofield didn’t mind the Arctic.

  It was quiet and peaceful and at this time of year it was actually quite beautiful. It was al
ways a perfect dawn—the sun lurked just above the horizon, never setting but never rising either, bathing the ice plain in spectacular horizontal light. It was bitingly cold, sure, but still beautiful.

  It also helped that he had a good team up there with him.

  Eight people and one robot.

  Over the last seven weeks, huddled in their camp of silver domed tents, Schofield’s team had got along pretty well—as well as eight human beings living in close proximity in freezing conditions could get along, really.

  Having Mother around helped.

  She could silence anyone who bitched or moaned with a single withering look. And even then, the only member of the team who’d been even remotely problematic was the senior executive from ArmaCorp Systems, Jeff Hartigan, and getting ‘the Look’ from Mother usually shut him up.

  Mother, of course, had insisted on coming along. Not even the Commandant of the Marines Corps dared say no to Mother Newman. After many years of loyal and distinguished service in the Corps, she had her choice of deployment and she went where Scarecrow went.

  ‘Because I’m his Fairy Godmotherfucker,’ she would say when asked why.

  The other two Marines in the group were considerably younger: Corporal Billy ‘the Kid’ Thompson and Lance Corporal Vittorio Puzo, a hulking Italian-American who because of his famous surname quickly got the nickname ‘Mario’.

  Scarecrow had a soft spot for the Kid. While not academically gifted—he failed most written exams—what he lacked in smarts, he made up for in a desire to be smarter. He was also good-natured, a crack shot and a dab hand at field-stripping and rebuilding almost any kind of weapon.

  Mario, on the other hand, was less easy to like.

  He was a surly and dour guy from the Engineering Corps who kept largely to himself when they weren’t working. A highly skilled mechanic, he was responsible for maintaining the various vehicles they were testing.