Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves Read online

  Like Schofield, however, both the Kid and Mario were in the Arctic doing field testing for a reason.

  They were also broken.

  The Kid had lost the hearing in one ear in a training accident, so he couldn’t go on active deployment. And a little digging on Schofield’s part had revealed that Mario had been implicated in the disappearance of some sidearms and over $20,000 worth of vehicle parts from a Marine lock-up; he hadn’t been formally charged but a cloud had lingered over him and this assignment was seen by some as an unofficial punishment.

  As for the four civilian members of the team, as far as Schofield was concerned, two of them were great and two less so.

  Zack Weinberg was from DARPA and he was your typical geek genius: he was 29, gangly and thin, and he wore huge glasses that seemed three sizes too big for his head.

  A physicist by training, he was at DARPA because of his work in robotics. Hopelessly devoted to Call of Duty video games and all things Star Wars and Star Trek, he was in the Arctic testing several new DARPA inventions, the main one being a small bomb-disposal robot called the BRTE-500, or, as Zack called it, ‘Bertie’.

  Bertie was DARPA’s answer to existing battlefield robots like the PackBot, the Talon and the weapons-mounted variant of the Talon called SWORDS.

  ‘Except Bertie comes with a few extra features,’ Zack said the day he pulled the little robot from its crate. ‘Unlike other bots that require human operators to control them remotely, Bertie is able to operate completely independently. Thanks to an artificial intelligence chip developed by my team at DARPA, he can follow spoken orders, learn, and even assess a situation and make tactical decisions.’

  ‘He can make tactical decisions?’ Schofield said. To him, the little robot—with its two spindly bomb-disposal arms and its curiously emotive single-lens ‘eye’ mounted on a stalk—looked like a cute toy. It scurried around on four rugged little tyres and, when necessary, extended a set of triangular treads that enabled it to climb up steps and over obstacles.

  ‘He’s a smart little bot,’ Zack said, ‘and for a weedy little fella, he packs a punch. He was initially designed for bomb disposal but I removed his IED water blaster and lightened his armour plating—replaced all the steel with ultralight titanium. Then I augmented him with some offensive capabilities.’

  As he said this, Zack attached a gunbarrel to Bertie’s weapons mount . . . and suddenly the little robot took on a wholly different appearance: he looked like Wall-E with a great big gun.

  ‘Those capabilities include,’ Zack explained, ‘four internal rotator-fed ammunition clips which load a custom-modified lightweight short-barrelled internal-recoil-compensated 5.56mm M249 machine gun; a blowtorch for cutting through fences and razor wire; full digital sat-comms; a high-res camera that can send video images back to base; a first-aid pack, including a diagnostic scanner and defibrillator paddles, both of which Bertie can apply himself; oh, and four of our new MRE ration packs in case the human beings working with him get hungry. And all this in a package that weighs about thirty kilograms, so you can even pick him up and carry him if you really need to get out of Dodge in a hurry.’

  Schofield couldn’t help but like Bertie: the little robot followed Zack around the camp like a devoted puppy, albeit a puppy with a machine gun on its back.

  Mother, however, was doubtful. ‘I don’t know. How can we know he won’t short-circuit and open fire on us with that cannon?’

  ‘Bertie can distinguish between friend and foe,’ Zack said. ‘I’ve scanned all our team’s faces into his memory bank with instructions that we are never to be fired upon.’

  ‘Hello? Didn’t you see the ED-209 in RoboCop?’

  ‘This is the big question about robotic weapons,’ Zack said. ‘But Bertie has operated for three hundred hours without hurting anybody he wasn’t supposed to hurt. We have to trust him sometime. Hey, speaking of which, Bertie, scan Captain Schofield. Facial and infra-red, please.’

  The robot scanned Schofield’s face, then beeped.

  Its robotic voice said, ‘Scan complete. Individual identified as Captain Shane M. Schofield, United States Marine Corps. Service identification number 256-3569.’

  Zack said, ‘Store as secondary buddy, please.’

  ‘Captain Shane M. Schofield stored as secondary buddy.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Schofield asked.

  ‘Bertie needs someone to follow. I’m his primary buddy, which is why he follows me, but if something were to happen to me, he needs a secondary buddy which I think should be you.’

  ‘I’m honoured.’

  Schofield liked Zack. On quiet evenings, they played chess and during those matches Zack would happily explain things like space-time, the speed of light and the Big Bang Theory—the TV show and the universe-creating event.

  On a few occasions, Schofield even played chess against Bertie, with the little robot moving the pieces with its long spindly arm.

  Bertie won every time.

  The second civilian Schofield got along well with was Emma Dawson, a young meteorologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

  In her late twenties, Emma was pretty, articulate and tremendously hardworking—she was almost always reading a chart or working away on her laptop. She was in the Arctic measuring the rate at which the sea ice was melting.

  Her beauty had not gone unnoticed by the young males in the team. Schofield had seen the Kid and Mario—and young Zack—staring absently at Emma on various occasions. But she rarely looked up from her work, and Schofield wondered if it was the practised skill of an attractive young woman: bury yourself in your work so you don’t have to fend off unwanted advances.

  The final two civilian members of the field team kept mainly to themselves.

  Jeff Hartigan was a senior executive for ArmaCorp Systems, a weapons maker that produced assault and sniper rifles. ArmaCorp was trying to convince the Marines to buy its latest assault rifle, the MX-18 carbine, but the Corps had insisted on cold-weather testing before they committed.

  At 48, Hartigan was the oldest member of the group. He was also perhaps the only one who occupied a position of status back in the real world. As such, he was haughty and aloof and didn’t care about anyone he deemed beneath him, which was pretty much everyone else in the camp—so long as they recorded the results of the carbine’s tests, he didn’t seem to care what they thought of him. Except during testing, he mostly stayed in his tent, well apart from the others, even going so far as to send his personal assistant—an equally aloof junior executive named Chad—to collect his food for him at mealtimes.

  Their testing had generally gone well.

  The ArmaCorp rifle had performed flawlessly in the ice-cold conditions—making Hartigan even more unbearable—and Bertie whizzed about impervious to all kinds of frost and snow, variously disarming explosives and blowing blocks of ice to pieces with his small but very powerful M249 machine gun.

  A new anti-explosive paint-gel made by an Australian company, DSS, worked perfectly in the cold—after the gooey gel was painted onto a large crate, that crate could withstand the most powerful explosive blast, even one from some potent PET plastic explosive, brought along precisely for those tests. Longer-lasting scuba rebreathers and drysuits for cold-water insertions had performed excellently, as had the new Assault Force Delivery Vehicles: some had wondered if the deflating valves on their rubber skirts might freeze in the cold, but they’d held up just fine.

  Mother liked the new MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—that they’d been instructed to try. Each MRE came in a small plastic tube the size of a Magic Marker, so they were extremely portable. Each tube held some powdered jelly, a high-energy protein bar and three new water filtration pills which worked brilliantly.

  ‘The jelly still tastes like shit,’ Mother said, ‘but the water pills are fucking brilliant. Best field water I ever tried and I haven’t got diarrhoea once.’

  Zack said, ‘That’s always been an issue with water fil
tration pills. These ones are chitosan-based and so far the results have been great. Chitosan is a natural polysaccharide that dissolves organically in the body. Did you know it’s also the main ingredient of Celox, the bullet-wound gel?’

  Mother held up a hand. ‘Hey. Genius. You lost me at polysaccha-something. I get it. It’s an amazing new substance that will change the way we live.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Zack said, deflating a little.

  Mother was more interested, however, in another device that Zack had been trialling: a new high-tech armoured wristguard.

  DARPA had been developing it in the hope that it would become standard issue in the Marines and Army Rangers. Made of light carbon-fibre, the wristguard covered its wearer’s forearm and featured, among other things, a high-resolution LCD screen.

  ‘This screen is designed to display real-time data—video signals, even satellite imagery—to a soldier in the field,’ Zack explained to Mother as they stood outside their tents one day, testing it.

  ‘Real-time satellite imagery?’ Wearing the wristguard, Mother peered at its small rectangular screen. Zack leaned over and touched some icons on it. The screen came alive, showing two people in black-and-white seen from directly overhead, standing on a barren white plain beside some hexagonal objects.

  ‘Okay, now wave,’ Zack said.

  Mother waved her left arm.

  On the screen, one of the figures waved its left arm.

  ‘Oh, that is way cool . . .’ Mother said.

  ‘The wristguard operates like a satellite phone,’ Zack explained. ‘Encrypted, of course. But so long as you can make a connection with the satellite, you can get real-time imagery, data, even voice signals. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve configured it so you can even surf the net.’

  Mother threw Zack a grin. ‘You know, Science Boy, you and I are gonna get along just fine.’

  Zack beamed.

  A few items had been unable to be tested, like an acid-based aerosol ‘anti-ursine agent’—or as Mother called it, ‘polar bear repellent’. While Zack had studiously sprayed it on all their tents, armour and drysuits, it had defied testing since no polar bears had come near their camp during the entire trip (prompting Mother to conclude, ‘Then I guess it works, doesn’t it?’).

  And some things hadn’t worked well at all.

  A new version of the Predator RPG launcher froze up, while the older version worked just fine. And a portable proximity sensor on the armoured wristguard seemed to work okay at first, but toward the end of their tour, it started sensing a large moving object—a three-hundred-foot-long object—within half a mile of their camp.

  But there was nothing near the camp. The endless ice plain, split by ever-widening cracks, stretched away to the horizon, starkly and obviously empty.

  ‘It might be picking up killer whales swimming under the ice,’ Schofield suggested. ‘Or even a submarine.’

  ‘No, it’s a lateral rangefinder. It scans the landscape in a sideways direction, not downward. It’s a glitch,’ Zack said sadly. ‘Shame. But then, that’s exactly why we’re here, to test these things out.’

  Naturally, over the course of seven weeks in a remote Arctic camp, they had good and bad days, occasional clashes and the odd petty argument.

  Like the time Mother accidentally picked up Zack’s iPhone, thinking it was hers, and listened to some music.

  ‘Goddamn hip-hop shit,’ she said, yanking the earphones from her ears. ‘How can you listen to this? It’s elevator music.’

  ‘What music do you like, then?’ Zack challenged.

  ‘Music peaked in the eighties, my young friend. Huey Lewis and the News. Feargal Sharkey. Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a fucking bat live on stage. It’s the same for movies. Seriously, there hasn’t been a decent balls-to-the-wall action flick since Predator. Arnie doing the business and, oh my, Jesse “The Body” Ventura. God broke the mould after he made Jesse Ventura. Hollywood actors today are all fucking nancy boys. Can you think of any leading man today who could say the line, “I ain’t got time to bleed”?’

  Zack had to concede that he couldn’t.

  But he did manage to convince Mother to listen to some other modern songs and she had to admit that she quite liked Lady Gaga. ‘Although, I’m not a “free bitch” like she is. I’m just a bitch,’ she said after hearing one song.

  On another occasion, as they gathered around the small gas fire in the mess tent, the Kid had said, ‘Hey Mother, I saw a killer whale pop up for air through an ice hole the other day. You seen one yet?’

  Mother stumped her left boot up on the table and rolled up her trouser leg, revealing that her left leg from the knee down was a prosthetic, all silver plating, hinges and hydraulics.

  Zack leaned forward. ‘What is that, stainless steel?’

  ‘Titanium,’ Mother said. ‘Got it thanks to a killer whale I met in Antarctica.’

  ‘What happened to the whale?’ the Kid asked.

  ‘It died,’ Mother said, deadpan.

  ‘Mother shot it in the head,’ Schofield explained.

  ‘You shot a killer whale in the head?’ the Kid said in disbelief.

  ‘Fuckin’ fish had my leg in its mouth. What else was I supposed to do?’

  Zack said, ‘You know, whales aren’t fish, they’re—’

  ‘I know they’re mammals!’ Mother snapped. ‘Christ, everyone tells me that. But when one of them’s got you by the foot and is pulling you under, trust me, you don’t care whether it’s a goddamn fucking mammal, all right!’

  Schofield grinned.

  During a long expedition, people will talk about many things over the campfire and this group was no different.

  They discussed politics, sports, the killing of Osama bin Laden, all kinds of subjects.

  One night they talked about the rise of China. It was one of the rare nights when Jeff Hartigan dined with the group and he spoke animatedly on the subject.

  ‘It’s hard to believe that only thirty years ago China was the laughing stock of the world, a rural shithole,’ he said. ‘Now, it’s a genuine global powerhouse: 1.3 billion people, the bulk of whom work in factories for a few bucks a day, building the world’s fridges, toys and DVD players. But now in China there’s this huge new middle class that wants everything we have in the West: cars, iPhones, the latest fashions. China is the future for every business in the world, in both supply and demand.’

  Mother looked doubtful. ‘But as China rises, does that mean other countries have to fall? My husband, Ralph, is a trucker. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of his buddies who work in factories get laid off—they’re honest, hardworking, blue-collar workers who just can’t compete with cheap Chinese labour. The work they do just keeps going overseas.’

  Hartigan shrugged. ‘Way of the world. A new power rises and an old one falls. America did exactly the same thing to England in the 1800s—outstripped it with industry, land and sheer human capital. Now China is doing it to us. And short of launching an all-out war, you can’t stop this kind of thing.’

  ‘Then what does the average American worker do? How do they pay their mortgage, keep a roof over their family’s head?’ Mother asked. She wasn’t trying to make a point. She genuinely wanted to know the answer.

  Hartigan said, ‘There’s nothing they can do. In things like this, some poor bastard has to be the loser. It’s just that the average American has never been the loser before. Now he is. And he’d better get used to it because nothing can stop China now.’

  On another occasion, a particularly spirited discussion arose when Zack—a very Jewish New York Jew—raised the classic campfire conundrum, ‘The Nazi Dilemma’.

  ‘You’re a Jew in Germany during World War II,’ he said, ‘hiding in a ditch beside a country road at night with a group of twenty other Jews. A Nazi regiment marches by. You all duck for cover and lie very still. But in your group is a baby. It starts crying. If the Nazis hear it, they’ll kill all of you. Someone suggests smothe
ring the baby, killing it in order to save the larger group. What do you do? Do you let the baby live and condemn everyone else, including you, to death? Or do you kill one baby so that twenty other people may live?’

  ‘You find a machine gun and kill the Nazis,’ Mother said.

  ‘Seriously,’ Zack said.

  ‘The choice is easy, kill the baby,’ Jeff Hartigan said. ‘The good of the majority must take precedence over the life of one person, even a child.’

  ‘I disagree,’ Emma said. ‘If you kill the baby, you become as bad as the Nazis.’

  The Kid said, ‘I could never kill an innocent person to save my own skin, least of all a baby. Couldn’t live with myself.’

  ‘What about you, Captain Schofield?’ Zack asked.

  Schofield looked at them all, before settling his gaze on Hartigan. ‘For me, the choice is also easy. Either we all survive together or we all die together. I don’t leave any man behind. And I’d never sacrifice anyone in my charge who was slow or tired or just a little weaker than everyone else. A civilisation is judged by how it treats the vulnerable.’

  ‘You’d give your life for a crying baby?’ Hartigan asked, incredulous. ‘And you’d give my life as well?’

  ‘Absolutely and absolutely. But I’d also put up one hell of a fight to save you both before it came to that.’

  Mother clapped him on the shoulder and gave him a big kiss on the cheek. ‘And that, folks, is why I love serving with the Scarecrow!’

  There were also, thankfully, some lighter conversations.

  ‘Well, with one week to go,’ Mother said, ‘I have to say that this trip has really let me down. My horoscope in Cosmo a couple of months ago said that’—she pulled out a page ripped from a magazine—‘“You will meet your mirror image in the next few months, a member of the opposite sex who is your natural partner. The chemistry will be irresistible. Sparks will fly.”’

  ‘You read Cosmo?’ the Kid asked.

  ‘When I’m in the waiting room at the dentist, yeah.’ Mother tossed the page into the air and gazed pointedly at the men in the tent: Schofield, the Kid, Mario and Zack. ‘I mean, look at you lot. Except for the ever-handsome Scarecrow, who’s like a brother to me and therefore off-limits in that department, the rest of you are a pretty fucking sorry sample of masculinity. No alpha males here.’