Schofield swung his jeep onto a converging course with the plane, a course that would finish at the very end of the runway.
His plan was a desperate one: he intended to drive his jeep in front of the plane, crippling its landing gear and stopping it from taking off. There was no other option: if Calderon got away, he—
A sudden volley shattered his windshield and Schofield spun to see the enemy motorcycle—with a gun-toting passenger in its sidecar—pull alongside him.
Schofield brought up his TMP but it just clicked, empty. Fortunately, at the same time, Bertie swung around and with two blistering shots nailed both the rider and the passenger and the motorbike went tumbling away, end over end.
Schofield chucked the TMP and gunned the jeep. It swung in parallel to the runway, hurtling along at almost a hundred kilometres an hour, just ahead of the rolling Antonov.
But then the Antonov surged forward . . . powering up to takeoff speed, accelerating dramatically . . .
Schofield’s jeep bounced up onto the runway, speeding as fast as it could go.
The Antonov thundered down the tarmac, picking up speed. Soon it would overtake the jeep and lift off, after which it would ignite the sky, while Dragon Island and everyone left on it would be destroyed by an angry Russian missile strike.
As he sped along, Schofield glanced forward and saw the end of the runway rapidly approaching. It was dangerously close, with nothing beyond it but sheer cliffs dropping down to the ocean.
I have to get in front of that plane . . .
He made to yank left on his steering wheel when suddenly, with a roar, the Antonov came alongside his jeep, its forward wheels lifting slowly from the runway . . .
He was too late.
No!
The plane lifted off with only twenty metres of runway to spare.
The sight of the Antonov lifting off from Dragon Island’s western runway would have been pretty impressive in and of itself, but its lift-off that day was special in one other way.
Had anyone been watching it from afar, they would have seen the plane soar magnificently into the air with a little jeep speeding along the ground beside it, trying valiantly to keep up. But as the plane took to the air, the keen observer would also have seen the man driving the jeep fire something up at the departing plane: a device with a trailing cable.
Speeding along in the jeep with the wind assaulting his face and the roar of the Antonov assailing his ears, Schofield stood and fired his Magneteux’s grappling hook up at the departing plane.
The Magneteux’s arrow-like head lodged in the plane’s fuselage up near its nose and as the Antonov lifted off, Schofield was yanked up into the air with it, clinging to the Magneteux’s cable.
As he was swept up into the air, hanging from the rising plane, his jeep went flying off the end of the runway, over the cliff, dropping in a great soaring arc into the ocean far below.
The Antonov soared skyward at a steep angle, with Shane Schofield dangling from it by his Magneteux’s cable.
Schofield had already done the maths in his head: the gap in the gas cloud would be perhaps seventy kilometres wide, so the Antonov would reach it in less than ten minutes. Once there, Calderon would drop a warhead into it and ignite the gas cloud.
Schofield reeled in his cable and whizzed up it, arriving near the nose of the Antonov, which, like the other one, featured a glass spotter’s dome.
Schofield swung up under the glass dome, unholstered his SIG and fired it into the glass.
He ran out of bullets after two shots, but they did enough. The dome shattered and he discarded the gun, swung himself up and clambered inside.
With freezing wind whistling all around him, Schofield stepped up into the Antonov’s forward nose area—
—to find Mario standing before him, his M9 pistol aimed at Schofield’s head.
Calderon and Typhon were nowhere to be seen. They must have been up in the cockpit directly above the nose cone. In the hold beyond Mario, Schofield saw a large object hidden underneath a tarpaulin and at the very back of the hold, near its closed ramp, the jeep Calderon had driven from the gasworks to get to the plane.
‘Mario . . .’ Schofield said, his hands spread wide. He had discarded the empty SIG when he’d climbed up through the shattered glass dome, so he was now gunless.
‘I made my choice, Scarecrow!’ Mario yelled over the wind. ‘And that means only one of us can go home!’
‘You’re a two-bit hood, Mario, unworthy of the name Marine . . .’
‘Fuck you,’ Mario shouted. ‘See you in Hell!’
He made to squeeze his trigger but, to his surprise, Schofield just stood there, hands still spread wide.
Then Schofield said something and suddenly Bertie popped up over his shoulder, his machine-gun barrel unfolding quickly.
Boom!
Mario’s chest exploded. He was literally blasted off his feet. His legs flew up into the air as his upper body went down. He dropped to the floor, unmoving, dead.
‘Hoodlums should never pick fights with soldiers,’ Schofield muttered. ‘Come on, Bertie. We got work to do.’
They dashed over Mario’s body, heading for the short flight of steel stairs that led up to the cockpit.
As Schofield had been hanging unseen from the Antonov’s nose cone by the Magneteux’s cable, Marius Calderon had been in the plane’s cockpit, staring intently at a screen.
He’d attached a spectroscopic long-path analyser to one of the cockpit’s side windows: it looked like a stubby horizontal aerial and it gave real-time analysis of the air quality around the plane.
Its results now appeared on the screen:
Calderon saw the gas cloud displayed as an encroaching blob at the top of the screen with his position shown at the centre. Every few seconds, the screen changed, showing the cloud getting closer as the plane advanced toward it.
They were currently 47 kilometres from the gas cloud, only four minutes’ travel away.
Calderon smiled.
On the floor beside him, connected to the spectroscope by some wires, sat a Russian RS-6 nuclear warhead that had been reconfigured to accommodate a red uranium sphere. Conical in shape and covered in stencilled warnings, it was an imposing device: one capable of delivering death on a massive scale.
As soon as he’d boarded the plane, Calderon had inserted the sphere into the warhead’s chamber. And now the warhead was linked to the spectroscope: once the spectroscope detected itself to be within the gas cloud, it would automatically instruct the warhead to initiate a two-minute detonation sequence, giving Calderon and Typhon time to escape before the warhead detonated.
For the explosion of the warhead would not be a small one.
It would vaporise the entire Antonov in a single fiery instant—blasting it apart as if it were made of tissue paper, before setting the gas-infused sky of the northern hemisphere alight. It was thus imperative that Calderon and Typhon be off the plane when the warhead went off, but they’d planned for that, too.
Calderon also had one last device in the cockpit: the compact black satellite dish that was the uplink. Once they were far enough away from Dragon Island, he would switch it off and leave the island to its fate.
Gunfire from the hold made him turn. ‘What was that! Get down there!’ he yelled to Typhon.
Calderon took the controls while Typhon dashed back into the hold.
Gun in hand, Typhon threw open the cockpit door to see the rear hold of the Antonov in turmoil: gusting Arctic wind whistled through it, causing tarps to billow and anything not tied down to swirl through the air. Making it seem even more bizarre, the hold was tilted sharply upward thanks to the ascending angle of the plane—
Someone tackled him from the side and Typhon went sprawling to the floor, dropping his gun, his attacker falling with him.
Typhon stood to see Shane Schofield rising to his feet a few yards away.
‘You just keep turning up,’ Typhon said as they circled each other. ‘Yo
u really are something . . .’
‘Where did Calderon find you?’ Schofield said. ‘Chile?’
‘Leavenworth,’ Typhon said. ‘I was in the Army Rangers, but I killed a fellow Ranger who was gonna report me for an off-base incident. Calderon needed capable, patriotic men and he got me released to work for him. I brought the “Sharks” with me.’
‘Great. More patriots,’ Schofield said. ‘Bertie!’ Once again, Bertie appeared over his shoulder and—
His gunbarrel clicked, dry.
‘Damn,’ Schofield said as Typhon lunged at him and the two of them went thudding onto the back of the jeep in the rear of the hold, struggling and rolling.
Typhon unleashed some brutal punches, and for a short while, Schofield parried and evaded them, but he was beyond exhausted—from gunshot and torture wounds—and soon Typhon gained the ascendency, and started landing more and more blows.
Up in the cockpit of the plane, Calderon’s spectroscope started beeping loudly. They had entered the gas cloud:
A timer on the warhead immediately started counting down.
‘Time to fly,’ Calderon said aloud. ‘And time to say goodbye to Dragon Island. Thank you, my beloved Army. You did your job perfectly.’
With those words, he flicked a switch on the satellite uplink and every light on it went out—
—and in a room in a Russian missile launch facility in western Siberia, a console operator instantly sat upright.
‘Sir!’ he called. ‘The satellite missile-detection shield over Dragon Island just went offline!’
His commander stared at the operator’s screen for a second, then he grabbed a secure phone and relayed this information to the Russian President in Moscow.
The reply came immediately.
The missile commander hung up the phone.
‘We are authorised for nuclear launch. Target is Dragon Island. Fire.’
A few moments later, an SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile with a 500-kiloton thermonuclear warhead shot out of its silo, heading for Dragon Island. Flight time: twenty-two minutes.
All as Marius Calderon had planned.
The Antonov’s hold was now a truly crazy place: tilted at a steep upward angle with a maelstrom of wind whipping through it.
Another savage blow from Typhon sent Schofield flailing onto the back of the jeep parked at the rear of the hold. In total control, Typhon straddled him and punched him again.
As Schofield recoiled from the blow, spitting blood, he suddenly became aware of a second source of wind in the already blustery hold.
He glanced up to see that the rear ramp was opening—a sideways look revealed that Marius Calderon had entered the hold and was at the ramp controls on the side wall.
‘Why, Captain Schofield, we meet again!’ he called. ‘Your determination is truly admirable, but you are finally too late. We have arrived at the gas cloud and the warhead has been activated. It cannot be stopped now. Typhon! Finish him! We have to get that jeep out of the way!’
Calderon nodded at the tarp-covered object at the front end of the hold, hemmed in by the jeep.
‘Yes, sir!’ Typhon shouted as he gripped the weakened and battered Schofield by the throat with one hand.
He looked down at Schofield with murderous eyes. Schofield was lying defenceless on the back of the jeep, one hand hanging off it, his face dirty and bruised, his mouth dripping blood.
Typhon pulled his fist back to deliver the death blow, a blow that would drive Schofield’s nose up into his brain and kill him.
His fist came rushing down, just as Schofield reached out with his free hand and pulled on a lever by the jeep’s tyres.
The lever released some chains holding the jeep inside the hold and as Typhon’s fist came rushing down, the jeep rolled suddenly, straight out of the back of the steeply-rising plane where it dropped out into the sky, with Schofield and Typhon on it!
Marius Calderon gaped at the sudden disappearance of the jeep and his right-hand man. One second they were there, the next they were gone.
‘Fuck me,’ he gasped.
He recovered quickly: losing Typhon was a shame but not a disaster. Typhon was an excellent second-in-command, but since he knew Calderon’s real identity as a senior CIA agent, Typhon had always faced liquidation when this was all over. This had saved Calderon the effort.
As for Schofield: thank Christ. The fucking Energizer Bunny was finally gone.
Calderon kept moving. He still had a getaway to make.
The plane had just entered the gas cloud and, now flying on autopilot, it was programmed to penetrate deeper into the cloud. In less than two minutes, the warhead in the cockpit would go off.
Calderon hurried over to the tarp-covered object and threw off the tarpaulin . . .
. . . to reveal a compact mini-submarine.
It was a Russian Mir-4 Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle, a variant of the Mir-2. Only five metres long with a curved glass bubble for its bow, it was capable of holding six crew and while it was claimed by the Russians to be used only for scientific research, the Mir-4 was actually used for submarine transfers and clandestine insertions into hostile waters. This Mir-4 had been one of two submersibles that had been on the Russian freighter, the Okhotsk, when it had been taken six months ago.
With the jeep now out of the way, Calderon flicked a switch and jumped aboard the sub as it was shunted by an underfloor cable to the back of the hold, ready for release. Once it reached the end of the rear ramp, it simply tipped over the edge and like the jeep before it, dropped away into the grey Arctic sky.
Unlike the jeep, however, the Mir was fitted with four parachutes, which all blossomed above it as it fell, guiding the sub and Calderon to a gentle landing in the cold waters of the Arctic Ocean.
The mini-sub landed in the ocean with a soft splash and Calderon quickly drove it under the surface, heading away to a designated retrieval location where he would be met by a CIA Sturgeon-class submarine, his years-long mission now over save for the big bang.
Calderon had taken care of everything: the gas cloud, the warhead, the destruction of Dragon Island, his own escape.
He’d only missed one thing:
The figure dangling from the underbelly of the Antonov at the end of a Maghook: Captain Shane Michael Schofield.
As Schofield’s jeep had tipped out the back of the Antonov, it had dropped away toward the ocean with Typhon still on it, screaming. He had screamed all the way down.
But Schofield hadn’t.
As the jeep had dropped out the back of the plane, he had called upon his trusty Maghook—small compared to the Magneteux and not nearly as sexy or strong—but it was all he had.
Leaping off the falling jeep, he’d fired the Maghook back up at the plane before he fell too far and the Maghook’s bulbous magnetic head thunked against the underside of the rear ramp and held. The jeep had fallen away beneath him, but he was still in the game.
Schofield then reeled himself up using the Maghook’s internal spooler, arriving under the ramp just as a submersible of some kind came rumbling out of the hold and dropped into the sky, issuing some parachutes.
‘That son of a bitch,’ Schofield said as he climbed back up into the blustery hold, now the doomed Antonov’s only occupant. ‘But this isn’t over yet.’
Schofield hurried through the windblown hold and up into the empty cockpit.
He took it all in quickly: the autopilot, the spectroscope’s screen showing that the plane was now inside the flammable gas cloud, the fearsome warhead, and on the warhead, a timer that currently read:
00:34 . . . 00:33 . . . 00:32 . . .
‘Thirty-two seconds to the end of the world . . .’ Schofield breathed. ‘How do I get myself into these situations?’
He looked about himself for options, ideas, solutions.
He was basically on a flying bomb, one that would ignite a global atmospheric firestorm.
00:30 . . . 00:29 . . . 00:28 . . .
He sta
red at the warhead. Calderon had replaced all its exterior panels and they were all screwed shut. He’d never be able to extract the uranium sphere from it in time.
How do I stop this? How can I?
I can’t.
It’s too late . . .
And for the first time in his career, Schofield knew that it was true: he had finally run out of time.
Twenty-eight seconds later, the warhead detonated with all its mighty force.
The detonation of the warhead containing the red uranium sphere was devastating in its intensity. It sent out a blinding white-hot blast that expanded laterally in every direction.
Inside his Mir submersible, under the surface of the Arctic Ocean, Marius Calderon felt it. It shook his sub, even from this distance.
And then he frowned.
Deep underwater, he shouldn’t have felt the detonation. Water was an excellent buffer against concussion waves. But he had still felt it. The only way he would feel it underwater was if . . .
‘No!’ Calderon shouted in the solitude of his mini-sub. ‘No!’
For the warhead had most assuredly detonated, with the red uranium sphere inside it. The only problem was, it had not detonated in the gas-infused sky.
As Calderon had just realised, it had detonated underwater.
It was the only thing Schofield could think to do.
Roll the warhead out of the cockpit into the hold—
00:26 . . . 00:25 . . . 00:24 . . .
Then pushing it off the back of the ramp—
00:21 . . . 00:20 . . . 00:19 . . .
The warhead tumbled end over end as it fell through the sky, its timer ticking all the way down—
Before it hit the ocean’s surface with a great splash and immediately went under, sinking fast—
00:05 . . . 00:04 . . . 00:03 . . .
Where it sank and sank into the blue haze—
00:02 . . . 00:01 . . . 00:00.
Beeeeeeep!
Boom.
The explosion of the warhead under the surface of the ocean looked like the standard undersea detonation of a thermonuclear device.