‘We’re seriously out of time, Emma,’ Schofield urged. ‘You gotta go now.’
‘Right,’ she said, and with a final deep breath, she slid away down the outrageously long zipline.
That left Schofield and Champion. Schofield lashed his own belt over the cable—
3:31 . . . 3:30 . . . 3:29 . . .
—and pulled Champion into a tight embrace.
Their faces were inches apart. Her arms were wrapped tightly around his neck while his hands were stretched upward, holding his belt looped over the cable.
‘Hang on tight,’ he said.
And for the briefest of moments, Veronique Champion looked deep into his scarred eyes.
And to Schofield’s complete surprise, she suddenly gave him a quick but passionate kiss on the lips. ‘I’ve never met a man like you. You are special.’ She pulled back from him. ‘Now fly, Scarecrow! Fly!’
As she said it, five members of the Army of Thieves burst through the terminal’s door, machine guns blazing.
But their bullets hit nothing, for the moment they entered the terminal, Schofield—with Champion gripping him tightly and Bertie still on his back—leapt off the cable car’s roof.
The tiny figures of Schofield and Champion shot down the super-long cable that connected Dragon Island’s clifftop terminal with Acid Islet’s sea-level station.
They looked infinitesimally small in front of the towering cliffs behind them and the vast horseshoe-shaped bay around them—but they didn’t care for the view now.
They slid fast, very fast, shooting down the long swooping cable, their enormous slide lasting a full twenty seconds.
Schofield gripped his belt tightly and as he saw the yawning square doors of the station on the islet getting closer, he pulled outward on his belt, causing it to tighten around the cable.
They slowed immediately and at first he thought he had left his braking move too late, and he pulled with all his strength on the belt and it bit against the cable, trying to slow, and they entered the lower station fast and—
—swung to a lurching halt.
Zack and Emma were already on the platform and they helped Champion down.
When she was safely down, Schofield dropped to the platform and checked his watch:
3:01 . . . 3:00 . . . 2:59 . . .
‘Three minutes, folks,’ he said. ‘Run. Run as fast as you can.’
They bolted out of the cable car station, down the short road and into the huge hall-sized building filled with vats and tanks.
2:00 . . . 1:59 . . . 1:58 . . .
Zack and Emma ran in front, while Schofield ran with Champion draped over his shoulder, limping along as fast as she could.
1:30 . . . 1:29 . . . 1:28 . . .
Across some catwalks, zigzagging.
1:00 . . . 0:59 . . .
‘One minute!’ Schofield called.
Down some ladders. Champion made it awkward, slowing them down.
0:40 . . . 0:39 . . .
Schofield landed on the bottom level and saw the door he’d seen before: the superthick metal door with the nuclear symbol on it. ‘There it is!’
0:30 . . . 0:29 . . .
They rushed across the floor of the hall.
0:18 . . . 0:17 . . .
Zack and Emma dashed inside the thick reinforced doorway.
0:16 . . . 0:15 . . .
Schofield, Bertie and Champion ducked in after them.
0:14 . . . 0:13 . . .
Zack and Emma swung the heavy door shut behind them. It closed with a resounding boom.
0:10 . . . 0:09 . . .
They all scampered down a concrete stairwell, down several levels.
0:05 . . . 0:04 . . .
Through two more thick doors.
0:03 . . . 0:02 . . .
Through a final door, which Schofield slammed shut behind them as they all dropped to the floor, backs pressed against the solid concrete wall.
0:01 . . . 0:00.
There was a moment of silence.
Then it came.
Impact.
The Russian ICBM came rocketing out of the sky like a thunderbolt, lancing down toward Dragon Island at over a thousand kilometres per hour.
The remaining members of the Army of Thieves had perhaps five seconds to admire its dazzling tailflame and smoketrail—enough time to realise with horror exactly what it was and that it brought with it their deaths.
The missile detonated.
A flash of light and an almighty boom were followed by a shockingly powerful outward-moving blast-wave that consumed Dragon Island.
The base’s two gas vents—previously so huge and gigantic—were instantly ripped apart by the shockwave. They simply disintegrated to dust. The disc-shaped tower tilted and fell before also being obliterated completely by the thermonuclear flame. Some of Dragon’s coastal cliffs trembled under the weight of the colossal explosion and spilled giant chunks of rock into the sea. The cable car terminal toppled off its perch, falling into the bay.
Everything was incinerated, every structure and person on the island was vaporised.
A towering mushroom cloud rose into the sky.
Dragon Island was no more.
So was the Army of Thieves.
Deep within the earth, in their nuclear bunker on Acid Islet, Schofield and the others all looked up at the deafening roar of the blast.
The concrete walls around them shook, but held. The lights flickered, but the generators continued to work.
When it was over, they all looked at each other.
‘What do we do now?’ Zack asked.
Schofield saw an old communications console on the wall. He walked over to it. It was connected to a generator and appeared to be in working order.
‘We radio home. Then we settle in and wait for someone to come and pick us up.’
That wait, it turned out, wasn’t long, only a few days.
After contacting the listening post at Eareckson Air Station again, Schofield was once again put through to the Situation Room.
An attack submarine with nuclear shielding—the USS Seawolf—was dispatched to pick them up. It would arrive, he was told, in three days. Until then, all they could do was wait.
During that wait, they drank what water they had sparingly and shared the few MREs that Bertie carried.
Schofield thought of Mother and Baba—especially Mother. They had apparently succeeded in stopping the launch of the megatrain’s missile, but at what cost: had they been shot? Wounded? Killed? They hadn’t replied to his radio calls earlier. Schofield wondered what had happened to Mother. If she had even been alive when the Russian nuke had hit, he couldn’t see how she could have survived its blast. And if she’d been killed, he hoped she had gone out the same way she had lived—all guns fucking blazing.
‘Farewell, Mother,’ he said softly. ‘You were my loyal, loyal friend. I wish I could’ve been with you at the end. I’ll miss you.’
When the Seawolf eventually arrived, it stayed under the surface of the icy waters of the bay.
The main island was a charred wasteland, a black apocalyptic hellscape.
Although partially sheltered from the primary blast, the hall on Acid Islet was now a skeleton of its former self: every single one of its many glass windows had been shattered and its roof had been wrenched away by the concussion wave. Its many vats and tanks now lay open to the sky.
Three crew members left the Seawolf in full biohazard suits. They carried a trunk with four more protective suits in it and a stretcher.
It took a while, but eventually everyone was transferred to the Seawolf in the biohazard suits. Once aboard, they would be quarantined in a radiation-proof chamber, scrubbed down and continually checked for residual radiation.
Schofield entered the Seawolf last, carrying the broken Bertie in one hand. In front of him walked Zack and Emma, and in front of them, two crewmen carried Champion on the stretcher. During the wait in the bunker, Schofield had cleaned and redressed her st
omach wound several times, but now she needed proper medical attention.
On the way to the quarantine chamber, Champion was diverted into the sub’s specially equipped infirmary—a sealed-off medical area specifically designed to treat crew members affected by a radiation leak in the sub’s nuclear reactor. There she would be treated by the sub’s medical officer, also in a biohazard suit.
As he handed Champion over to the medical officer, Schofield heard a muffled shouting coming from inside the sealed-off medical area. It sounded like, ‘Hey! Scarecrow!’
He peered inside—and saw Mother sitting up on a bed, yelling and waving at him.
‘Yeah, you! You big sexy hunk of hero stuff!’ She grinned broadly. ‘You fucking-A did it! You are the man! The fucking man!’
In a bed to her left, attached to a bunch of tubes and drips, and currently in a deep coma, was Baba. Beside him, a heart-rate monitor pulsed weakly; he was alive, barely.
Despite his fatigue, Schofield couldn’t help but smile. Next to him, Zack’s jaw just dropped.
Schofield said to Mother, ‘I tried to call you on the radio but got no response. What happened on the train? How did you get away from the blast?’
Mother grinned. ‘I did what you would’ve done: I drove that train at full fucking speed into the submarine dock’s pool! The fire-fight was brutal and my French buddy here got shot up bad—but he held them off long enough to get us over the line. Anyway, just as the train shot into the water, I grabbed Baba and dived off the top of the locomotive, and while it went under, we landed with a splash right beside the bow of that freighter, where I’d seen a little Russian submersible.
‘We were both wounded—him worse than me—so I just dragged him across to that submersible and climbed inside it, to get somewhere dry where I could check his wounds.’
Schofield looked at the still figure of Baba in the bed beside her. He had about six body wounds, including one right in the centre of his chest. Chest wounds were usually fatal unless you had some kind of haemostatic, or blood clotting, agent like Celox gel or a QuikClot sponge—and Schofield knew that Mother and Baba hadn’t had either of those.
‘How on Earth did you patch him up and stop him bleeding out?’
Mother grinned again, and jerked her chin at Zack. ‘It was all thanks to him, actually. You may find this hard to believe, boss, but sometimes I do actually pay attention to techno-babble. One day back at camp, before all this started, Zack was telling me about our new MRE ration packs. He said the water filtration pills in them were chitosan-based and that chitosan is the key ingredient of Celox gel. Now, those MREs also have a crap-tasting jelly in them, and jelly is just gelatin. I figured, well, if I mixed the filtration pills with water and the jelly, I might end up with a gooey gel vaguely like Celox. So I pulled out my MRE and did exactly that. It produced a nice thick gel which I applied to his major wound. It formed a decent clot, not a perfect one, but one that was good enough to seal and contain the wound. The submersible had a first-aid kit with some bandages in it and I used them to cover it all up. Not sure how much longer it would’ve lasted, but it kept him alive long enough till we got picked up.’
Schofield shook his head. ‘You made a clotting gel from the ingredients of your ration pack. You sound like—’
‘I know!’ Mother said. ‘I’m fucking MacGyver!’
‘You sure are. Wait a second. How did you get away, then? I tried to call you on the radio.’
Mother said, ‘I heard you on the radio but my microphone got shot off during the shootout on the train and Baba’s musta fallen off at some point, probably when we landed in the water; we did land pretty hard. Anyway, I could hear you but I couldn’t transmit. You said we had to get off the island, pronto, so I figured some kind of serious boomtime was coming. So I fired up that submersible and drove it as deep as possible, to put as much water between us and Dragon as I could. The Mir worked fine but its radio was a half-broken piece of shit. I only managed to attract this sub’s attention by pinging constantly on the active sonar.’
Schofield nodded at Baba. ‘How is he?’
‘He’s still critical. They put him in an induced coma. The doc doesn’t know if he’ll pull through.’
Schofield said, ‘I gotta go to quarantine and get scrubbed. I’ll talk to you later.’
As he said this, Veronique Champion was placed on the bed to Mother’s right.
Schofield said to Champion, ‘I’ll come back to check on you, too.’
Champion nodded. ‘Thank you . . . again.’
Mother saw this exchange and threw a wide suggestive grin at Schofield. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Take your time, Scarecrow. I got some girl talk to do with my new French chickadee here.’
OUTER BALTIMORE
24 SEPTEMBER, 1650 HOURS
(FIVE MONTHS LATER)
Shane Schofield sat in the basement office of a little townhouse in the suburbs of Baltimore.
Oddly, he wore his full dress uniform: white peaked cap, fitted blue coat with medals, gold belt buckle and pale-blue trousers with red piping. His attire looked far too formal for the little basement office, but then when he was done here he was going to the White House.
Across from him, behind her desk, sat Brooke Ulacco, his plain-looking, plain-spoken, sixty-bucks-an-hour suburban psychologist.
It was nearing the end of the day and Schofield had just spent the afternoon recounting his experiences at Dragon Island, including his torture at the hands of Marius Calderon.
Until that day, he hadn’t been allowed to talk to Ulacco about his mission to Dragon—as it involved CIA matters, he’d been informed by his superiors that her existing TS/SCI clearance was not high enough. He’d insisted that they get her the appropriate clearance, so he could tell her everything. It had taken a few months and even more background checks but Ulacco had passed and a ‘SAP’—or Special Access Program—addendum was attached to her existing Top Secret clearance. For Schofield it was well worth the wait to be able to tell her everything.
When he had finished recounting his story, Ulacco nodded slowly.
‘So, how’d you do it?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘How did you keep your head together? This Calderon guy tortured you both physically and mentally. He taunted you about your father and about Gant’s death and then, so far as you knew, he killed your closest friend, Mother, in front of you with rats in a goddamn box. As your therapist, I would have serious problems with someone doing this to you. So. How did you do it?’
Schofield leaned back in his chair.
He knew exactly how he’d done it.
‘I did what you taught me,’ he said.
‘What I taught you?’ Ulacco was rarely surprised. Her calm, cocksure, seen-it-all facial expression was not often broken. But now it was. ‘What did I teach you?’
‘You taught me to compartmentalise my mind,’ Schofield said. ‘In a memory location. Or in my case, a, ahem, memory submarine.’
Ulacco eyed him closely. ‘I’ve often wondered about this, Shane. You chose a submarine as a memory locale because it is a perfectly sealable structure, but one with a purging option—one from which you can jettison memories. Did you jettison your memories of Libby Gant?’
Ulacco asked that question without expression, poker-faced. And even though she actually hung on the answer, she added, ‘There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, by the way.’
Schofield paused for a full minute, thinking long and hard.
Ulacco watched him, waiting.
Then he spoke.
‘No. I didn’t. I could never jettison my memories of Libby. She was an incredible woman and I loved her and to remove all the wonderful memories of her would be to remove something that makes me whole, makes me who I am, makes me me. During my torture—and especially when I thought Mother had been killed—I just shoved all those good memories into a compartment deep within the submarine of my mind, shut the steel door and spun the flywheel till it w
as sealed tight. After that, Calderon couldn’t touch Gant. Nothing he could say or do to me would reach those memories, all those great memories. And I was okay.’
‘You were okay? You died.’
‘Only for a little while.’
Ulacco cracked a wry half-smile. ‘So you’re telling me that a memory technique that I taught you here in my crappy basement in Baltimore kept you sane while you were being tortured by one of the world’s foremost experts in breaking the human mind?’
Schofield nodded. ‘Yep.’
Ulacco turned away for a second, and despite herself, actually looked a little proud. It only lasted a second, but Schofield saw it. Then her usual self kicked back in.
‘And then you sorta saved the northern hemisphere from annihilation?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘So you could say that by saving you, I actually saved the world?’ she said cheekily.
Schofield returned her smile. ‘I think you could say that.’ And they laughed, for the first time in any of their meetings.
Ulacco stood. ‘Your time’s up, Captain. And you have an appointment with the President to keep.’
Schofield stood and nodded seriously. ‘Thanks, Doc. Thank you for all your help. Oh, there’s just one more thing.’
THE OVAL OFFICE
THE WHITE HOUSE
24 SEPTEMBER, 2000 HOURS
Shane Schofield stood to attention in the Oval Office in his full dress uniform while the President of the United States hung a medal around his neck.
Beside him stood Mother, also in her dress blues and also at attention. Beside her stood four civilians—Dave Fairfax, Marianne Retter, Zack Weinberg and Emma Dawson—and one robot. Standing happily by Zack’s side, his lower body completely rebuilt and his exoskeleton shining, was Bertie.
Watched by the Commandant of the Marine Corps, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Director of DARPA, they had all received various medals for ‘gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of their lives above and beyond the call of duty’.
Off to one side stood Brooke Ulacco, dressed in her quickly assembled Sunday best, looking a little stunned to be there. When the President stood before her, he had no medal in his hands.