Scarecrow (11 page)

5.2% . . . 4.8% . . . 4.4% . . .

Better
, Gant thought.

‘You know,' Mother said as they jogged, ‘I think he's gonna pop the question in Italy.'

‘Mother . . .' Gant said.

After this mission, Mother and Gant—together with Schofield and Mother's nuggetty little husband, Ralph—were going on a group holiday to Italy. They were going to rent a villa in Tuscany for two weeks before taking in the famous ‘Aerostadia Italia' airshow in Milan—the centrepiece of which were two very rare X-15s, the famous NASA-built rocket planes, the fastest aircraft ever built. Mother was really looking forward to it.

‘Think about it,' she said. ‘Tuscan hills. An old villa. A classy guy like the Scarecrow wouldn't miss an opportunity like that.'

‘He told you he was going to ask, didn't he?' Gant said, eyes forward.

‘Yep.'

‘He's such a chicken,' Gant said as they rounded a bend and all of a sudden, heard gunfire. ‘To be continued,' she said, giving Mother a look.

Up ahead in the darkness, they saw the beams of helmet-mounted flashlights and the shadows of running Allied soldiers, all moving behind a makeshift barricade constructed of old mining equipment—barrels, crates, empty steel mini-skips.

And beyond the barricade, Gant saw the all-important air vents.

In this tight, low-ceilinged, square-edged world, the air vent cavern was a welcome stretch of open space. Six storeys high and lit by brilliant white phosphorus flares, it shone like a glowing underground cathedral.

The two 10-metre-wide air vents disappeared up into the roof via a pair of identical cone-shaped recesses in the ceiling.

And underneath the air vents, one of the fiercest battles in history was underway.

The members of Al-Qaeda had prepared well.

They had built a blockade of their own in this high-ceilinged cavern—a barricade that was infinitely superior to the ad hoc creation of the Allied soldiers.

It was made of the larger mining equipment that had been left in the mine: big vehicles featuring gigantic hemispherical drill bits, front-end loaders, some old white Humvee-like trucks called ‘Driftrunners', and tip-trays filled with bullet-absorbing coal.

As Gant reached the Allied barricade, she saw the terrorists on the other side of the cavern: over a hundred of them, all dressed in brown leather waistcoats, white shirts, and coiled black turbans.

They were also armed to the teeth. AK-47s, M-16s, RPGs. Bathed in the fresh air of the vents, gunfire was clearly safe inside this subterranean hall.

Gant linked up with the Allied soldiers on the scene.

There were about twenty of them, a mix of United States Marines and British SAS troops.

She arrived at the side of the Allied commander, an SAS major named Ashcroft, call-sign: Sphinx.

‘It's a bloody nightmare!' the English commando shouted. ‘They're dug in around those vents for the long term! And then every few minutes, one of them—
shit!
Here comes another one! Shoot him!
Shoot
him!'

Gant snapped round to look over the Allied barricade.

With shocking suddenness, a bearded Arab terrorist had burst forth from a gap in the Al-Qaeda barricade
on a motorcycle
, firing an AK-47 one-handed and yelling to Allah.

Strapped to his chest were four wads of C4.

Three SAS soldiers nailed him with their automatic rifles, blasting the suicide bomber from his saddle, sending him crashing to the ground behind his speeding motorbike.

The Arab hit the ground in a clumsy puff of dust—

—and then he exploded.

One second he was there. The next he was simply gone.

Gant's eyes widened.

Madness
 . . .

The SAS leader, Ashcroft, turned to her. ‘It's absolute bedlam, darlin'! Every now and then, the bastards launch a suicide run and we have to cut them down before they reach our barricade! The problem is they must have a supply cave somewhere back there! Generators, gasoline and enough ammo, food and water to see them through to the year 3000! It's a stand-off!'

‘What if we went around?' Gant said, indicating the series of tunnels off to their right.

‘No. It's booby-trapped! Trip-wires. Landmines. I've already lost two good men going that way! These rag-heads have been waiting for a fight in this place for a long time! This is going to take a frontal assault. What I need is more men!'

At that moment, as if on cue, a collection of about twenty more barrel-mounted flashlights appeared in the tunnel that led back to the mine's entrance.

‘Ah, reinforcements,' Ashcroft said, heading down the tunnel to meet them.

Gant watched him go, saw him meet the leader of this new squad and shake the man's hand.

Funny
, she thought.
Colonel Walker had said that the next team wouldn't be coming in for at least another twenty minutes. How did these guys get in so quickly—

She watched Ashcroft wave his hand toward the barricade, explaining the situation, turning his back on his new acquaintance for a split second, during which moment the leader of this new group of soldiers smoothly and fluidly drew something from his belt and swiped it hard across Ashcroft's neck region.

At first Gant didn't know what had happened.

Ashcroft didn't move.

Then, to her absolute horror, Gant saw Ashcroft's head tilt at an impossible angle and just drop off his body.

Her eyes went wide with disbelief.

What—?

But she didn't have time for shock, for no sooner was Ashcroft down than the submachine-guns of this new force of men burst to life, raining fire on the Allied troops gathered behind their barricade.

Quick as a flash, Gant dived over and
into
one of the steel mini-skips that formed her barricade, just as bullets impacted all around her. She was joined a second later by Mother and her other two Marines.

The rest of the Allied troops weren't so lucky.

Most of them were caught out in the open . . . and they were pummelled mercilessly by this unexpected storm of bullets from behind. Their bodies exploded with bloody holes, convulsed horribly.

‘Goddamnit! What the hell is this!' Gant pressed herself close to a mini-skip's rusty steel walls.

Now they were caught between
two
sets of enemies: one in front of their barricade, one behind.

A lethal sandwich.

‘What do we do, Chickadee?' Mother yelled.

Gant's face set into a determined expression. ‘We stay alive. Come on, this way!'

And with that, Gant led her team in the only direction they could go—she leapt over the
forward
side of the mini-skip and landed, cat-like, on the dusty section of open ground
in between
the two facing barricades.

 

At that very same moment, Schofield and Book's Light Strike Vehicle skidded to a halt in the upper entrance cave of the mine.

Schofield saw the roller-coaster-like tracks of the drift diving down into the mine, took a step toward them, just as two figures burst out from a nearby side-tunnel.

Schofield and Book whipped around together, MP-7s up. The two dark figures did the same and—

‘Pokey?' Schofield said, squinting. ‘Pokey de Villiers?'

‘Scarecrow?' one of the figures lowered his gun. ‘Man, I almost shot you dead.'

It was Corporal Paul ‘Pokey' de Villiers, just returned from cleaning out the Al-Qaeda sniper holes on the mountainside with his partner, a lance-corporal nicknamed Freddy.

‘I need to find Gant,' Schofield said. ‘Where is she?'

‘Down there,' Pokey said.

Thirty seconds later, Schofield was sliding down the steep drift tunnel at the wheel of the Light Strike Vehicle with Book II riding shotgun and the two extra Marines, Pokey and Freddy, sharing the rear gunner's seat.

The LSV's headlights blazed as it rocketed down the 30-degree slope, straddling the train tracks that ran down the centre of the tunnel.

Nearing the bottom, Schofield jammed the LSV into reverse, causing its wheels to spin wildly backwards as the speeding car skidded
forwards
down the tunnel.

The strategy worked: they slowed, if only slightly. But it was enough and with a few yards to go, Schofield slipped the dune buggy out of reverse and the LSV blasted out of the bottom of the drift tunnel and shot into the maze, swinging left past the dead body of the SAS messenger who had been stationed there.

Gant was completely exposed.

Out on the forward side of the Allied barricade—with only thirty yards of open ground between her and about 200 murderous holy warriors.

If the terrorist forces wanted to kill her and her three Marines, then this was their chance. Gant waited for the hail of bullets that would end her life.

But it never came.

Instead she heard gunfire—from somewhere
behind
the Al-Qaeda blockade.

Gant frowned. It was a type of gunfire that she had never heard before. It sounded too fast, way too fast, like the whirring of a six-barrelled mini-gun . . .

And then she saw something that took her completely by surprise.

She saw the Al-Qaeda blockade get absolutely
raked
with internal gunfire—its walls blew out, assaulted by a million hypervelocity bullets—and suddenly a whole crowd of terrorists were leaping
over their own barricade
out into no-man's-land, fleeing some unseen force behind their own blockade . . . exactly as Gant had done herself.

Another thing was clear.

The terrorists were fleeing something far worse than Gant was.

As they leapt desperately over their barricade, they were shot in mid-air—from behind—and all but ripped apart, their limbs exploding from their bodies.

A split-second before one such Al-Qaeda warrior was ripped to pieces as he clambered over the barricade, Gant caught a glimpse of a
green
targeting laser zeroing in on him.

A green laser . . .

‘Er, Lieutenant!' Mother yelled from beside her. ‘What the hell happened to this fight! I thought wars were supposed to be fought between
two
competing forces!'

‘I know!' Gant called. ‘There are more than two forces down here! Come on, follow me!'

‘Where!'

‘There's only one way to solve this problem, and that's to do what we came here to do!'

With that, Gant made a break across no-man's-land, ducking underneath the overhead conveyor belt that ran up its left-hand side, and headed towards the left-hand air vent.

Gant came to the northern end of the elevated conveyor belt just as four Al-Qaeda terrorists came running out from behind their barricade, chased by gunfire.

The first three holy warriors scrambled up some boxes that had been arranged like stairs and jumped up onto the conveyor belt while the fourth hit a fat green button on a console.

The conveyor belt roared to life—

—and the three men on it were instantly whisked out of sight at tremendous speed, heading towards the Allied barricade. The fourth man jumped onto the belt after them and—
whoosh
—he was swept southward as well.

‘Whoa. Fast belt . . .' Mother said.

‘Come on!' Gant yelled as she dashed behind the Al-Qaeda barricade.

She burst into open space—the high-ceilinged area underneath the air vents. It did look like a cathedral here. Dim white light from electric lamps partially illuminated the area.

She also saw the reason why the Al-Qaeda terrorists had bolted from the safety of their barricade.

A team of maybe 15 black-clad commandos—dark wraiths wearing green-eyed night-vision goggles and motorcross-style Oakley anti-flash glasses—was fanning out from a small tunnel located behind the Al-Qaeda barricade, tucked into the north-eastern corner of the cavern.

It was, however, the weapons in their hands that seized Gant's attention. The weapons which had unleashed hell on the Al-Qaeda troops.

These new soldiers were equipped with MetalStorm M100 assault rifles. A variety of rail gun, the MetalStorm range of weapons do not use conventional moving parts to fire their bullets. Rather, they employ rapid-sequential electric shocks to trigger each round, and as such, are able to fire at the unbelievable rate of 10,000 rounds per minute. It amounts to a literal storm of metal, hence the name.

The MetalStorm guns of this new force of men were equipped with ghostly green laser-sighting devices—so in her mind, until she found out their real name, Gant just labelled them ‘the Black-Green Force'.

One thing about them was truly odd. This Black-Green Force didn't seem to care about her at all. They were pursuing the fleeing terrorists.

In the midst of all this confusion, Gant slid to the dusty ground underneath the left-hand air vent and started erecting a vertical mortar launcher.

When the launcher was ready, she yelled, ‘Clear!' and hit the trigger. With an explosive
whump!
, a mortar round shot up into the air vent, disappearing up it at rocket speed before . . .

. . . 
BOOM!!!!

Six hundred metres above them, the mortar round hit the camouflaged lid that capped the air vent, blasting it to smithereens. Debris rained down the vent, smacking to the ground, at the same time as a shaft of natural grey light flooded into the cavern from above.

When the rain of debris had cleared, Gant stepped forward again, and surrounded by her team, erected a new device, a much smaller one: a compact laser-emitting diode.

She flicked a switch.

Immediately, a brilliant red laser beam shot up into the vent from the diode, disappearing up the chimney, shooting into the sky.

‘All units, this is Fox,' Gant said into her radio mike. ‘If you're still alive, pay attention. The laser is set. Repeat, the laser is set. According to mission parameters, the bombers will be here in ten minutes! I don't care what else is happening in here, let's clear out of this mine, people!'