Scarecrow Read Free Page B

clusters of blinking red dots could be seen: one set on the ground floor of the office tower and a second set inside the massive maintenance shed.
    The two Delta teams.
    But something was wrong with this image.
    None of the blinking dots was moving.
    All of them were ominously still.
    Schofield felt a chill on the back of his neck.
    â€˜Bull,’ he said softly, ‘take Whip, Tommy and Hastings. Check out the office tower. I’ll take Book II, Clark and Rooster and secure the maintenance building.’
    â€˜Roger that, Scarecrow.’
    The Scout rushed down a narrow deserted street, passing underneath concrete walkways, blasting through the mounds of snow that lay everywhere.
    It skidded to a halt outside the gargantuan maintenance warehouse, right in front of a small personnel door.
    The rear hatch of the Scout was flung open and immediately Schofield and three snow-camouflaged Marines leapt out of it and bolted for the door.
    No sooner were they out than the Scout peeled away, heading for the glass office tower next door.
    Schofield entered the maintenance building gun-first.
    He carried a Heckler & Koch MP-7, the successor to the old MP-5. The MP-7 was a short-barrelled machine pistol, compact but powerful. In addition to the MP-7, Schofield carried a Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol, a K-Bar knife and, in a holster on his back, an Armalite MH-12 Maghook—a magnetic grappling hook that was fired from a double-gripped gun-like launcher.
    In addition to his standard kit, for this mission Schofield carried some extra firepower—six high-powered Thermite-Amatol demolition charges. Each handheld charge had the explosive ability to level an entire building.
    Schofield and his team hurried down a short corridor lined with offices, came to a door at its end.
    They stopped.
    Listened.
    No sound.
    Schofield cracked open the door—and caught a glimpse of wide-open space, immense wide-open space . . .
    He pushed the door wider.
    â€˜Jesus . . .’
    The work area of the maintenance warehouse stretched away from him like an enormous hangar bay, its cracked-glass roof revealing the grey Siberian sky.
    Only this was no ordinary hangar bay.
    Nor was it any ordinary old ‘maintenance shed’ for a penal colony.
    Taking up nearly three-quarters of the floorspace of this massive interior space was a gigantic— gigantic —rectangular concrete pit in the floor.
    And mounted at Schofield’s end of the pit, raised off the floor on a series of concrete blocks, was a 200-metre-long submarine.
    It looked awesome.
    Like a giant on its throne, surrounded by a complex array of structures that belonged to people of a vastly smaller size.
    And all of it covered in a crust of ice and snow.
    Cranes and catwalks criss-crossed over the top of the sub, while thin horizontal walkways connected it to the concrete floor of the shed. A single vertiginous gangway joined the three-storey-high conning tower of the submarine to an upper balcony level.
    Blinking away the strangeness of the sight, Schofield’s mind processed this new information.
    First, he recognised the submarine.
    It was a Typhoon.
    The Typhoon class of submarines had been the jewel in the crown of the USSR’s ocean-going nuclear arsenal. Despite the fact that only six had ever been built, the long-nosed ballistic missile subs had been made famous in novels and Hollywood movies. But while the Typhoons looked sexy, they had been terribly unreliable, requiring constant upgrades and maintenance. They remain the largest submarines ever built by man.
    This one, Schofield saw, had been having work done to its forward torpedo bays when Krask-8 had been abandoned—the outer hull around the Typhoon’s bow torpedo tubes lay ripped open, taken apart plate-by-plate.
    How a Typhoon-class sub came to be inside a maintenance shed two miles inland from the Arctic Ocean was another question.
    A question that was answered by the