Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves Read Free Page A

skin-searing superhot acid rain falls on America.
    ‘Even the location of Dragon is no accident: it sits at the top of the world, at the start of the spiralling wind pattern we call the jetstream. Anything hoisted up into the air above Dragon is quickly whisked around Europe, southern Russia, then China, Japan and across the Pacific to America. It’s the same jetstream that swept that volcanic ash cloud from Iceland across Europe. But the thing is—’ the DIA deputy director paused.
    The room was silent with anticipation.
    ‘—the Soviets couldn’t get it to work. The TEB-based acid rain project never got beyond the test phase. Instead, by accident, the Soviets created something much more dangerous.
    ‘There are rumours in the scientific weapons community that they found another use for their TEB/Venusian gas compound: namely, sending a combustible gas cloud up into the atmosphere and igniting it with a powerful catalytic blast, creating an “atmospheric incineration event”.’
    ‘A what?’
    ‘They set the atmosphere on fire. The science is fairly straightforward: for a fire to burn, it requires oxygen. A device like this takes that principle to the ultimate extreme—technically it’s called a thermobaric weapon, or a fuel-air bomb, because, once ignited, the explosive uses oxygen in the air as the main fuel for the blast. Weapons specialists call it a Tesla device, after the great Nikola Tesla who postulated a weapon that could ignite the entire atmosphere.
    ‘But such a weapon would require a massive amount of gas in the atmosphere and an ignition device of extraordinary heat and power—a semi-nuclear weapon, essentially—and we don’t believe the Soviets ever managed to build such a device.’
    A cough.
    It was the CIA’s representative. He cleared his throat and spoke for the first time.
    ‘That,’ he said, ‘may not be entirely correct.’
     
     
    ‘Dragon Island,’ the CIA man said, ‘was indeed one of the crazy outliers of the Cold War.
    ‘Let’s not be delicate about it. What the Soviets did there was seriously fucked up. It was cutting-edge science, with no boundaries, ethical or otherwise—at Dragon, Russia’s best physicists were allowed to work with the most exotic and dangerous substances known to man, including those Venus samples you mentioned, all to create new forms of death. Dragon Island was the crown jewel of the Soviet Army’s Special Weapons Directorate. Its scientists not only pushed the envelope, occasionally they broke through it. Dragon was their Area 51, Los Alamos and Plum Island all rolled into one.
    ‘But when the USSR collapsed in 1991, Dragon Island’s program was terminated. Only thing was, the stuff they built there was so exotic, destroying it raised more questions than answers. And so the Russkies have been sending skeleton crews there ever since, just keeping the lights on, so to speak, making sure stable solids don’t become unstable liquids and that compounds meant to be stored at absolute zero stay at absolute zero. Put simply, Dragon Island still is a house of horrors.’
    He turned to the President. ‘And it is my unfortunate duty to report to you, sir, that the Russians did in fact build a Tesla device and it is kept at Dragon.
    ‘They call it the “Atmospheric Weapon” and it is a two-stage device: the first stage is the combustible gas which is belched up into the atmosphere via a pair of massive vents on Dragon; the second stage is the explosive catalyst that ignites the gas. This catalyst is basically a quasi-nuclear explosive composed of a spherical inner core of corrupted uranium-238—so-called “blood uranium” or “red uranium”, because of its deep maroon colour. Red uranium is not as potent or as radioactive as yellowcake but its corrupted atomic structure makes it react with TEB far more intensely than a regular thermonuclear blast would; indeed, a regular nuke wouldn’t set off such a gas cloud.
    ‘A red uranium sphere is