Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves Read Free Page B

small, roughly the size of a golf ball. You encase one in a standard beryllium bridgewire implosive detonator—the kind you find inside a regular nuclear weapon—and then fire the whole unit by missile into the gas cloud. The subsequent blast is hot enough to light the gas and set off the incineration—a rolling chain reaction of white-hot acid-fire follows, sweeping around the northern hemisphere, igniting the atmosphere itself. It’s like lighting gasoline with a match, only this creates a firestorm of global proportions.’
    The President shook his head in disbelief. ‘Who builds something like this? If it destroys the northern hemisphere, it destroys them, too.’
    ‘In fact, sir, that’s exactly why it was built,’ DIA deputy director Gordon said. ‘A device like this is called a “scorched earth” weapon: it’s the weapon you use when you’ve lost a war. When the Germans saw that they’d lost World War II, they retreated, burning farms as they went, scorching the earth. The idea was that if they were going to lose the war, then the victors would not gain anything by winning it.
    ‘The Soviet atmospheric weapon is similar: in the event of the United States disabling or destroying their stockpile of ICBMs in some kind of hostile exchange, the Soviets, facing certain defeat, would set off the atmospheric weapon, leaving nothing behind but scorched earth for the victors.’
    ‘Only this weapon doesn’t just scorch their country, it wipes out the entire upper half of the Earth,’ the President said.
    ‘That’s correct,’ Gordon said. ‘Mr President. If someone has taken Dragon Island and initiated its Tesla device, then, yes, we have a problem, but it appears we’ve caught it in time. Whoever is at Dragon Island would need to have spewed the combustible aerosol into the atmosphere for weeks for the weapon to be in any way effective.’
    Relief fell over the Situation Room.
    The NRO man, Bowling, however, swallowed deeply.
    ‘Then you don’t want to see this.’ He hit a key on his laptop that projected a new image onto the screen. ‘This image was taken four weeks ago:

    ‘And this one, two weeks ago:

    ‘And this last image was taken forty-five minutes ago, after we caught the distress signal.’

    ‘Holy shit . . .’ someone breathed.
    ‘Jesus Christ . . .’
    The murky cloud had swept around the entire northern hemisphere in an ugly elongated spiral, blanketing every major landmass in the top half of the world. It looked like an oil slick that had stained the planet, only this was in the atmosphere. The image of the befouled Earth loomed in front of the shocked faces of the Crisis Response Team.
    ‘Whoever took Dragon Island has been belching out combustible gas for nearly six weeks,’ Bowling said. ‘They sent it up into the jetstream and the jetstream did the rest. The entire northern hemisphere is now covered by this gas cloud.’
    At that moment, a young assistant ran into the room and handed a transcript to the DIA deputy director, Gordon.
    The deputy director read it then looked up sharply. ‘Mr President. This is from our Russian MASINT station. It just intercepted an emergency transmission from the head of the Russian Special Weapons Directorate in Sarov to the Russian President in Moscow. It reads:
    SIR,
    DRAGON ISLAND TAKEN BY AN UNKNOWN FORCE.
    SATELLITE ANALYSIS HAS REVEALED THAT ATMOSPHERIC GAS DISPERSION FROM DRAGON HAS BEEN ACTIVATED FOR SOME TIME, PERHAPS AS LONG AS 41 DAYS.
    REMOTE ANALYSIS HAS CONFIRMED THAT SIX URANIUM SPHERES AT DRAGON ARE BEING PRIMED FOR IMMINENT USE. PRIMING TAKES APPROXIMATELY TWELVE HOURS AND IT APPEARS THAT PRIMING BEGAN SEVEN HOURS AGO.
    WE HAVE FIVE HOURS TO STOP THIS UNKNOWN FORCE INITIATING THE ATMOSPHERIC WEAPON.’
    Gordon put down the transcript.
    Silence gripped the room.
    The President looked at a wall clock. It was now 5 p.m., or 6 a.m. at Dragon. ‘Are you telling me that in five hours an unknown force is going to set off some kind of