Free Scarecrow by Matthew Reilly Page A

not.’
    Drabyak glanced at his brother’s grisly remains. ‘Is that what you’re going to do to me?’
    Monsieur Delacroix smiled. ‘Oh, no. Unlike you, I am an admirer of history. Sometimes, the old ways are the most satisfying.’
    And with that the Swiss banker hit a third and final button on his remote . . .
    . . . and 1,000 litres of boiling oil sprayed out from the wall-holes in the tunnel containing Joe Drabyak.
    Any exposed flesh was burned on contact—all the skin on his face was scalded in a second. Wherever the boiling oil touched his clothes, it simply melted them to his body.
    And as the oil felled him, Drabyak screamed. He would shriek and cry and wail until he was dead, but no-one would hear him.
    Because the Forteresse de Valois, mounted on its high rocky pinnacle overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, hanging off the edge of the Brittany coast, lay 20 miles from the nearest town.

    Â 
DEEP IN THE HINDU KUSH MOUNTAINS AFGHANISTAN–TAJIKISTAN BORDER
26 OCTOBER, 1300 HOURS LOCAL TIME
(0300 HOURS E.S.T. USA)
    It was like storming the gates of hell.
    Lieutenant Elizabeth Gant’s eight-wheeled Light Armoured Vehicle kicked up a tornado of dust and dirt as it sped across the 200 yards of open ground that protected the entrance to the terrorist cave system.
    An absolute storm of bullets hammered the ground all around the speeding LAV as it wended its way toward the cave entrance, covered by an overhead artillery barrage of its own.
    This was the Allies’ fifth attempt to get troops into the cave system—a converted Soviet mine known to be harbouring Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, Hassan Zawahiri, and about two hundred heavily-armed Al-Qaeda terrorists.
    More than a year after the Taliban regime had been ousted from Kabul—and even though a far more public war had since been waged and won against Saddam Hussein in Iraq—Operation Enduring Freedom still raged in the darkest places of Afghanistan: the caves.
    For the final annihilation of Al-Qaeda could not be achieved until all the terrorist caves had been cleared, and that involved a kind of warfare not suitable for viewing on CNN or Fox. A down-and-dirty variety of fighting. Hand-to-hand, man-on-man cave-hunting.
    And then just this week, US and UK forces had found this cave system far in the north of the country, straddling the Afghan–Tajikistan border—the most important terrorist cave base in Afghanistan.
    It was the core of the Al-Qaeda network.
    An abandoned Soviet coalmine once known as the Karpalov Mine, it had been converted by Osama bin Laden’s construction company into a labyrinthine network of hiding caves: caverns in which terrorists lived and worked and in which they’d stored a veritable arsenal of weapons.
    It also came with an extra defence mechanism.
    It was a methane trap.
    Coal gives off methane—a highly flammable gas—and methane levels of 5% are explosive. One spark and it all goes up. And while the inner sections of the abandoned mine were supplied with fresh air from chimney-like vents, its outer extremities were filled with methane.
    In other words: invading soldiers couldn’t use guns until they arrived at the core of the mine.
    One thing was certain: the terrorists who had withdrawn to this cave system were not going to give up without a fight. Like Kunduz the previous year and the bloodbath at Mazar-e-Sharif, this was going to be a fight to the death.
    It was Al-Qaeda’s last stand.
    The mine’s entrance was a reinforced concrete archway wide enough for large trucks to pass through.
    The sharply-sloping mountainside above it was pockmarked with dozens of tiny snipers’ nests, from which the terrorists covered the wide expanse of open ground in front of the entrance.
    And somewhere up in the tangle of mountain peaks covering the mine were the openings to two air vents—twin 10-metre-wide shafts that rose like chimneys