Free Scarecrow by Matthew Reilly Page B

from the bottom of the mine, allowing fresh air into it. The terrorists had long ago covered the tops of these vents with camouflaged lids, so that they were invisible to spy planes.
    Those vents were Gant’s objective.
    Capture a vent from inside the mine, blow its lid from below, and then send up a targeting laser that would be picked up by an overflying C-130 bomber, giving it a bull’s-eye that it wouldn’t miss.
    The only thing left to do then was to get the hell out of the mine before a devastating 21,000-pound Massive Ordnance Air Burst (more commonly known as MOAB, the Mother Of All Bombs) was dropped down the chimney.
    The first three attempts that morning to storm the tunnel system had been successful.
    In each attempt, a pair of LAV-25s—eight-wheeled Light Armoured Vehicles—filled with Marines and SAS troopers had survived the hail of bullets and entered the cave.
    The fourth attempt, however, had been a disaster.
    It had ended with a terrible cross-fire of Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades—known to many as ‘LAV-Killers’—slamming into the two inrushing vehicles, killing all the men inside them.
    Gant’s was the fifth attempt, and it had entailed sending two high-speed decoy buggies into the gauntlet first, to attract the enemy’s fire, after which Gant’s two eight-wheelers had zeroed in on the cave entrance under cover of mortar fire targeted at the enemy’s emplacements.
    It had worked.
    The speeding decoy buggies caught all manner of shit—automatic gunfire, RPGs that smashed into the ground all around them—while Gant’s LAV-25 had burst forth from cover, closely followed by a second eight-wheeled beast.
    The mountainside above the cave entrance had erupted in mortar impacts while the two LAVs had shot across the open plain before whipping into the entrance of the cave system, disappearing into darkness, out of the rain of gunfire and into a whole new kind of hell.
    Elizabeth ‘Fox’ Gant was 29 years old and a newly-minted First Lieutenant, fresh from Officer Candidate School.
    Now, it wasn’t often that a brand-new lieutenant was given command of a prized Recon Unit, let alone a stand-alone one, but Gant was something special.
    Compact, blonde and fitter than many triathletes, she was a natural leader. Behind her sky-blue eyes lay a razor-sharp mind. Plus she already had two years’ experience in a Recon Unit as an NCO.
    She also, it was said in whispers, had friends in high places.
    Some said that her rapid rise to Recon command had been the result of a recommendation from no less than the President of the United States himself. It had something to do, they said, with an incident at the US Air Force’s most secret base, Area 7, during which Gant had shown her worth in the presence of the President himself. But that was conjecture.
    The greatest recommendation, in the end, had come from a highly-respected Marine Gunnery Sergeant named Gena ‘Mother’ Newman who had vouched for Gant in the best possible way: if Gant were put in command of a Recon Unit, Mother had said, then she herself would act as Gant’s Team Chief.
    At six-feet-two, with a fully-shaven head, one artificial leg and some of the most ruthless skills in the killing trade, Mother’s word was gold. Her nickname said it all. It was short for ‘Motherfucker’.
    And so Gant took command of Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit 9 one month before it shipped out for Afghanistan.
    There was one other thing about Libby Gant worth noting.
    For almost a year now, she had been the girlfriend of Captain Shane M. Schofield.

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    Schofield’s newly acquired Yak-141 shot through the air at close to Mach 2.
    It had been nearly five hours since his battle at Krask-8, and now, spread out before him and Book II, were the formidable Hindu Kush mountains.
    And somewhere in them was Libby Gant—Potential Hostage No. 1 for anyone wanting