Issue 2

Best of the Bookshelf - Just Read

Scarecrow

Scarecrow is the fifth Matthew Reilly novel, and the third to feature the main character Captain Shane Schofield, USMC. It was released in 2003.

As well as Schofield, Mother, Gant and Book II all return from previous Schofield adventures.

A gruesome USD $18.6 million per head bounty hunt is on for 15 targets across the world - all either intelligence officers, military personnel or terrorists. The bounty will be paid upon production of the decapitated head of each target to a castle in France. One of them is Shane Schofield (callsign "Scarecrow") our all-action hero. Schofield is leading a special forces team on a mission in Siberia, to reinforce a Delta Force team. Delta had been sent to quell some terrorists, and is led by two of those whose names are on the hitlist.

Arriving on the scene, Schofield proceeds with the mission, splitting his team into two groups. They are subsequently ambushed and a bloody battle against mercenaries ensues. One of the groups is decimated but, sensing a trap moments before the first shot, Schofield manages to remain unharmed, eventually ending the fight with the destruction of the Gulag facility by a missile launched from an abandoned Typhoon class submarine. Schofield and his NCO Book II escape by hijacking a fighter jet owned by a bounty hunter who has already arrived at the scene.

Schofield gains an unlikely ally in the "Black Knight", a bounty hunter being paid to keep Schofield alive rather than kill him, and their alliance takes them worldwide from Afghanistan to France in a desperate race to stay alive. Crucially, Knight's orders are to allow Schofield free rein, in order that he perform the tasks the bounty hunt is designed to prevent him from doing.

At the heart of the conspiracy are the twelve most powerful businessmen in the world; self-styled puppeteers manipulating the course of governments calling themselves the Majestic-12 (or M-12 for short). Member No. 12, Jonathan James Killian controls the Axon Corporation, a defence contractor of the United States commissioned to construct the sinister 'Chameleon' project, a series of nuclear warheads and missiles designed to imitate the weapons of another nuclear power. As an Israeli Mossad agent describes them, "they're designed to start wars ... but to make it look like someone else fired the first shot". The missiles are launched from ships belonging to the 'Kormoran' project: battleships disguised as ordinary cargo vessels. The intention is to begin a 50 year Cold War that would earn the companies within M-12 billions.

The Chameleon series of missiles is protected by the CincLock-VII security system which can only arm or disarm the missiles if three criteria are met: proximity to warhead (must be within 60 feet), a light-pattern reflex response test and a numerical code. It is the light-pattern reflex test that is the crux of CincLock-VII - only someone who knows the sequence of flashing lights by heart or with unusually fast reflexes will be able to disarm the system. The fifteen names on the bounty list include six soldiers who can disarm the program, two scientists who worked on the NATO precursor to the reflex test, three spies who variously know about Chameleon and Majestic-12, three terrorists who participated in the Soviet equivalent of the NATO tests, and one high-ranking soldier who oversaw key parts of the program.

The Majestic-12 plan to fire a series of Iranian nuclear warheads on London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle and a series of North Korean missiles on New Delhi, Islamabad, Beijing and Hong Kong. With the aid of the French, Majestic-12 stage a series of terror raids on their missile plants and steal their own projects before starting the bounty hunt to stop anyone from preventing the execution of the plans.

Killian, however, has his own endgame. As an anarchist, he confesses his love for watching people in situations where there is no law or order. Directly in control of the missiles, he substitutes several of the missiles so that India and Pakistan apparently engage in mutual nuclear bombardment, while China is hit by Taiwan. Killian also adds an additional Israeli-made missile, based in Yemen and aimed at Mecca on the first day of Ramadan and armed with an American warhead. The book ends in a usual Scarecrow fashion, he blows up everything (several jokes are made about this by characters within the story) but before the end he nearly kills himself because of the death of his girlfriend Gant. With M-12's true intentions revealed to the government, its members all die in mysterious circumstances.

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