Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves Read Online Free PDF Page B

and peaceful and at this time of year it was actually quite beautiful. It was always a perfect dawn—the sun lurked just above the horizon, never setting but never rising either, bathing the ice plain in spectacular horizontal light. It was bitingly cold, sure, but still beautiful.
    It also helped that he had a good team up there with him.
    Eight people and one robot.
     
     
    Over the last seven weeks, huddled in their camp of silver domed tents, Schofield’s team had got along pretty well—as well as eight human beings living in close proximity in freezing conditions could get along, really.
    Having Mother around helped.
    She could silence anyone who bitched or moaned with a single withering look. And even then, the only member of the team who’d been even remotely problematic was the senior executive from ArmaCorp Systems, Jeff Hartigan, and getting ‘the Look’ from Mother usually shut him up.
    Mother, of course, had insisted on coming along. Not even the Commandant of the Marines Corps dared say no to Mother Newman. After many years of loyal and distinguished service in the Corps, she had her choice of deployment and she went where Scarecrow went.
    ‘Because I’m his Fairy Godmotherfucker,’ she would say when asked why.
    The other two Marines in the group were considerably younger: Corporal Billy ‘the Kid’ Thompson and Lance Corporal Vittorio Puzo, a hulking Italian-American who because of his famous surname quickly got the nickname ‘Mario’.
    Scarecrow had a soft spot for the Kid. While not academically gifted—he failed most written exams—what he lacked in smarts, he made up for in a desire to be smarter. He was also good-natured, a crack shot and a dab hand at field-stripping and rebuilding almost any kind of weapon.
    Mario, on the other hand, was less easy to like.
    He was a surly and dour guy from the Engineering Corps who kept largely to himself when they weren’t working. A highly skilled mechanic, he was responsible for maintaining the various vehicles they were testing.
    Like Schofield, however, both the Kid and Mario were in the Arctic doing field testing for a reason.
    They were also broken.
    The Kid had lost the hearing in one ear in a training accident, so he couldn’t go on active deployment. And a little digging on Schofield’s part had revealed that Mario had been implicated in the disappearance of some sidearms and over $20,000 worth of vehicle parts from a Marine lock-up; he hadn’t been formally charged but a cloud had lingered over him and this assignment was seen by some as an unofficial punishment.
    As for the four civilian members of the team, as far as Schofield was concerned, two of them were great and two less so.
    Zack Weinberg was from DARPA and he was your typical geek genius: he was 29, gangly and thin, and he wore huge glasses that seemed three sizes too big for his head.
    A physicist by training, he was at DARPA because of his work in robotics. Hopelessly devoted to Call of Duty video games and all things Star Wars and Star Trek , he was in the Arctic testing several new DARPA inventions, the main one being a small bomb-disposal robot called the BRTE-500, or, as Zack called it, ‘Bertie’.
    Bertie was DARPA’s answer to existing battlefield robots like the PackBot, the Talon and the weapons-mounted variant of the Talon called SWORDS.
    ‘Except Bertie comes with a few extra features,’ Zack said the day he pulled the little robot from its crate. ‘Unlike other bots that require human operators to control them remotely, Bertie is able to operate completely independently. Thanks to an artificial intelligence chip developed by my team at DARPA, he can follow spoken orders, learn, and even assess a situation and make tactical decisions.’
    ‘He can make tactical decisions?’ Schofield said. To him, the little robot—with its two spindly bomb-disposal arms and its curiously emotive single-lens ‘eye’ mounted on a stalk—looked like a cute toy. It scurried