Scarecrow by Matthew Reilly Page B

here?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Gant said. ‘But we’re not gonna find out now. We have to get out of this place.’
    They turned—
    â€”just in time to see a crowd of about thirty Al-Qaeda terrorists stampeding toward them—toward the conveyor belt, screaming, shouting, their empty machine-guns useless—pursued by more Black-Green commandos.
    Gant opened fire—smacked down four terrorists.
    Mother did too—took down four more.
    The other two Marines in Gant’s team were crash-tackled where they stood, trampled by the stampeding crowd.
    â€˜There are too many of them!’ Gant yelled to Mother. She dived left, out of the way.
    For her part, Mother stepped back onto the boxes leading up to the conveyor belt, firing hard, before she was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the terrorists and was herself flung backwards onto the speeding conveyor belt in their midst.
    The Black-Green men who had killed Zawahiri seemed amused by the sight of the Al-Qaeda warriors fleeing desperately onto the conveyor belt.
    One of them strode over to the conveyor belt’s control console and hit a fat yellow button.
    A mechanical roar filled the cavern, and from her position on the dusty floor, Gant spun to see its source.
    Over by the Allied barricade, at the far end of the conveyor belt, a giant rock crusher had been turned on. It was composed simply of a pair of massive rollers that were each covered in hundreds of conical rock-crushing ‘teeth’.
    Gant gasped as she saw the Al-Qaeda terrorists now jumping for their lives off the speeding conveyor belt. She watched for Mother to jump, too, but it never happened.
    Gant didn’t see anyone resembling Mother leap off.
    Shit.
    Mother was still on the conveyor belt, rushing headlong toward the rock crusher.
    Mother was indeed still on the belt—shooting down its length toward the rotating jaws of the rock crusher sixty yards away.
    The problem was she was wrestling with two Al-Qaeda terrorists as she went.
    While the other Al-Qaeda troops had decided to leap off the conveyor belt, these two had decided to die in the rock crusher . . . and they were going to take Mother with them.
    The conveyor belt rushed down the length of the cavern, racing toward the rock crusher at about thirty kilometres an hour—eight metres per second.
    Mother had lost her gun when she’d hit the conveyor belt and now she struggled with the two terrorists.
    â€˜You suicidal ratfuckers!’ she yelled as she fought. At six feet two, she was as strong as an ox—strong enough to hold off her two attackers but not overpower them.
    â€˜Think you’re gonna take me down, huh!’ she shouted in their faces. ‘Not fucking likely!’
    She kicked one of them in the balls—hard—and he yelped. She flipped him over her head, toward the rock crusher, now only twenty yards away and approaching fast.
    Two-and-a-half seconds away.
    But the second guy held on. Tight. He was a dogged fighter and he wouldn’t let go of her arms. He was travelling backwards, feet-first. Mother was now travelling forwards, on her belly, head-first.
    â€˜ Let—go—of—me! ’ she yelled.
    The first Al-Qaeda man entered the rock crusher.
    A shriek of agony. An explosion of blood. A wash of it splattering all over Mother’s face.
    And then, in an instant of clarity, Mother realised.
    She wasn’t going to make it.
    It was too late. She was dead.
    Time slowed.
    The terrorist holding her arms went into the jaws of the rolling rock crusher feet-first.
    It swallowed him whole and Mother saw it all up close: a six-foot man chewed in an instant. Shluck-splat! Another blood explosion assaulted her face from point-blank range.
    Then she saw the rolling jaws of the crusher inches away from her own face, saw each individual spoked tooth, saw the blood on each one, saw her hands disappear into the—
    â€”and then suddenly