Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [68]
‘Why?’
‘Because when Shane Schofield landed on the Wasp after being extracted from that farmhouse in Bosnia by a team of United States Marines, he was the worst looking thing you have ever seen.
‘The extraction had been bloody. Fierce as hell. The Serbs hadn’t wanted to give up their prized American pilot and they’d fought hard. When that chopper returned and hit the tarmac on the Wasp, it had four seriously-wounded Marines on board. It also had Shane Schofield.
‘The medics and the doctors and the support crews charged out and got everybody off the chopper as fast as they could. There was blood everywhere, wounded men screaming. Schofield was taken away on a gurney. He had blood pouring out of both of his eyes. The extraction had been so fast – so intense – that no one had even had a chance to put gauze patches over his eyes.’
Riley paused. Gant just stared.
‘What happened after that?’ she asked.
‘Jack Walsh copped shit from the White House and the Pentagon. They hadn’t wanted him to send anyone in for Schofield because Schofield wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. The White House didn’t want the “political damage” that would follow from an American search-and-rescue mission for a downed spy plane. Walsh told them where to shove it, said they could fire him if they wanted to.’
‘What about Scarecrow? What happened to him?’
‘He was blinded. His eyes had been ripped to shreds. They took him to Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Maryland. It’s got the best eye surgery unit in the country, or so they tell me.’
‘And?’
‘And they fixed his eyes. Don’t ask me how, ’cause I don’t know how. Apparently, the razor blade cuts were fairly shallow, so there was no damage to his retinas. The real damage, they said, was to the outer extremities of his eyes – the irises and the pupils. Purely physical defects, they said. Defects which could be fixed.’ Riley shook his head. ‘I don’t know what they did – some fancy new laser-fusing procedure, someone told me – but they did it, they fixed his eyes. Hell, all I know is that if you can afford it – and in Scarecrow’s case, the Corps could – you don’t need glasses these days.
‘Of course, there was still the scarring on his skin, but otherwise, they did it. Schofield could see again. Twenty-twenty.’ Riley paused. ‘There was only one hitch.’
‘What was that?’
‘The Corps wouldn’t let him fly again,’ Riley said. ‘It’s standard procedure across all the armed forces: once you’ve had eye trauma of any kind, you can’t fly a military airplane. Hell, if you wear reading glasses, you’re not allowed to fly a military kite.’
‘So what did Scarecrow do?’
Riley smiled. ‘He decided to become a line animal, a ground Marine. He was already an officer from his flying days, so he kept his commission. But that was all he kept. He had to start all over again. He went from flight status, lieutenant-commander, to ground force, lieutenant second class in an instant.
‘And he went back to school. Back to the Basic School at Quantico. And he did every course they had. He did tactical weapons training. He did strategic planning. Small arms, Scout/Sniper. You name it, he did it. He did it all. Apparently, he said he wanted to be like those men who’d come in and got him out of Bosnia. What they’d done for him, he wanted to be able to do.’
Riley shrugged. ‘As you can probably imagine, it didn’t take long for him to get noticed. He was too clever to stay a second lieutenant for long. After a few months, they upped him to full lieutenant, and before long, they offered him a Recon unit. He took it. That was almost two years ago, now.’
Gant had never known. She had been selected for Schofield’s Recon unit only a year ago and it had never occurred to her to wonder how Schofield himself had become the team’s commander. That sort of thing was officer stuff, and Gant wasn’t an officer. She was enlisted, and enlisted troops know only what they are told to know. Things like the choice of team commander are left to the higher-ups.
‘I’ve been in his team ever since,’ Riley said proudly.
Gant knew what