Ice Station

seen his eyes.'

There was a short silence.

'Is that why his call sign is Scarecrow?' Gant said softly. 'Because of his eyes?'

Riley nodded. 'Norman McLean gave it to him.'

'The general?'

'The General. When McLean saw Schoneld's eves, he said he looked like a scarecrow McLean had once had guarding his cornfield back in Kansas. Apparently, it was one of those scarecrows that had two slits for each eye, you know, like a plus sign.'

'Do you know how it happened?' Gant asked gently.

At first Riley didn't answer. Then, finally, he nodded. But he didn't say anything.

'What happened?'

Riley took a deep breath. He put down the helium compressor he was holding in his hand and looked at Gant. 'Shane Schofield wasn't always in command of a ground Recon Unit,' he began. 'He used to be a pilot, based on the Wasp.'

The USS. Wasp is the flagship of the United States Marine Corps. It is one of seven Landing Helicopter Dockships in the Corps, and it is the battle center for any major Marine expedition. Most casual observers mistake it for an aircraft carrier.

What a lot of people don't know about the Marine Corps is that it maintains a sizable aviation wing. Although this air wing is used primarily to transport troops, it is also used to support ground attacks. For this purpose it is equipped with lethal AH-1W Cobra Attack Helicopters?instantly recognizable because of their skinny shape?and British-made (but American-modified) AV-8B Harrier II fighter jets, or, as they are more widely known throughout the world, Harrier jump jets. Harriers are the only attack planes in the world with the ability to take off and land vertically.

'Schofield was a Harrier pilot on the Wasp. One of the best, so they tell me,' Riley said. 'He was in Bosnia in 1995, during the worst of the fighting there, flying patrol missions over the no-fly zone.'

Gant watched Riley closely as he spoke. He was staring off into space as he recounted the story.

'One day, late in 1995, he got shot down by a mobile Serbian missile battery that Intelligence said didn't exist. I think they found out later that it was a two-man strike team in a jeep with six American-made Stingers in the backseat.

'Anyway,' Book said, 'Schofield managed to eject a second before the Stingers took out his fuel tanks. He came down bang in the middle of Serb-held territory.'

Riley turned to face Gant.

'Our lieutenant survived for nineteen days in the Serbian woodlands?alone?while over a hundred Serbian troops swept the forest looking for him. When they found him, he hadn't eaten in ten days.

'They took him to a deserted farmhouse and tied him to a chair. Then they beat him with a wooden plank with nails stuck into it and asked him questions. Why was he flying over this area? Was he a spy plane? They wanted to know how much he knew about their positions because they thought he was up there providing air support for U.S. ground forces inside Serb territory.'

'U.S. ground forces were inside Serbian territory?' Gant asked.

Riley nodded silently. 'There were two SEAL teams in there. Carrying out covert surgical hits on Serbian leadership positions. Night hits. Good hits. They'd been causing chaos among the Serbs, absolute chaos. They'd be in and out before anyone knew they even existed. They'd go in, slash their victims' throats, and then vanish into the night. They were so good that some of the locals started saying they were ghosts come to haunt them for what they were doing to their own people.'

Gant said, 'Did Scarecrow know about them? The SEAL teams inside Serb territory?'

Book was silent for a moment. Then he said, 'Yes. Officially, Schofield was patrolling the no-fly zone. Unofficially, he was sending grid coordinates of Serb leadership farmhouses to the SEALs on the ground. It didn't make any difference anyway. He never said a word.'

Gant watched intently as Riley took a deep breath. He was building up to something.

'In any case,' Book said, 'the Serbs decided that Schofield had been carrying out reconnaissance for the SEAL teams, that he had been spotting strategic targets from the air and transmitting their coordinates to men on the ground. They decided that since he'd been seeing things that he wasn't supposed to be seeing, they would cut his eyes out.'

'What?' Gant said.

Riley said, 'They pulled a razor blade out of a drawer and they held him down. Then one of them stepped forward and slowly cut two vertical lines down across Schofield's eyes. Apparently, as he did it, the man with the razor blade quoted something from the Bible. Something about if your hand sins, cut it off, and if your eyes sin, cut them out.'

Gant felt sick. They had blinded Schofield. 'What did they do then?' she asked.

'They locked him in a cupboard and they let him bleed.'

Gant was still shocked. 'So how did he get out?'

'Jack Walsh sent a Recon team to go in and get him,' Riley said.

Gant's ears pricked up at the name. Every Marine knew of Captain John T. Walsh. He was the captain of the Wasp, the most revered Marine in the Corps.

Some thought he should have been Commandant, the highest-ranking officer in the United States Marine Corps, but Walsh's history of disdain for any kind of politician had prevented that. The Commandant is required to liaise regularly with members of Congress, and everyone knew?Walsh more than anyone?that Jack Walsh wouldn't be able to stomach that. Besides, Walsh had said he would rather command the Wasp and liaise with soldiers. The Marines loved him for it.

Riley went on. 'When Scott O'Grady got lifted out of Bosnia on 8 June 1995, they put him on the cover of Time magazine. He met the President. He did the whole PR thing.

'When Shane Schofield got lifted out of Bosnia five months later, nobody heard a thing. There were no TV cameras waiting on the deck of the Wasp to photograph him as he stepped off that helicopter. There were no newspaper reporters there to take down his story. Do you know why?'

'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