Hell Island

by Matthew Reilly

  Astro turned briefly. ‘Hey. Pancho. Until you go undefeated at R7, I’ll follow the Cap’n.’

  R7 stood for Relampago Rojo-7, the special forces exercises that had been run in conjunction with the huge all-forces Joint Task Force Exercise in Florida in 2004.

  Sanchez said, ‘Hey, hey, hey. The Scarecrow wasn’t the only guy to go undefeated at R7. The Buck also did.’

  The Buck was Captain William Broyles, ‘the Buccaneer’, a brilliant warrior and the former leader of what was acknowledged to be the best Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit, Unit 1.

  Sanchez went on: ‘Fact is, the Buck won the overall exercise on points, because he beat the other teams faster than the Scarecrow did. Shit, the only reason the Scarecrow got a draw with the Buck was because he evaded the Buck’s team till the entire exercise timed out.’

  ‘A draw’s a draw,’ Astro shrugged. ‘And, er, didn’t you used to be in the Buck’s unit?’

  ‘Damn straight,’ Sanchez said. ‘So was Biggie. But they disbanded Unit 1 a few months ago and we’ve been shuffled from team to team ever since, ending up with you guys for this catastrophe.’

  ‘So you’re biased.’

  ‘So I’m cautious. And you should be, too, ’cause we might just be working under a boss who’s not firing on all cylinders.’

  ‘I’ll take that under advisement. Now shut up, we’re here.’

  Sanchez looked forward, and paused.

  They’d arrived at the main hangar deck.

  Shane Schofield stepped out onto a catwalk suspended from the ceiling of the main hangar deck of the USS Nimitz. It was an ultralong catwalk that ran for the entire length of the hangar in a north–south direction, hanging a hundred feet above the floor.

  An indoor space the size of two football fields lay beneath him, stretching away to the left and right. Normally it would have been filled with assorted jets, planes, Humvees and trucks.

  But not today.

  Today it was very, very different.

  Schofield recalled Gator’s description of the hangar deck:

  ‘It’s like an indoor battlefield. I got artificial trenches, some low terrain, even a field tower set up inside the hangar.’

  It was true.

  The hangar deck had indeed been converted into a mock battlefield.

  However it had been done, it had been a gargantuan effort, involving the transplanting of several million tons of earth. The end result: something that looked like the Somme in World War I—a great muddy field, featuring four parallel trenches, low undulating hills and one high steel-legged tower that rose sixty feet off the ground right in the centre of the enormous space.

  The regular residents of the hangar lay parked at the stern end of the hangar: two F-14 Tomcats, an Osprey, some of the other leftover planes of the Nimitz, and some trucks.

  The tower was connected to Schofield’s ceiling catwalk via a thin steeply-slanted gangway-bridge also suspended from the ceiling.

  Schofield said, ‘Astro and Bigfoot, cover the catwalk to the north of this bridge. Sanchez and Hulk, you got the south side. Call me on the UHF the second you see anything.’

  Accompanied by the rest of his team, Schofield then crossed the gangway-bridge, came to the observation platform at the top of the field tower.

  Broken computers and torn printouts littered the platform. Blood was everywhere.

  ‘What the hell was this place?’ Hulk asked.

  ‘An observation post. From here, the big kahunas watched the exercises down on the hangar floor,’ Mother said.

  ‘But the exercises, it seems, went seriously wrong . . .’ Schofield said, examining a printout. Like most of the other material lying around, it was headed:

  PROJECT STORMTROOPER

  SECURITY CLASSIFICATION:

  TOP SECRET-2X

  DARPA/U.S. ARMY

  ‘Stormtrooper . . .’ he read aloud.

  Movement out of the corner of his eye.

  Schofield spun—just as an attacker came bursting out of a cabinet at the back of the observation platform.

  Six guns swirled as one, locking onto the attacker. But not a single one fired—since the ‘attacker’ had fallen to his knees, sobbing.

  He was a young man, about thirty, dressed in a lab-coat and wearing horn-rimmed glasses. A computer nerd, but dirty, dishevelled and terrified.

  ‘Don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot! Oh my God, I’m so glad you’re here! You have to help me! We lost control! They wouldn’t obey us anymore! And then they—’

  ‘Hold it, hold it,’ Schofield said, stepping forward. ‘Calm down. Start again. What’s your name?’

  ‘My n-name is . . . Pennebaker. Zak Pennebaker.’ He peered around fearfully.

  Schofield saw that the name matched the one on the man’s pocket-mounted ID badge. The ID badge also featured clearance levels and a silver disc at its base—an odd addition to a nametag. Schofield had never seen one before. Radiation meter, perhaps?

  ‘I’m DARPA. High-end project. Please, you gotta get me outta here, off this boat, before they ome back.’

  ‘Not until you tell us what this project was.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Let me put it another way: you tell us about the project or we leave you here.’

  Zak Pennebaker didn’t need three degrees to figure out that one. It came out in a blurting flurry.

  ‘It started out as a supersoldier project, special ops stuff involving “Go” drugs, amphetamines, biomechanics and brainchip grafting. All on human subjects. But the human subjects didn’t work out. The ape subjects, however, worked very, very well.’

  ‘Ape subjects?’ Mother said in disbelief.

  ‘Yes, apes. Gorillas. African mountain gorillas to be precise. They’re twice as strong as human beings and the grafting technology worked perfectly with them.’

  ‘Not quite perfectly,’ Hulk said, indicating the state of the observation platform.

  ‘Well, no, no, not in the end,’ Pennebaker mumbled. ‘But when the apes took so well to the tech, the project morphed from a special forces operation to a frontline troop replacement project.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Schofield asked.

  ‘The ultimate frontline trooper—lethal, vicious, remorseless, yet totally obedient. And best of all, totally expendable. No more letters from a grateful nation to grieving parents. No more onelegged veterans protesting in DC. Hell, no more veterans full-stop—the government would save billions in entitlements alone. Imagine you’re a general, facing a frontal assault, it’s a lot easier to send a thousand purpose-bred apes to their deaths than fresh-faced farmboys from Idaho.

  ‘And that’s the best part, we bred the gorillas ourselves in labs, so we aren’t even thinning the natural population, committing some crime against nature. They are the first custom-made artificially-produced armed force in the history of mankind. You could send them into hostile territory and they’d never question the order, you could send them on complete suicide missions and they’d never complain.’

  ‘How the hell do you manage that?’ Hulk asked.

  ‘The grafting technology,’ Schofield answered.

  Pennebaker seemed surprised that Schofield would know about this. ‘Yes. That’s correct.’

  ‘What’s grafting technology?’ Mother asked.

  Schofield said, ‘You attach—or graft—a microchip to the brain of your subject. The chip is biomechanical, semi-organic, so it attaches to the brain and becomes part of it. Grafting technology has allowed quadriplegics to communicate via computers. Their brain engages with the chip and the chip sends a signal to the computer. But . . . I’ve heard it can also work the other way round . . .’

  ‘That’s right,’ Pennebaker said. ‘When an outside agent uses a grafted microchip to control the subject.’

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Mother sighed. ‘Poindexter, you musta read a million books in college filled with words I couldn’t even understand, but didn’t you just once think about reading Franken
stein?’

  Pennebaker responded, ‘You have to believe me. The results were astonishing, at least at the start. The apes were perfectly obedient and shockingly effective. We taught them how to use weapons. We even created modified M-4 assault rifles for them, to accommodate their bigger hands. But even when they lost their guns, they were still hyper-effective—they could crush a man’s head with their bare hands or bite his whole face off.’

  As Pennebaker spoke, Schofield stole a glance at his four men guarding the north–south catwalk. None of them had moved.

  He keyed his UHF channel: ‘Astro? Hulk? Any contacts?’

  ‘Not a thing from the north, sir.’

  ‘Ditto the south, sir. It’s too quiet here.

  ’Schofield turned back to Pennebaker. ‘You’re saying you tested these things against human troops?’

  Pennebaker bowed his head. ‘Yes. Against three companies of Marines that we had brought here from Okinawa. What are you guys?’

  ‘Marines,’ Mother growled.

  Pennebaker swallowed. ‘The apes annihilated them. Down on the battlefield and also on the island proper. Five hundred gorillas versus 600 Marines. It was a hell of a fight. The gorillas lost heaps in the opening exchange, but they just weathered the losses without a backward step. The chips in their heads don’t allow for ineffective emotions like fear. So the apes just kept coming, climbing over the piles of their dead, until the Marines were toast.’

  Mother pushed her face—and pistol—into Pennebaker’s. ‘You call a Marine toast again, fucknut, and I’ll waste you right now.’

  Schofield said softly, ‘And fear is not an ineffective emotion, Mr Pennebaker.’

  Pennebaker shrugged. ‘Whatever. You see, it was then the apes started doing . . . unexpected . . . things. Independent strategic thinking; killing their own wounded. And then there were the more unseemly things, like cutting the hands off their vanquished enemies and piling them up.’

  ‘Yeah, heard about that,’ Mother said. ‘Charming.’

  ‘And then they turned on you,’ Schofield said.

  ‘And then they turned on us. The most unexpected thing of all. While we were looking the other way, observing the exercise, they sent a subteam to take this tower. Took us by surprise. They’re smart, tactical. They outthought us and now they own this ship and the island. Marines, welcome to the end of your lives.’

  ‘We’re not dead yet,’ Schofield said.

  ‘Oh, yes you are. You’re completely screwed,’ Pennebaker said. ‘You have to understand: you can’t beat these things. They are stronger than you are. They are faster. Christ, they’ve been bred to fight for longer, to stay awake for ninety-six hours at a time—four days—so if they don’t kill you straight away, they’ll just wait you out and get you later, like they did with the last few regular Marines. Add to that, their technological advantages—Signet-5 radio-locaters, surgically-implanted digital headsets—and your headstones are practically engraved. These things are the evolution of the modern soldier, Captain, and they’re so damned good, even their makers couldn’t control them.’

  Mother shook her head. ‘How do you geniuses manage to keep doing things like this—?’

  Without warning, a voice exploded in Schofield’s earpiece: Astro’s voice.

  ‘Oh God no, we missed them! Shit! Captain! Duck!’

  Standing with his back to the main hangar, Schofield didn’t turn to verify Astro’s warning.

  He just obeyed, trusting his man, and dived to the floor—a bare instant before a black mansized creature came swooping in over his head and slammed to the floor right where he’d been standing.

  Had Schofield remained standing for even a nanosecond longer, the K-Bar knife in the creature’s hand would have slashed his throat.

  The creature now stood before him and for the briefest of moments Schofield got a look at it.

  It was indeed an ape, perhaps five-and-a-half feet tall, with straggly black hair. But this was no ordinary jungle gorilla. It wore a lightweight helmet, from the front of which hung an orange visor that covered the animal’s eyes. On the helmet’s rear were some stubby antennas. Kevlar body armour covered its chest and shoulders. Wrist guards protected its arms. And in a holster on its back was a modified M-4.

  Goddamn.

  But that was all Schofield got to see, for right then the ape bared its jaws and launched itself at him—just as it was shot to bits, about a million bits, as Mother and Hulk nailed it with their MP-7s.

  Then Astro yelled: ‘Marines! Look sharp! They’re not coming in via the catwalk! They’re coming at you from across the ceiling!’

  Only now did Schofield stand and spin to check the ceiling of the hangar near his tower.

  Coming across it, using the complex array of pipes, lights, pulleys and rails that lined the hangar’s ceiling, was a phalanx of about forty black gorillas, all dressed like the dead one and moving across the superhigh ceiling with ease.

  And then Schofield’s horror became complete as the nearest ape—hanging upside-down from three of its four limbs, raised its free hand, levelled an M-4 at the tower and opened fire.

  SECOND ASSAULT

  HELL ISLAND

  1600 HOURS

  1 AUGUST, 2005

  The apes moved across the ceiling with incredible speed, clambering across it faster than a human could run across land. And the fact that they were more than a hundred feet off the floor didn’t seem to faze them at all.

  Schofield’s Marines opened fire and the first three gorillas dropped off the ceiling in explosions of blood, shrieking.

  But the others just kept on coming, firing as they advanced.

  The man beside Schofield, a young private known as Cheese, was hit square in the face and thrown backwards. Another Marine was hit in the chest and flopped to the floor.

  Then the force of apes split and started to fan out around the tower, like an ocean wave washing around a rock.

  Mother was busy unleashing a withering volley of fire at three of the incoming beasts when a fourth ape landed with a thud on the open window-ledge of the tower right next to her and threw itself at her from the side.

  Ape and Marine went sprawling across the floor, struggling violently, desperately. Since both had lost their guns in the tumble, this would be the worst kind of battle: hand-to-hand, to the death.

  Now Mother was strong but the ape was stronger and it quickly got the upper hand, head-butting her hard and then throwing her against a nearby table. With a roar, the ape hurled itself at her, aiming its bared teeth at her nose . . .

  . . . only to catch one of Mother’s grenades in its mouth. Mother had whipped it around and jammed it into the creature’s jaws.

  ‘Get a taste of this,’ she said, releasing the spoon and rolling away a second before the gorilla’s head simply exploded, transforming instantly into a shower of red spray.

  The force of gorillas was now converging on the high tower from all sides, raining automatic fire on the Marines inside it—who returned that fire with interest.

  Then the gorillas started leaping en masse down onto the tower’s observation platform—in one instance, four of them crash-tackled one of Schofield’s Marines, taking him down with their bare hands. One gorilla was ripped to shreds by the Marine’s final spray of fire, but the rest got him. The hapless man fell screaming, covered by the frenzied apes.

  Given the gorillas’ suicidal frontal-assault strategy, their numbers dropped fast. Forty had quickly become twenty, but even then the numbers game was still in their favour: Schofield’s ten-man Marine team was now down to seven, three on the tower, plus the four over on the catwalk supplying cover fire.

  ‘Marines!’ Schofield called. ‘Get off this tower! Back to the catwalk! Now!’

  He began to retreat—pushing Zak Pennebaker in front of him—loosing three shots as he did so, dropping three gorillas that had just landed inside the tower. But the three apes didn’t die; they clawed after him despite their wounds and it took six more
shots to neutralise them all.

  A gurgled scream as the Marine beside Schofield was shot in the throat. He fell, and even though he was already mortally wounded, two gorillas descended on him with a fury, firing their guns into his body, tearing at his face with their hands.

  Jesus . . . Schofield’s eyes went wide.

  Of the six Marines who had stepped onto the tower, only he and Mother remained.

  They retreated, with Pennebaker between them, back across the gangway-bridge to the long north–south catwalk, chased by the twenty gorillas.

  Once on the catwalk, Schofield checked his options. The gorillas, still using the pipe-riddled ceiling as their means of travel, were angling toward the south end of the catwalk, leaving Schofield with only one choice.

  ‘North,’ he ordered. ‘To the bow! Go!’

  The six remaining Marines—Schofield, Mother, Astro, Sanchez, Bigfoot and Hulk—charged along the catwalk, heading forward, their boots clanging on the walkway.

  Seconds later, the gorillas arrived at the catwalk and started their pursuit, exchanging fire with the last man in the Marine squad, Sanchez.

  The catwalk ended at an immense steel wall that bisected the hangar deck. The enormous hangar stretched for nearly the full length of the ship, but it was cut in the middle by this water-tight wall, so if the carrier ever flooded, only one hangar bay would be lost.

  Moving in the lead of her desperate fleeing team, Mother threw open a bulkhead door in the great wall, to reveal that the catwalk continued beyond it in a straight line, only now suspended over a second hangar bay, the forward one.

  Mother froze in the doorway.

  ‘God have mercy . . .’ she breathed.

  Schofield came up alongside her, looked beyond the doorway into the forward hangar bay.

  ‘Oh . . . my . . . God . . .’

  This hangar bay had no indoor battlefield, just regular planes, trucks and jeeps on its wide bare floor.

  What it did have, however, were about 350 gorillas standing on the floor of the gigantic hangar bay, milling around the remains of Condor’s 82nd Airborne unit.