Hell Island (10 page)

Knox stopped.

Schofield nodded at Flash Gordon and the Delta team arrayed around him. “Why were
they
brought here at all, if they just stayed with you?”

Knox grinned. “They were brought in for my DARPA team’s protection. Just in case you
did
happen to survive and got angry with us.”

Knox resumed his casual appraisal of his apes.

Schofield said, “I should have offed your army when I had the chance.”

“No, you shouldn’t have, Captain. What you should do is walk away and be proud of yourself. You have done future generations of American farm boys a great service. They will not need to die on the front lines
ever
again. Also, be proud that my apes defeated every other force they faced, but
you
beat
them.
Go home.”

“This is not right. It shouldn’t be done this way,” Schofield said.

“What you think, Captain, is unimportant and irrelevant. You are not paid to think about such weighty issues. Better brains than yours have pondered these issues. You are paid to fight and to die, and you have successfully done half of that today. Farewell, Captain,” Knox waved Schofield away. “Specialist Gordon and Captain Broyles will escort you and your men out.”

As he said this, Knox threw Flash Gordon and the
Buck a look—unseen by Schofield—that said:
they are not to leave this place alive.

Gordon nodded. So did the Buck.

The Delta team swooped in on Schofield’s five men, surrounding them perhaps a little more tightly than they needed to. Gordon indicated the door. “Captain . . . if you will.”

Schofield entered the elevator shaft, followed by his team.

T
HROUGHOUT ALL
this, the apes sat silently, swaying slightly from side to side, as if their lust for blood was being suppressed only by the chips in their heads.

Schofield stepped out into the elevator shaft, stood at its base, where he saw the huge circular safe-like door set into the wall. He headed for the ladder—

—when suddenly his Delta escorts released the safeties on their guns and aimed them at him and his Marines.

“Hold it right there, Scarecrow,” Gordon said.

“Oh, you
cocksuckers . . .
” Mother said.

“Buck?” Bigfoot asked in surprise.

“Buck, how can you do this?” Sanchez said, too, turning to his former commander.

Buck Broyles just shrugged. “Sorry, boys. But you aren’t my responsibility anymore.”

“You son of a bitch . . .” Sanchez breathed.

During this exchange between the men, Schofield assessed his options and quickly found that there was nothing available. This time they were well and truly screwed.

But then as he gazed at his ring of captors, he noticed that every single one of them wore a silver disc clipped to his lapel.

The silver discs,
Schofield thought.
That was it . . .

And suddenly things began to make sense.

That was how you stayed safe from the apes. If you wore a silver disc, the apes couldn’t attack you. The discs were somehow connected to the microchips in the apes’ heads, probably by some kind of digital radio signal—

A digital radio signal. Schofield sighed inwardly. Like the binary beep signal Mother had picked up earlier. That was how the Buck had been remotely commanding the apes: with digital signals sent directly to the chips in their brains.

The silver discs probably worked the same way—which was how Pennebaker had been able to enter the fray before to give Schofield information without having to fear the apes.

“Mother,” Schofield whispered as he raised his hands above his head. “Still got your AXS-9 there?”

“Yeah?”

“Jam radios, all channels,
now.
”

Mother was also in the process of raising her hands—when suddenly she snapped her right hand down and hit a switch on the AXS-9 spectrum analyzer on her webbing, the switch marked:
SIGNAL JAM: ALL CH.

The Delta man beside her swung his gun around, but he never fired.

Because right then another
very loud
sound seized his attention.

The sound of the apes awakening.

The effect of what Mother had done was invisible, but if one could have
seen
the radio spectrum it would have looked like this: a radiating wave of energy had fanned out from Mother’s jamming pack, moving outward from her in a circular motion, like expanding ripples in a pond, hitting every wave-emitting device in the area, and turning each device’s signal into garbled static.

The result: the silver discs on the ID badges of Knox, the DARPA scientists, the Buck and the Delta team all
instantly became useless.

From his position in the elevator shaft, Schofield saw what happened next in a kind of hyper-real slow motion.

He saw Knox in the ammo chamber with the army of deadly apes looming above him; saw the three apes nearest to Knox suddenly leap down at him, jaws bared, arms extended, slamming into him, throwing him to the ground, where they fired into him with their M-4s at point-blank range.

In the face of their gunfire, Dr. Malcolm Knox was turned into a bloody mess, his body exploding in a million
bullet holes. Grotesquely, the apes kept firing into him long after he was dead.

Complete pandemonium followed . . .

. . . as the rest of the ape army leapt down from the mountain of crates looking for blood.

Different people reacted in different ways.

The DARPA scientists in the chamber spun, eyes wide with horror.

In the elevator shaft, the Delta team also turned, shocked, Gordon and the Buck among them.

Schofield, however, was already moving, calling, “Marines, two hands! Now!”

As for the apes, well, they went apeshit.

Freed from the grip of the silver discs, they launched themselves at the DARPA scientists in the ammo chamber, crashtackling them to the floor, clubbing them with the butts of their guns, tearing them apart—as if all their lives they had been waiting to attack their makers.

Screams and cries rang out.

Zak Pennebaker ran for the door to the elevator shaft, crying, “Buck! Do something!” before he himself was crashtackled from behind and assailed by six, then eight, then twelve apes.

He disappeared under their bodies, arms flailing,
screaming in terror, before he was completely overwhelmed by the hairy black monsters.

In the elevator shaft, Flash Gordon and his team of Delta scumbags were caught totally by surprise.

Gordon whirled back to face Schofield, bringing his pistol back around—

—only to see both of Schofield’s Desert Eagle pistols aimed directly at his own nose.

“Surprise,” Schofield said.

Blam!

Schofield fired.

The apes were now rushing for the door, all three hundred of them, angry and deadly, heading for the elevator shaft.

While they did so, Schofield’s Marines did battle with the Delta force surrounding them.

It was a short battle.

For Schofield’s men had obeyed Schofield’s shouted order—“Marines, two hands!”—so that by now they all held guns in
both
their hands: an MP-7 in one and a pistol in the other.

The five Marines whipped up two guns each—and suddenly they’d evened the odds against the ten-man Delta squad encircling them.

The Marines fired as one, spraying bullets
outward, dropping the distracted Delta squad around them.

Six of the Delta men were killed instantly by head shots. The other four went down, wounded but not killed.

The only bad guy left standing was the Buck, mouth open, gun held limply at his side, frozen in shock at the unfolding mayhem around him: the apes were completely out of control; Knox and his scientists were dead; and Schofield’s men had just nailed their Delta captors.

A call from Schofield roused him.

“Marines! Up the ladder! Now!”

As his Marines climbed skyward, Schofield grabbed the ladder last of all, shoving past the immobile Buck.

After he was ten feet up, Schofield aimed his pistol at a lever on the big round safe-like door set into the wall of the elevator shaft.

“History lesson for you, Buck,” Schofield said. “Happy swimming.”

Blam.

Schofield fired, hitting the lever with a spray of sparks.

And at which point all hell really broke loose.

The lever snapped downward, into the
RELEASE
position.

And the big ten-foot-wide circular door was instantly
flung
open, swinging inward with incredible force, force that came from the weight of ocean water that had been pressing against it from the other side.

This door was one of the floodgates that the Japanese had used in 1943 to flood the tunnels of Hell Island. A door that backed onto the Pacific Ocean itself.

A shocking blast of seawater came rushing in through the circular doorway, slamming into the Buck, lifting him off his feet and hurling him like a rag doll against the opposite wall of the elevator shaft, the force so strong that his skull
cracked
when it hit the concrete.

The roar of the ocean flooding into the elevator shaft was absolutely deafening. It looked like the spray from a giant fireman’s hose, a
ten-foot-wide
spray of super-powerful inrushing water.

And one more thing.

The layout of the subterranean ammunition chamber meant that the incoming water flooded
into Chamber No. 2,
where the three hundred apes now stood, trapped.

The apes scrambled across the chamber, wading waist-deep against the powerful waves of whitewater pouring into it.

The water level rose fast—the apes continued howling, struggling against it—but it only took a few seconds for it to hit the upper frame of the doorway to the chamber, sealing off the chamber completely, cutting off the sounds of the three hundred madly-scrambling apes.

And while they could swim short distances, the apes could not swim
underwater.

They couldn’t get out.

Ammunition Chamber No. 2 of Hell Island would be their tomb—three hundred apes, innocent creatures turned into killing machines, would drown in it.

F
OUR GORILLAS
, however,
did
make it out of the hall before the water completely covered the doorway.

They got to the elevator shaft and started climbing the ladder, heading up and away from the swirling body of ocean water pouring into the concrete shaft beneath them.

Higher up the same ladder, Schofield and his team scaled the shaft as quickly as they could.

The roar of inrushing water drowned out all sound for almost thirty seconds until—ominously—the whole shaft suddenly fell silent.

It wasn’t that the water had stopped rushing in: it was just that the water
level
had risen above the floodgate. The ocean was still invading the shaft, just from below its own waterline.

“Keep climbing!” Schofield called up to the others, moving last of all. “We have to get above sea level!”

He looked behind him, saw the four pursuing apes.

Fact: gorillas are much better climbers than human beings.

Schofield yelled, “Guys! We’ve got company!”

Three-quarters of the way up the shaft was a large horizontal metal grate that folded down across the width of the shaft—notches in its edges allowed it to close around the elevator cables. When closed horizontally, it would completely span the shaft, sealing it off. It was one of the gates the Japanese had created to trap intruders down below.

Schofield saw it. “Mother! When you get to that grate, close it behind you!”

The Marines came to the grate, climbed up past it one at a time—Astro, then Bigfoot, then Sanchez and Mother.

With a loud clang, Sanchez quickly closed one half of the grate. Mother grabbed the other half, just as Schofield reached it . . .

. . . at the same time as a big hairy hand grabbed his ankle and yanked hard!

Schofield slipped down six rungs, clutching with his hands, dropping six feet below the grate, an ape hanging from his left foot.

“Scarecrow!” Mother shouted.

“Close the grate!” Schofield called.

Immediately below him, the ocean water was now
charging
up the vertical elevator shaft. It must have completely filled the ammo chamber—so that now it was racing up the only space left for it to go: the much narrower elevator shaft.