Hell Island (7 page)

Mother floored it, slamming the ascending truck into the outer walls of the spiraling ramp-way, losing a couple of apes that way.

In the tray at the back of the truck, Sanchez, Astro and Hulk were doing battle with four apes that had just swung inside.

Sanchez shot one in the chest, while Astro disarmed another and kicked it through the side canvas of the truck, but Hulk wasn’t so lucky. The other two apes took him on together, and in the scuffle one managed to shoot him in the stomach.

Hulk roared in pain—just as the two apes did something totally unexpected: they yanked him off the back of the speeding truck, jumping with him,
without any thought, it seemed, to the injuries they themselves would suffer.

Astro saw it all in a kind of surreal slow motion.

He saw Hulk’s eyes go wide as the big man fell to the ramp behind the upwardly-racing truck, gripped by the two gorillas.

Then he saw the onrushing army of apes overwhelm Hulk, choosing to use their M-4s as clubs rather than guns. Astro winced as he lost sight of Hulk amid the mass of black hair.

But even then, not every ape stopped to join in the mauling of Hulk—the rest just kept running, clambering around the gorillas battering Hulk’s body, still chasing the fleeing truck.

“Jesus . . .” Astro breathed.

And then
wham!
Mother’s truck burst into gray daylight, into the pouring rain assaulting the flight deck. Uncountable raindrops hammered its windshield.

The four remaining gorillas on the truck made their move.

They converged on the cab in a coordinated manner—swinging down together from the roof, one arriving at each door, the other two landing on the bonnet of the truck, right in front of Mother, guns up.

“Yikes . . .” Mother breathed.

There was no escape. No chance.

Except . . .

“Hang on, boys!” she called into her UHF radio.

And with that, she yanked on the steering wheel, bringing the truck into a sharp right-hand turn, a turn that was far too fast for a vehicle of its type.

Gravity played its part.

The truck turned sharply . . . its inner wheels lifting off the tarmac . . . and it rolled.

The big truck tumbled across the rain-slicked flight deck, sending the apes on its cab and bonnet flying in every direction. Then it landed on its side and slid for a full sixty feet before coming to rest against the lone Super Stallion helicopter on the deck.

Mother clambered out of the overturned truck, raced to its rear.

“You okay?” she called, crouching to her knees.

Sanchez and Astro lay crumpled against the side wall of the tray, bruised and bloody but alive.

“Come on,” Mother peered back at the ramp. “We gotta keep—”

She cut herself off.

The apes were already at the top of the ramp.

A great crowd of them—easily one hundred strong—now stood on the deck, in the rain, at the entrance to the ramp, grunting and snorting and glaring right at her.

S
TILL ON
her knees, totally exposed, Mother just sighed.

“Game over. We lose.”

The apes charged, raising their guns, pulling the triggers.

Mother shut her eyes.

The sound of gunfire rang out—loud, hard and brutal—and Mother imagined this was the last sound she’d ever hear.

Braaaaaaaaaaaap!

But there was something wrong with this sound.

It was
too loud
for an M-4, too deep. It was the sound of a much larger gun.

Crouched at the rear of her overturned truck, Mother had never noticed the port-side elevator rise up to deck-level behind her.

Never saw what stood
on
the open-air elevator: an F-14 Tomcat, pointed right at her.

And in the cockpit of the Tomcat . . .

. . . were Shane Schofield and Bigfoot!

Schofield sat in the pilot’s seat, gripping the control stick and jamming down on its trigger.

Sizzling tracer rounds whizzed by Mother on either side, popping past her ears, before razing into the crowd of gorillas beyond her, mowing them down.

The first three rows of gorillas fell at once. The others split up, fanned out, sought cover.

“Mother!”
Schofield’s voice said in her ear.
“Get out of here! I’ll hold them off!”

“Where can we go?” Mother dragged Astro out of the truck and started running, with Sanchez by her side.

“Get to Casper’s door!”
Schofield said cryptically.
“Go over the stern! I’ll meet you there!”

Mother did as she was told, hustling to the rear edge of the deck, where she lowered Astro over the side, down to a safety net just below the edge. She and Sanchez then jumped down after him and disappeared inside a hatch.

That left Schofield and Bigfoot in the Tomcat on the port-side elevator, facing the now 80-strong force of apes.

“Bigfoot! Let’s move! Time to get out of here—”

All of a sudden, their fighter started rocking wildly.

Schofield spun in his seat. “Shit! They must have climbed up the side of the ship!”

The rest of the ape army—nearly 300 gorillas—was now climbing
up and over the outer edges of the elevator platform!

They swarmed around the plane, clambered up onto it, shook it, hit it, fired at it.

Schofield closed the Tomcat’s canopy a split second before it was hit by gunfire. Made of reinforced Lexan glass, the canopy was capable of deflecting high-velocity air-to-air tracers, so it could handle this small-arms fire, even from up close.

But then one clever gorilla climbed into the towing vehicle that was attached to the Tomcat and started it up.

“Aw, no way, that just ain’t fair . . .” Bigfoot breathed.

Covered in rampaging apes and now pulled by the towing vehicle, the Tomcat slowly started moving . . .

. . . toward the edge of the elevator!

“They’re going to tip us over the side!” Bigfoot exclaimed.

Indeed they were.

The Tomcat rolled toward the edge of the elevator, six stories above the waterline.

As it did so, the apes on its back started bailing off it, jumping clear. They knew what was about to happen.

“Ah, Captain . . .” Bigfoot said. “Any ideas?”

“Yeah. Buckle up.” Schofield was already strapping on his seatbelt.

“Buckle up? How’s that going to—oh!” Bigfoot clutched at his belts, started clasping them.

The towing vehicle came to the edge of the platform and the ape driving it bailed out just as the towing vehicle tipped over the edge, now hanging from the Tomcat’s front landing gear.

The ape army did the rest. They pushed the F-14 until its front wheels lurched off the edge and the entire plane—with Schofield and Bigfoot in it—fell, off the carrier, plunging ninety feet
straight down
to the water far below.

T
HE INSTANT
the Tomcat fell off the edge, the canopy of the fighter blew open and the F-14’s two ejection seats shot up out of the plane.

The ejection seats—with Schofield and Bigfoot on them—rocketed up into the sky above the aircraft carrier while the Tomcat went in the opposite direction, the plane falling in a clumsy tumbling heap down the side of the boat and into the water, where it landed with a great splash and immediately began to sink.

Schofield and Bigfoot flew high into the air before they disengaged their flight seats and initiated the parachutes that were attached to their seatbelts.

As the two of them floated back down to the earth, they scanned the huge force of apes on the deck of the carrier. They looked like an army of ants swarming over the aft runway.

Then suddenly Hail Mary gunshots started to zing past Schofield’s head, tearing through his chute.

“Where to now?” Bigfoot asked over the UHF.

Schofield pursed his lips, thinking fast. His eyes fell on the chunky CH-53 Super Stallion in the center of the flight deck.

“It’s time to even the score a little. Follow me.”

He angled his gliding flight back toward the carrier, toward its mid-section.

Schofield touched down on the middle of the flight deck. Bigfoot landed a second after him, not far from the catapult launch controls.

The apes charged forward, roaring, firing, rampaging.

“Stay here,” Schofield ordered before racing across the open deck to the massive Super Stallion.

Hunched in the pouring rain, he did something near the front of the chopper out of Bigfoot’s sight before he came back around and charged into the chopper via its forward right-side door, slamming the door shut an instant before the gorillas arrived, banging on the side of the chopper, massing around it.

Inside the Super Stallion, Schofield hustled into the cockpit, shutting its door behind him, locking it.

Watching from the outside, taking cover behind the on-deck launch controls, Bigfoot was confused.

What was Schofield doing?

But then something even more confusing occurred.

The rear loading ramp of the Super Stallion folded open.

Naturally, the apes stormed it, fifty of them rushing inside, hungry for Schofield’s blood.

Bigfoot frowned.
What on earth is he . . . ?

“Bigfoot!”
Schofield’s voice said over the UHF.
“After you do what I ask, get down to Casper’s door and find the others. I’ll meet you there.”

“Casper’s d—? Oh yeah, sure,” Bigfoot said. “But what do you want me to do now?”

“Simple. Initiate Catapult No. 1.”

“What—!”

At that moment, Schofield brought the rear loading ramp back up, closing it,
trapping
the fifty-odd apes that had gone inside.

It was then that Bigfoot saw what Schofield had done at the
front
of the chopper: via a tie-down chain, Schofield had attached the helicopter to the carrier’s No. 1 launch catapult.

“You have got to be kidding . . .” Bigfoot said.

“Uh, now please, Bigfoot. They’re about to break down the cockpit door.”

“Right.”

Bigfoot hit a switch on the launch console, igniting Catapult No. 1.

The Super Stallion hurtled down the length of the runway at a speed no helicopter had gone before.

The steam-driven catapult slingshot it down the tarmac at an astonishing 160 km/h!

The great chopper’s landing wheels snapped off
after about ninety feet and the CH-53
slid
the rest of the way,
on its belly,
sparks flying everywhere, the ear-piercing shriek of metal scraping against the flight deck filling the air.

And then . . .
shoom . . .
the Super Stallion shot off the bow of the
Nimitz,
soaring out horizontally from the flight deck for a full 150 feet, hanging in the air for a moment before it arced downward, falling toward the sea.

A second before it hit the ocean, a human figure could be seen leaping from one of its cockpit windows, jumping clear of the falling helicopter, hitting the water at the same time it did, but safely alongside it.

The helicopter came down with a massive splash and as the splash subsided, it could be seen bobbing slowly in the water.

And then it began to sink.

Shrieks could be heard from within it—the cries of the trapped gorillas.

Ten seconds later, the Super Stallion went under, with its cargo of murderous apes, never to rise again.

Shane Schofield trod water for a few moments, staring at what he’d just done. Then he started swimming back toward the ship, heading for the bow.

Once there, he pulled a Pony bottle from his combat webbing—a compact bottle-sized SCUBA tank fitted with a mouthpiece. He jammed it into his mouth and went underwater.

Within a minute, he arrived at a little-known entrance to the carrier, one located fifty feet below the waterline: a submarine docking door.

Designed to recover long-range reconnaissance troops—read spies—returning to the
Nimitz
via small submarines, for a long time Marines had referred to it as the spooks’ door. Over time, “spook” had become “ghost” and then ghost had become “Casper,” as in the friendly one.

This was Casper’s door.

Schofield knocked loudly on it—in Morse code, punching out: “Mother. You there?”

At first there was no reply and Schofield’s heart began to beat a little faster, before suddenly there came a muffled answering knock from the other side:

“As always.”

THIRD ASSAULT