Matt Reilly Stories (21 page)

Then
blam!
a gunshot boomed and there were no more screams. Schofield
couldn’t tell if it was the man who had fired or the thing that had attacked
him.

And
suddenly it was over.

Silence
on the airwaves.

In
the bridge of the supercarrier, the members of Schofield’s team swapped
glances.

Sanchez
reached for the radio—only for Schofield to swat his hand away.

‘I
said no signals.’

Sanchez
scowled, but obeyed.

One
of the other teams, however, came over the line:
‘SEAL team, this is Condor.
What’s going on? Come in!’

Schofield
waited for a reply.

None
came.

But
then after thirty seconds or so, another rough scuffling sound could be heard,
someone—or something—grabbing one of the SEAL team’s radio-mikes.

Then
a terrifying sound shot through the radio.

A
horrific animal roar.

* * * *

V

‘SEAL
team, I repeat! This is Condor! Come in!’
the Airborne
commander kept saying over the radio.

‘Scarecrow!’
Mother exclaimed. ‘I got something here…’

‘What?’
Schofield hurried over to her console.

‘Those
binary beeps just went off the charts. It’s like a thousand fax machines all
dialled up at once. There was a jump thirty seconds ago as well, just after
Condor called the SEALs the first time.’

‘Shit...’
Schofield said. ‘Quickly, Mother. Find the ship’s dry-dock security systems.
Initiate the motion sensors.’

Every
American warship had standard security features for use when they were in
dry-dock. One was an infra-red motion sensor array positioned throughout the
ship’s main corridors—to detect intruders who might enter the boat when it was
deserted. The USS
Nimitz
possessed just such a system.

‘Got
it,’ Mother said.

‘Initialise,’
Schofield said.

A
wire-frame image of the
Nimitz
appeared on a big freestanding glass
screen in the centre of the control room, a cross-section shown from the
right-hand side.

‘Holy
shit...’ Hulk said, seeing the screen.

‘Mama
mia ...’ Sanchez breathed.

A
veritable
river
of red dots was flowing out from the main hangar bay,
heading toward the bow of the carrier ... where a far smaller cluster of ten
dots stood stationary: Condor’s Airborne team.

Each
dot represented an individual moving past the infra-red sensors. There were
perhaps 400 dots on the screen right now. And they were moving at incredible
speed, practically leap-frogging each other in their frenzy to get forward.

For
Schofield, things were starting to make sense.

The
binary beeps were the encrypted digital communications of his enemy, spiking
whenever they radioed each other. He also now knew for sure that they had
Signet-5 radio tracers. Damn.

‘SEAL
team! Come in!’
Condor said again over the airwaves.

‘Another
spike in the digital chatter,’ Mother reported.

The
dots on the glass screen picked up their pace.

‘Christ.
He’s got to get off the air,’ Schofield said. ‘He’s bringing them right to
him.’

‘We
have to tell him, warn him ...’ Sanchez said.

‘How?’
Mother demanded. ‘If we call him on our radios, we’ll only be giving away our
own position.’

‘We
can’t just leave him there, with all those things on the way!’

‘Wanna
bet?’ Mother said.

‘The
Airborne guys know their job,’ Schofield interrupted. ‘As do we. And our job is
not to babysit them. We have to trust they know what they’re doing. We also
have our own mission: to find out what’s been happening here and to end it.
Which is why we’re going down to the main hangar right now.’

* *

Schofield’s
team hustled out of the bridge, sliding down the drop-ladders.

Last
to leave was Sanchez, covering the rear.

With
a final glare at Schofield, he pulled out his radio, selected the Airborne
team’s private channel, and started talking.

Then
he took off after the others.

* *

Descending
through the tower, the Marines came level with the flight deck, but instead of
going outside, they kept climbing down, heading belowdecks.

Through
some tight passageways, lighting the way with their helmet- and barrel-mounted
flashlights.

Blood
smears lined the walls.

All
was dark and grim.

But
still no bodies, no nothing.

Then
over the main radio network came the sound of gunfire: Condor’s Airborne team
had engaged the enemy.

Desperate
shouts, screams, sustained fire. Men dying, one by one, just as had happened to
the SEAL team.

Listening
in, Mother stopped briefly at a security checkpoint—a small computer console
sunk into the corridor’s wall. These consoles were linked to the
Nimitz’s
security
system and on them she could bring up the digital cross-section of the ship,
showing where the motion sensors had been triggered.

Right
now—to the sound of the Airborne team’s desperate shouts—she could see the
large swarm of red dots at the right-hand end of the image overwhelming the
Airborne team.

In
the centre of the digital
Nimitz
was her own team, heading for the
hangar.

But
then there was a sudden change in the image.

A
subset of the 400-strong swarm of dots—a sub-group of perhaps forty
dots—abruptly broke away from the main group at the bow and started heading
back
toward the hangar.

‘Scarecrow...’
Mother called, ‘I got hostiles coming back from the bow. Coming back toward
us.’

‘How
many?’
And how did they know
... ?

‘Thirty,
maybe forty’

‘We
can handle forty of anything. Come on.’

They
continued running as the final transmission from the Airborne team came in.
Condor shouting,
‘Jesus, there are just too ma
—
Ahhh!’

Static.

Then
nothing.

The
Marine team kept moving.

* *

At
the rear in the team, Sanchez came alongside the youngest member of Schofield’s
unit, a 21-year-old corporal named Sean Miller. Fresh-faced, fit and a
science-fiction movie nut, his call-sign was Astro.

‘Yo,
Astro, you digging this?’

Astro
ignored him, just kept peering left and right as he moved.

Sanchez
persisted. ‘I’m telling you, kid, the skip’s gone Section Eight. Lost it.’

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.

* * * *

VI

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 come 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.’