Matt Reilly Stories (20 page)

‘What
do I think?’ the bulky female Marine to his right replied. ‘I think this is
seriously fucked up. I was planning on spending this weekend watching David
Hasselhoff DVDs. No-one takes me away from the Hoff.’

Gena
Newman was her real name, Gunnery Sergeant was her rank, but ‘Mother’ was her
call-sign and it didn’t relate to any overtly maternal traits. It was short for
a slightly longer word starting with ‘Mother’.

At
six-feet-two, 200 pounds, and with a fully-shaven head, Mother cut a mean
figure. Tough, no-nonsense and fiercely loyal, she had accompanied Schofield
oh many missions, including the bad ones. She was also arguably the best Gunny
in the Corps—once she had even been offered her pick of assignments
outside
Schofield’s
command. She’d looked the Commandant of the Marine Corps in the eye and said,
‘I’m staying with the Scarecrow, sir.’

Mother
gazed at the blood splatters on a nearby plane. ‘No, this was way suspect from
the start. I mean, why are we here with D-boys, Airbornes and slithery SEALs?
I’d rather just work with swordsmen.’

Swordsman
was
her word for a Marine: a reference to the swords they wore with their
full-dress uniforms.

‘Marines,’
Schofield called, ‘the tower. Let’s move.’

Since
they’d been assigned the mid-section of the supercarrier, Schofield’s Marines
had the task of investigating the carrier’s six-storey-high command tower,
known as ‘the Island’. But since this mission also involved a real island, it
was being referred to today as ‘the tower’.

They
moved quickly through the rain, crossed the wide flight deck, arrived at the
base of the tower—to find the main door there covered in blood and about a
million bullet holes. It hung askew, its hinges blasted.

Looking
up, Schofield saw that every single antenna and radar array atop the command
tower had been broken or destroyed. The main antenna mast was broken in the
middle and now lay tilted over.

‘What
in God’s name happened here?’ one of Schofield’s Marines asked softly. He was a
big guy, broad shouldered, with a supersolid footballer’s neck. His name:
Corporal Harold ‘Hulk’ Hogan.

‘Not
a tsunami, that’s for sure,’ Sergeant Paulo ‘Pancho’ Sanchez said. Older and
more senior than Hulk, he was a sly sarcastic type. ‘Tsunamis don’t shoot you
in the head.’

The
voice of the SEAL leader came through their earpieces:
‘All units, this is
Gator. Starboard Elevator Three has been disabled. We’re taking the stairs,
heading for the main hangar bay below the flight deck.’

‘This
is Condor,’
the Airborne leader called in.
‘I got
evidence of a firefight in the SAM launcher bay up at the bow. Lot of blood,
but not a single body ...’

‘Delta
Six here. We’re on the island proper. No sign of anything yet…’

Schofield
didn’t send out any report.

‘Sir,’
Sanchez said to him. ‘You gonna call in?’

‘No.’

Sanchez
exchanged a quick look with the Marine next to him, a tall guy named Bigfoot.
Sanchez was one of the men who’d been dubious about Schofield’s mental state
and his ability to lead this mission.

‘Not
even to tell the others where we are?’

‘No.’

‘But
what about—’

‘Sergeant,’
Schofield said sharply ‘did you ask your previous commander to explain
everything to you?’

‘No,
sir.’

‘So
don’t start doing it now. Focus on the mission at hand.’

Sanchez
bit his lip and nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Now,
if no-one else has anything to say, let’s take this tower. Move.’

Hurdling
the twisted steel door, they charged into the darkness of the supercarrier’s
command tower.

* * * *

III

Up
a series of tight ladders that formed the spine of the command tower, moving
quickly. Blood on the rungs.

Still
no bodies.

Schofield’s
team came to the bridge, the middle of three glass-enclosed lookout levels on
the tower.

They
were granted a superb view of the flight deck outside…albeit through cracked
and smashed wraparound windows.

Nearly
every window overlooking the flight deck had been destroyed. Blood dripped off
what glass remained. Thousands of spent rounds littered the floor. Also, a few
guns lay about: mainly M-16s, plus a few M-4 Colt Commandos, the
short-barrelled version of the M-16 used by special forces teams worldwide.

Mother
led a sub-team upstairs, to the uppermost bridge: the flight control bridge.
She returned a few minutes later.

‘Same
deal,’ she reported ‘Bucketloads of blood, no bodies. All windows smashed, and
an armoury’s worth of spent ammo left on the floor. A hell of a firefight took
place here, Scarecrow.’

‘A
firefight that was cleaned up afterward,’ Schofield said.

Just
then, something caught his eye: one of the abandoned rifles on the floor, one
of the M-4s.

He
picked it up, examined it.

From
a distance it looked like a regular M-4, but it wasn’t. It had been modified
slightly.

The
gun’s trigger-guard was different: it had been elongated, as if to accommodate
a
longer
index finger that wrapped itself around the gun’s trigger.

‘What
the hell is that?’ Hulk said, seeing it. ‘Some kind of super gun?’

‘Scarecrow,’
Mother said, coming over. ‘Most of these blood splatters are the result of
bullet impacts. But some aren’t. They’re…well…thicker. More like arterial flow.
As if some of the dead had entire
limbs
cut off.’

Schofield’s
earpiece squawked.

All
units, this is Gator. My SEAL team has just arrived at the main hangar deck and
holy shit,-people, have we got something to show you. We aren’t the first force
to have got here. And the guys before us didn’t fare well at all. I have a
visual on at least two hundred pairs of hands all stacked up in a neat pile
down here.’

Sanchez
whispered, ‘Did he just say—?’

Gator
anticipated this. ‘
Yes
,
you heard me right. Hands. Human hands. Cut
off and stacked in a great big heap. What in God’s name have we walked into
here?’

* * * *

IV

While
the rest of their team listened in horror to Gator’s gruesome report, Schofield
and Mother strode into the command centre, the inner section of the bridge. It
too was largely wrecked, but not totally.

‘Mother,
do a power-grid check, all grids, all levels, even externals. I’m gonna look
for ATOs.’

Mother
sat down at an undamaged console while Schofield went to the Captain’s desk and
attached some C-2 low-expansion plastic explosive to the commanding officer’s
safe.

A
muffled boom later and he had the
Nimitz’s
last fourteen ATOs—Air
Tasking Orders, the ship’s daily orders received from Pacific Command at Pearl
Harbor.

It
was mainly routine stuff as the
Nimitz
hop-scotched her way back from
the Indian Ocean to Hawaii, dropping in at Singapore and the Philippines on
the way ...

Until
ten days ago ...

…when
the
Nimitz
was ordered to divert to the Japanese island of Okinawa and
pick up three companies of US Marines there, a force of about 600 men.

She
was to ferry the Marines—not crack Recon troops, but rather just regular men—
across the northern Pacific and drop them off at a set of co-ordinates that
Schofield knew to be Hell Island.

After
unloading the Marines, the ship was then instructed to:

PICK
UP DARPA SCIENCE TEAM FROM LOCATION:

KNOX,
MALCOLM C.

RYAN,
HARPER R.

PENNEBAKER,
ZACHARY B.

HOGAN,
SHANE M.

JOHNSON,
SIMON W.

LIEBMANN,
BEN C.

HENDRICKS,
JAMES F.

PERSONNEL
ARE ALL SECURITY-CLEARED TO ‘TOP SECRET’.

THEY
WILL HAVE CARGO WHICH IS NOT TO BE SEEN BY CREW OF NIMITZ.

So.
The
Nimitz
had been sent here to drop off a sizeable force of Marines
and also pick up some scientists who had been at work here.

Again,
it bore all the hallmarks of an exercise— Marines being unloaded on a secret
island where DARPA scientists had been at work.

DARPA
was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the genius-level scientists
who made high-tech weaponry for the US military. After inventing the Internet
and stealth technology, rumour had it that DARPA had recently been at work on
ultra-high-tensile, low-weight body armour and, notoriously, a
fourth-generation thermonuclear weapon called a
Supernova,
the most
powerful nuke ever devised.

‘Scarecrow,’
Mother said from her console. ‘I got a power drain in grid 14.2, the starboard-side
router, going to an external destination, location unknown. Something on the
island is draining power from the
Nimitz’s
reactor. Beyond that, all
other electrical systems on the boat have been shut down: lights,
air-conditioning, everything.’

Schofield
thought about that.

‘And
another thing,’ Mother said. ‘I fired up the ship’s internal spectrum analyser.
I’m picking up a weird radio signal being transmitted inside the
Nimitz.’

‘
Why’s
it weird?’

‘Because
it’s not a voice signal. It sounds, well, like a digital signal, a binary beep
sequence. Fact, sounds like my old dial-up
modem.’                           

Schofield
frowned. A power drain going off the ship. Digital radio signals inside the
ship. A secret DARPA presence. And a gruesome stack of severed hands down in
the hangar deck.

This
didn’t make sense at all.

‘Mother,’
he said, ‘you got a portable AXS on you?’ An AXS was an AXS-9 radio spectrum
analyser, a portable unit that picked up radio transmissions, a bug
detector.                                      

‘Sure
have.’

‘Jamming
capabilities?’

‘Multi-channel
or single channel,’ she said.

‘Good,’
Schofield said. ‘Tune it in to those beeps. Stay on them. And just be ready to
jam them.’

Gator’s
voice continued to come over his earpiece. The SEAL leader was describing the
scene in the hangar bay:

‘...
looks like the entire hangar has been configured for an exercise of some
sort. It’s like an indoor battlefield. I got artificial trenches, some low
terrain, even a field tower set up inside the hangar. Moving toward the nearest
trench now—hey, what was that...? Holy—

Gunfire
rang out. Sustained automatic gunfire.

Both
from the SEALs and from an unknown enemy force. The SEALs’ silenced MP-5SNs
made a chilling
slit-slit-slit-slit-slit-slit
when they fired. Their
enemies’ guns made a different noise altogether, the distinct puncture-like
clatter of M-4 Colt Commando assault rifles.

The
SEALs starting shouting to each other:

‘—
they’re
coming out of the nearest trench
—’

‘—
what
the fuck
is that...’

‘
—
it
looks like a Goddamn go
—’

Sprack!
The
speaker never finished his sentence. The sound of a bullet slamming into his
skull echoed through his radio-mike.

Then
Gator’s voice:
‘Fire! Open fire! Mow ‘em down!’

In
response to the order, the level of SEAL gunfire intensified. But the SEALs’
voices became more desperate.

‘—
Jesus,
they just keep coming! There are too many of them!’

‘—
Get
back to the stairs! Get back to the
—’

‘—
Shit!
There are more back there! They’re cutting us off! They’ve got us surrounded!’

A
pained
scream.

‘—
Gator’s
down! Oh, fuck, ah—’

The
speaker’s voice was abruptly cut off by a guttural grunting sound that all but
ate
his radio-mike. The man screamed, a terrified shriek that was muffled by
rough scuffling noises over his mike. He panted desperately as if struggling
with some great beast. Indeed it sounded as if some kind of frenzied creature
had barrelled into him full-tilt
and started eating his face.