Matt Reilly Stories (26 page)

* * * *

XV

At
exactly six p.m., the five Marines exited the
Nimitz
via the submarine
docking door, swam over to the nearby shore and for the first time that day,
set foot on Hell Island. The
Nimitz
loomed above them in the darkness, a
dark shadow against the evening sky.

Schofield
and his team quickly found an entrance to the underground tunnel system—a
sixty-year-old cracked concrete archway that stank of decay, dust and the
fearful sweat of soldiers long gone.

Inky
darkness loomed beyond the old concrete arch.

Before
they entered the tunnel network, Schofield stopped them.

‘Okay,
hold here for a moment. There’s only one way this can work, and that’s if
they’re right behind us.’

He
reached for his throat-mike and pressed ‘Transmit’, opening up his regular
radio channel.

‘But
they’ll know where we are ...’ Astro said, alarmed.

‘That’s
the whole point, kiddo,’ Mother said.

Schofield
keyed his radio, put on a worried voice: ‘Delta Leader, come in! Flash ...
Flash Gordon! You still alive out there? This is Scarecrow. Please respond!’

He
received no reply from the Delta team.

But
he did get another kind of response.

A
terrifying howl echoed out from the flight deck of the
Nimitz.

His
transmission had been detected.

The
gorillas were coming.

* *

And
they didn’t take long getting there.

They
swarmed off the
Nimitz,
an army of fast-moving shadows.

Zeroing
in on Schofield’s radio signal, the three hundred apes converged on the tunnel
entrance, howling and roaring.

Schofield’s
team charged into the tunnel system, pursued by the monsters. It was scary
enough moving through the dank concrete passageways— but doing it with an army
of deadly creatures on your tail was even worse.

‘This
way,’ Schofield said, referring to his map.

He
was heading for the two massive gun emplacements of Hell Island. The two big
guns— twelve-inch behemoths—were positioned on a pair of cliffs pointing east
and south, designed to ward off any approaching fleet.

Actually,
that wasn’t entirely correct: he was heading for the ammunition chambers buried
underneath and in between
the gun emplacements.

Through
the tunnels they ran.

The
gorillas caught up, firing and roaring. Schofield’s team fired behind
themselves as they ran, picking off the apes, never slowing down. To slow down
was to die.

Then
abruptly they came to a freight elevator.

‘This
is it. We’re beneath the first gun emplacement,’ Schofield said. ‘This
elevator was used to feed ammunition to the guns from the chambers down below.’

Like
the concrete world around it, the elevator was old and clunky, rusted beyond
repair. It didn’t work, but that didn’t matter.

‘Quickly,
down,’ Schofield ordered.

One
after the other, they swept down a rusty ladder that ran down the elevator
shaft.

Moving
last of all, Mother grabbed the ladder just as an ape came leaping out of the
darkness, grabbing her gun-hand.

She
pivoted on the ladder and hurled the gorilla free—allowing it to take her gun,
but flinging it out into the elevator shaft. The gorilla sailed down the shaft,
disappearing into blackness, its shriek ending with a dull thud somewhere down
there.

‘Hurry
up, people!’ Mother called downward.

They
hustled down the ladder.

On
the way, Schofield found a huge iron door set into an alcove. Its Japanese
markings had been painted over with English:
ORDNANCE
CHAMBER
ONE.

Unfortunately,
access to the door itself was obstructed by a cluster of heavy crates and
boxes. They’d never get to it.

Down
another level and they came to the bottom of the elevator shaft. Here
Schofield found a second huge iron door marked
ORDNANCE CHAMBER TWO.
Not only was it free of obstructing
crates, it was unlocked. Also here was a large circular pressure door that
looked like the entry to a giant safe. It was easily ten feet in diameter.

Schofield
ignored this circular door, pushed open the heavy iron door to the ordnance
chamber and pulled a glowstick from his belt.

Beside
him, Sanchez extracted a flare gun and raised it.

‘No,’
Schofield said sharply. ‘Not here.’

He
cracked the glowstick—illuminating the room around them with its haunting amber
glow—and suddenly Sanchez saw the wisdom of Schofield’s words.

The
room around them was enormous, high-ceilinged and concrete-walled, with
floorspace roughly the size of a basketball court. A network of overhead rails
ran along its ceiling, dangling chains and hooks. An identical door lay on the
far side, leading to a second elevator shaft that fed the other gun
emplacement.

And
piled up in its centre, like an artificial mountain sixty feet tall, was a
pyramid-shaped stack of wooden crates. Each crate was marked in either Japanese
or English with DANGER:
EXPLOSIVES
OR
DANGER: FLAMMABLE, NO NAKED FLAMES.

In
fact, Schofield couldn’t recall seeing the word ‘danger’ so many times in the
one place.

‘This
is what we wanted,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Come on.’

His
team hustled inside.

* * * *

XVI

The
apes arrived at the second ammunition chamber a minute later.

The
first few must have been recon troops— for the first time that day they were
cautious, checking things out, as if suspecting a trap.

They
saw Schofield and Mother clambering up the mountain of wooden crates, heading
for a catwalk near the ceiling—presumably to join the others up there,
although they couldn’t be seen. The recon gorillas ducked back outside, to
report back to the others.

Thirty
seconds later, the onslaught came.

* *

It
was spectacular in its ferocity.

The
ape army
thundered
into the ammo chamber in full assault mode.

Screaming
and shrieking, moving fast and spreading out, they stormed the subterranean
hall—not firing. The scouts had informed the others of the flammable contents
of the hall. They’d have to do this
without
guns.

The
ape army leapt onto the mountain of crates, coming after Schofield and Mother
with a vengeance, coming to finish them off.

Schofield
and Mother stayed at the peak of the crate mountain, each holding two MP-7 submachine
guns and firing them with precision, aiming carefully to avoid hitting the
ordnance all around them, taking down apes left, right and centre.

Gunfire
clattering.

Apes
screaming and falling.

Muzzle
flashes.

Two
against an army.

And
the apes just kept coming, live ones just clambering over the dead ones,
scaling the artificial mountain. For every rank of gorillas that Schofield and
Mother mowed down, another
two ranks
stepped forward.

Soon
the mountain of crates was crawling with hairy black shapes, all scrambling in
a fury for the two defiant Marines at the summit.

‘Scarecrow
... !’ Mother called.

‘Not
yet! We have to wait till they’re all inside…!’

Then
the last apes entered the great underground room, and Schofield called, ‘Now!’

As
he yelled, the first gorillas reached the summit and clutched at his boots—only
to be completely surprised when Schofield and Mother suddenly discarded their
guns and leapt
upward,
grabbing a pair of chains hanging from the
ceiling-mounted rail network and using them to swing across the length of the
chamber, high above the army of apes swarming over the crate-mountain.

Schofield
and Mother hit the western wall of the hall and unclipped clasps on their
chains— causing the chains to unreel from the ceiling, lowering the two of them
to the floor of the room right in front of the doorway leading back to the
elevator shaft.

‘Marines!
Now!’

It
was then that the other three members of Schofield’s unit revealed
themselves—from
behind
some crates near the entrance to the ammunition
chamber. They all stepped back out through the heavy entry door, and raised
their guns to fire back in through the gap.

And
suddenly the trap became clear.

The
entire
guerrilla army was now inside the one enclosed space, swarming
all over the most combustible mountain in history.

And
with Schofield and Mother now down and safe, Bigfoot, Astro and Sanchez aimed
their guns at the base of the mountain of crates.

‘Fire!’
Schofield commanded.

They
squeezed their triggers.

* *

But
then, from completely out of nowhere, a voice called:
‘Captain Schofield!
Don’t!’

* * * *

XVII

Schofield
snapped up. ‘Marines! Hold that order! Do not fire!’

The
voice—it was a man’s voice—was desperate and pleading. It echoed out from
ancient loudspeakers positioned around the great concrete room and inside the
elevator shaft.

By
this time the apes had started descending the mountain of crates, coming back
down after Schofield and Mother, but then the voice addressed them:

‘Troops!
Desist and stand down!’

Immediately,
the apes stopped where they stood, sitting down on their haunches in total and
absolute obedience.

What
had moments before been a frenzied blood-hungry army of apes was now a
perfectly-behaved crowd of three hundred silent mountain gorillas.

And
then suddenly
people
appeared behind Schofield’s team, moving slowly and
calmly, stepping down from the ladder in the elevator shaft: seven men in
lab-coats, one officer in uniform, and covering them, a team of Delta
commandos: the same ten-man team led by Hugh ‘Flash’ Gordon that had
parachuted in with Schofield’s unit earlier that day.

Among
the scientists in the lab-coats, Schofield recognised Zak Pennebaker, the
‘desperate’ scientist he’d met earlier.

He
also recognised the officer in uniform, which happened to be the khaki day
uniform of the United States Marine Corps. He was Captain William ‘Buccaneer’
Broyles, aka the Buck.

The
leader of the lab-coated crowd stepped forward. He was an older man, with a
mane of flowing white hair, an aged crinkled face, and dazzling blue eyes. He
oozed authority.

‘Captain
Schofield,’ he said in a deep voice. ‘Thank you for your quick response to my
plea. My name is Dr Malcolm Knox, scientific consultant to the President, head
of the Special Warfare Division at DARPA and overall commander of
Project
Stormtrooper.’

Knox
walked out among the apes—they continued to sit obediently, although they did
rock from side to side, fidgeting impatiently. But they did not attack him.
Schofield noticed a silver disc on Knox’s ID badge—it was exactly the same as
the one Pennebaker had been wearing earlier and, Schofield saw, was still
wearing now.

Standing
with the apes at his back, Knox turned to Schofield and his dirty,
blood-covered team.

‘Congratulations.
You have won this mission, Captain Schofield,’ he said.

Schofield
said nothing.

‘I
said, you
won,’
Knox said. ‘I commend you on an incredible effort.
Indeed, yours was the only team to survive.’

Still
Schofield remained silent.

Knox
stammered. ‘You really, er, should all be proud—’

‘This
was a goddamned test,’ Schofield said in a low voice, his tone deadly.

‘Yes…yes,
it was,’ Knox said, slightly unnerved. ‘The final test of a new technology—’

Schofield
said, ‘You pitted your new army against three companies of Marines, and you
beat them. But then the higher-ups said you had to beat Special Forces, didn’t
they?’

Knox
nodded. ‘This is correct.’

‘So
you had us parachuted in here, with the SEALs and the Airborne. You used us as
live
bait.
You used us as human guinea pigs for a
test
—’