Matthew Reilly: Hell Island

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.

THROUGHOUT 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.