Matthew Reilly - Hell Island

A call from Schofield roused him.

“Marines! Up the ladder! Now!”

As his Marines climbed skyward, Schofield grabbed the ladder last of all, shoving past the immobile Buck.

After he was ten feet up, Schofield aimed his pistol at a lever on the big round safe-like door set into the wall of the elevator shaft.

“History lesson for you, Buck,” Schofield said. “Happy swimming.”

Blam.

Schofield fired, hitting the lever with a spray of sparks.

And at which point all hell really broke loose.

The lever snapped downward, into the RELEASE position.

And the big ten-foot-wide circular door was instantly flung open, swinging inward with incredible force, force that came from the weight of ocean water that had been pressing against it from the other side.

This door was one of the floodgates that the Japanese had used in 1943 to flood the tunnels of Hell Island. A door that backed onto the Pacific Ocean itself.

A shocking blast of seawater came rushing in through the circular doorway, slamming into the Buck, lifting him off his feet and hurling him like a rag doll against the opposite wall of the elevator shaft, the force so strong that his skull cracked when it hit the concrete.

The roar of the ocean flooding into the elevator shaft was absolutely deafening. It looked like the spray from a giant fireman’s hose, a ten-foot-wide spray of super-powerful inrushing water.

And one more thing.

The layout of the subterranean ammunition chamber meant that the incoming water flooded into Chamber No. 2, where the three hundred apes now stood, trapped.

The apes scrambled across the chamber, wading waist-deep against the powerful waves of whitewater pouring into it.

The water level rose fast—the apes continued howling, struggling against it—but it only took a few seconds for it to hit the upper frame of the doorway to the chamber, sealing off the chamber completely, cutting off the sounds of the three hundred madly-scrambling apes.

And while they could swim short distances, the apes could not swim underwater.

They couldn’t get out.

Ammunition Chamber No. 2 of Hell Island would be their tomb—three hundred apes, innocent creatures turned into killing machines, would drown in it.

FOUR GORILLAS, however, did make it out of the hall before the water completely covered the doorway.

They got to the elevator shaft and started climbing the ladder, heading up and away from the swirling body of ocean water pouring into the concrete shaft beneath them.

Higher up the same ladder, Schofield and his team scaled the shaft as quickly as they could.

The roar of inrushing water drowned out all sound for almost thirty seconds until—ominously—the whole shaft suddenly fell silent.

It wasn’t that the water had stopped rushing in: it was just that the water level had risen above the floodgate. The ocean was still invading the shaft, just from below its own waterline.

“Keep climbing!” Schofield called up to the others, moving last of all. “We have to get above sea level!”

He looked behind him, saw the four pursuing apes.

Fact: gorillas are much better climbers than human beings.

Schofield yelled, “Guys! We’ve got company!”

Three-quarters of the way up the shaft was a large horizontal metal grate that folded down across the width of the shaft—notches in its edges allowed it to close around the elevator cables. When closed horizontally, it would completely span the shaft, sealing it off. It was one of the gates the Japanese had created to trap intruders down below.

Schofield saw it. “Mother! When you get to that grate, close it behind you!”

The Marines came to the grate, climbed up past it one at a time—Astro, then Bigfoot, then Sanchez and Mother.

With a loud clang, Sanchez quickly closed one half of the grate. Mother grabbed the other half, just as Schofield reached it…

…at the same time as a big hairy hand grabbed his ankle and yanked hard!

Schofield slipped down six rungs, clutching with his hands, dropping six feet below the grate, an ape hanging from his left foot.

“Scarecrow!” Mother shouted.

“Close the grate!” Schofield called.

Immediately below him, the ocean water was now charging up the vertical elevator shaft. It must have completely filled the ammo chamber—so that now it was racing up the only space left for it to go: the much narrower elevator shaft.

“No!” Mother yelled. To shut the grate was to drown Schofield himself.

“You have to!” Schofield shouted back. “You have to shut them in!”

Schofield glanced downward at the enraged gorilla clutching his left foot. The other three apes were clambering up the ladder close behind it.

He leveled his pistol at the gorilla holding him—

Click.

Dry.

“Shit.”

Then suddenly he saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to find someone hovering next to his face, level with his head, someone hanging upside-down!

Mother.

Hanging fully stretched, inverted, her legs held by Sanchez and Bigfoot up at the grate, herself holding pistols in both hands.

“No heroic sacrifices today, buddy,” she said to Schofield.

She then opened fire with both her guns, blasting the ape holding him to pieces. The ape released him, Mother chucked her guns, grabbed Schofield by his webbing and suddenly, whoosh, both Mother and Schofield were lifted up the shaft by Sanchez and Bigfoot, up past the half-closed grate, where once they were up, Astro slammed down the other half and snapped shut its lock.

The three remaining apes and the rising water hit the grate moments later, the water pinning the screaming apes to the underside of the grate until it rose past them, swallowing them, climbing a further ten feet up the shaft, before it abruptly stopped, having come level with the sea outside, now forbidden by physics from rising any further.

Schofield’s Marines gazed down at the sloshing body of water from their ladder above, breathless and exhausted, but safe, and now the only creatures—man or ape—still breathing on Hell Island.

FOUR HOURS later, a lone plane arrived on the landing strip of Hell Island. It was a gigantic Air Force C-17A Globemaster, one of the biggest cargo-lifters in the world, capable of holding over two hundred armed personnel, or perhaps three hundred sedated apes.

Its six-man crew were a little surprised to find only five United States Marines—dirty, bloody and battle-weary—waiting on the tarmac to greet them.

Its co-pilot came out and met Schofield, shouted above the whine of the plane’s enormous jet engines: “Who the hell are you? We’re here to pick up a bunch of DARPA guys, Delta specialists, and some mysterious cargo that we’re not allowed to look at. Nobody said anything about Marines.”

Schofield just shook his head.

“There’s no cargo,” he said. “Not anymore. Now, if you don’t mind, would you please take us home.”