Matthew Reilly: Hell Island

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:

“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, disheveled 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.”

Zak Pennebaker didn’t need three degrees to figure out that one. It came out in a blurting flurry.

“It started out as a super-soldier project, special ops stuff involving ‘Go’ drugs, amphetamines, biomechanics and brain-chip grafting. All on human subjects. But the human subjects didn’t work out. The ape subjects, however, worked very, very well.”

“ Ape subjects?” Mother said in disbelief.

“Yes, apes. Gorillas. African mountain gorillas to be precise. They’re twice as strong as human beings and the grafting technology worked perfectly with them.”

“Not quite perfectly,” Hulk said, indicating the state of the observation platform.

“Well, no, no, not in the end,” Pennebaker mumbled. “But when the apes took so well to the tech, the project morphed from a special-forces operation to a frontline troop replacement project.”

“What do you mean?” Schofield asked.

“The ultimate frontline trooper—lethal, vicious, remorseless, yet totally obedient. And best of all, totally expendable. No more letters from a grateful nation to grieving parents. No more one-legged veterans protesting in D.C. Hell, no more veterans full-stop—the government would save billions in entitlements alone. Imagine you’re a general, facing a frontal assault, it’s a lot easier to send a thousand purpose-bred apes to their deaths than fresh-faced farm boys from Idaho.

“And that’s the best part, we bred the gorillas ourselves in labs, so we aren’t even thinning the natural population, committing some crime against nature. They are the first custom-made artificially-produced armed force in the history of mankind. You could send them into hostile territory and they’d never question the order, you could send them on complete suicide missions and they’d never complain.”

“How the hell do you manage that?” Hulk asked.

“The grafting technology,” Schofield answered.

Pennebaker seemed surprised that Schofield would know about this. “Yes. That’s correct.”

“What’s grafting technology?” Mother asked.

Schofield said, “You attach—or graft —a microchip to the brain of your subject. The chip is biomechanical, semi-organic, so it attaches to the brain and becomes part of it. Grafting technology has allowed quadriplegics to communicate via computers. Their brain engages with the chip and the chip sends a signal to the computer. But… I’ve heard it can also work the other way around…”

“That’s right,” Pennebaker said. “When an outside agent uses a grafted microchip to control the subject. ”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Mother sighed. “Poindexter, you musta read a million books in college filled with words I couldn’t even understand, but didn’t you just once think about reading Frankenstein? ”

Pennebaker responded, “You have to believe me. The results were astonishing, at least at the start. The apes were perfectly obedient and shockingly effective. We taught them how to use weapons. We even created modified M-4 assault rifles for them, to accommodate their bigger hands. But even when they lost their guns, they were still hyper-effective—they could crush a man’s head with their bare hands or bite his whole face off.”

As Pennebaker spoke, Schofield stole a glance at his four men guarding the north-south catwalk. None of them had moved.

He keyed his UHF channel: “Astro? Hulk? Any contacts?”

“Not a thing from the north, sir.”

“Ditto the south, sir. It’s too quiet here.”

Schofield turned back to Pennebaker. “You’re saying you tested these things against human troops?”

Pennebaker bowed his head. “Yes. Against three companies of Marines that we had brought here from Okinawa. What are you guys?”

“Marines,” Mother growled.

Pennebaker swallowed. “The apes annihilated them. Down on the battlefield and also on the island proper. Five hundred gorillas versus 600 Marines. It was a hell of a fight. The gorillas lost heaps in the opening exchange, but they just weathered the losses without a backward step. The chips in their heads don’t allow for ineffective emotions like fear. So the apes just kept coming, climbing over the piles of their dead, until the Marines were toast.”

Mother pushed her face—and pistol—into Pennebaker’s. “You call a Marine toast again, fuck-nut, and I’ll waste you right now.”

Schofield said softly, “And fear is not an ineffective emotion, Mr. Pennebaker.”

Pennebaker shrugged. “Whatever. You see, it was then the apes started doing… unexpected… things. Independent strategic thinking; killing their own wounded. And then there were the more unseemly things, like cutting the hands off their vanquished enemies and piling them up.”