‘This
gorilla force could save thousands of American lives in future conflicts,’ Knox
said. ‘You, Captain Schofield, are sworn to defend the American people and your
fellow soldiers. You were doing exactly that, only in an indirect way.’
‘In
an indirect way ...’ Schofield growled. ‘I’ve lost five good men here today, Dr
Knox. Not to mention the other Marines, SEALs and Airbornes who also died here
in your little experiment. These men had families. They were prepared to die
for their country fighting its
enemies,
not its latest fucking weapon.’
‘Sometimes
a few must be lost for the greater good, Captain,’ Knox said. ‘This is bigger
than you. This is the future of warfare for our country.’
‘But
your apes
lost
in the end. We had them in the cross-hairs and were about
to fire the kill-shot.’
‘Yes,
you did. You most certainly did,’ Knox said. ‘Your participation in this
exercise was requested for precisely that reason: your adaptability and
unpredictability. The apes needed such an adversary.
‘As
it stands, however, the gorillas beat everybody but you, and your victory, it
must be said, was based in large part on a few longshots, in particular a level
of knowledge that 99 per cent of our enemies simply will not have: submarine
docking doors in carriers and an unusually high level of knowledge of World War
II
Japanese tunnel systems. No, based
on the results of this test,
Project Stormtrooper
will most certainly go
live, and it will save many lives over the years to come.’
Knox
started walking around the hall, checking the apes. ‘Now, if you don’t mind,
we have a lot of follow-up to do and a whole lot of paperwork. An extraction
plane has been called from Okinawa to come and take you home. It should be here
in a few hours.’
‘Paperwork
...’ Schofield said. ‘Men have died and you have paperwork. You guys are something
else. Hey, hold it. I have another question.’
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 farmboys 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.
* * * *
XVIII
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 analyser 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 round—
—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.
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 in rushing 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.