Matt Reilly Stories

by Matthew Reilly

  Sanchez reached for the radio—only for Schofield to swat his hand away.

  ‘I said no signals.’

  Sanchez scowled, but obeyed.

  One of the other teams, however, came over the line: ‘SEAL team, this is Condor. What’s going on? Come in!’

  Schofield waited for a reply.

  None came.

  But then after thirty seconds or so, another rough scuffling sound could be heard, someone—or something—grabbing one of the SEAL team’s radio-mikes.

  Then a terrifying sound shot through the radio.

  A horrific animal roar.

  * * * *

  V

  ‘SEAL team, I repeat! This is Condor! Come in!’ the Airborne commander kept saying over the radio.

  ‘Scarecrow!’ Mother exclaimed. ‘I got something here…’

  ‘What?’ Schofield hurried over to her console.

  ‘Those binary beeps just went off the charts. It’s like a thousand fax machines all dialled up at once. There was a jump thirty seconds ago as well, just after Condor called the SEALs the first time.’

  ‘Shit...’ Schofield said. ‘Quickly, Mother. Find the ship’s dry-dock security systems. Initiate the motion sensors.’

  Every American warship had standard security features for use when they were in dry-dock. One was an infra-red motion sensor array positioned throughout the ship’s main corridors—to detect intruders who might enter the boat when it was deserted. The USS Nimitz possessed just such a system.

  ‘Got it,’ Mother said.

  ‘Initialise,’ Schofield said.

  A wire-frame image of the Nimitz appeared on a big freestanding glass screen in the centre of the control room, a cross-section shown from the right-hand side.

  ‘Holy shit...’ Hulk said, seeing the screen.

  ‘Mama mia ...’ Sanchez breathed.

  A veritable river of red dots was flowing out from the main hangar bay, heading toward the bow of the carrier ... where a far smaller cluster of ten dots stood stationary: Condor’s Airborne team.

  Each dot represented an individual moving past the infra-red sensors. There were perhaps 400 dots on the screen right now. And they were moving at incredible speed, practically leap-frogging each other in their frenzy to get forward.

  For Schofield, things were starting to make sense.

  The binary beeps were the encrypted digital communications of his enemy, spiking whenever they radioed each other. He also now knew for sure that they had Signet-5 radio tracers. Damn.

  ‘SEAL team! Come in!’ Condor said again over the airwaves.

  ‘Another spike in the digital chatter,’ Mother reported.

  The dots on the glass screen picked up their pace.

  ‘Christ. He’s got to get off the air,’ Schofield said. ‘He’s bringing them right to him.’

  ‘We have to tell him, warn him ...’ Sanchez said.

  ‘How?’ Mother demanded. ‘If we call him on our radios, we’ll only be giving away our own position.’

  ‘We can’t just leave him there, with all those things on the way!’

  ‘Wanna bet?’ Mother said.

  ‘The Airborne guys know their job,’ Schofield interrupted. ‘As do we. And our job is not to babysit them. We have to trust they know what they’re doing. We also have our own mission: to find out what’s been happening here and to end it. Which is why we’re going down to the main hangar right now.’

  * *

  Schofield’s team hustled out of the bridge, sliding down the drop-ladders.

  Last to leave was Sanchez, covering the rear.

  With a final glare at Schofield, he pulled out his radio, selected the Airborne team’s private channel, and started talking.

  Then he took off after the others.

  * *

  Descending through the tower, the Marines came level with the flight deck, but instead of going outside, they kept climbing down, heading belowdecks.

  Through some tight passageways, lighting the way with their helmet- and barrel-mounted flashlights.

  Blood smears lined the walls.

  All was dark and grim.

  But still no bodies, no nothing.

  Then over the main radio network came the sound of gunfire: Condor’s Airborne team had engaged the enemy.

  Desperate shouts, screams, sustained fire. Men dying, one by one, just as had happened to the SEAL team.

  Listening in, Mother stopped briefly at a security checkpoint—a small computer console sunk into the corridor’s wall. These consoles were linked to the Nimitz’s security system and on them she could bring up the digital cross-section of the ship, showing where the motion sensors had been triggered.

  Right now—to the sound of the Airborne team’s desperate shouts—she could see the large swarm of red dots at the right-hand end of the image overwhelming the Airborne team.

  In the centre of the digital Nimitz was her own team, heading for the hangar.

  But then there was a sudden change in the image.

  A subset of the 400-strong swarm of dots—a sub-group of perhaps forty dots—abruptly broke away from the main group at the bow and started heading back toward the hangar.

  ‘Scarecrow...’ Mother called, ‘I got hostiles coming back from the bow. Coming back toward us.’

  ‘How many?’ And how did they know ... ?

  ‘Thirty, maybe forty’

  ‘We can handle forty of anything. Come on.’

  They continued running as the final transmission from the Airborne team came in. Condor shouting, ‘Jesus, there are just too ma— Ahhh!’

  Static.

  Then nothing.

  The Marine team kept moving.

  * *

  At the rear in the team, Sanchez came alongside the youngest member of Schofield’s unit, a 21-year-old corporal named Sean Miller. Fresh-faced, fit and a science-fiction movie nut, his call-sign was Astro.

  ‘Yo, Astro, you digging this?’

  Astro ignored him, just kept peering left and right as he moved.

  Sanchez persisted. ‘I’m telling you, kid, the skip’s gone Section Eight. Lost it.’

  Astro turned briefly. ‘Hey. Pancho. Until you go undefeated at R7, I’ll follow the Cap’n.’

  R7 stood for Relampago Rojo-7, the special forces exercises that had been run in conjunction with the huge all-forces Joint Task Force Exercise in Florida in 2004.

  Sanchez said, ‘Hey, hey, hey. The Scarecrow wasn’t the only guy to go undefeated at R7. The Buck also did.’

  The Buck was Captain William Broyles, ‘the Buccaneer’, a brilliant warrior and the former leader of what was acknowledged to be the best Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit, Unit 1.

  Sanchez went on: ‘Fact is, the Buck won the overall exercise on points, because he beat the other teams faster than the Scarecrow did. Shit, the only reason the Scarecrow got a draw with the Buck was because he evaded the Buck’s team till the entire exercise timed out.’

  ‘A draw’s a draw,’ Astro shrugged. ‘And, er, didn’t you used to be in the Buck’s unit?’

  ‘Damn straight,’ Sanchez said. ‘So was Biggie. But they disbanded Unit 1 a few months ago and we’ve been shuffled from team to team ever since, ending up with you guys for this catastrophe.’

  ‘So you’re biased.’

  ‘So I’m cautious. And you should be, too, ‘cause we might just be working under a boss who’s not firing on all cylinders.’

  ‘I’ll take that under advisement. Now shut up, we’re here.’

  Sanchez looked forward, and paused.

  They’d arrived at the main hangar deck.

  * * * *

  VI

  Shane Schofield stepped out onto a catwalk suspended from the ceiling of the main hangar deck of the USS Nimitz. It was an ultralong catwalk that ran for the entire length of the hangar in a north-south direction, hanging a hundred feet above the floor.

  An indoor space the size of two football fields lay beneath him, stretching away to the
left and right. Normally it would have been filled with assorted jets, planes, Humvees and trucks.

  But not today.

  Today it was very, very different.

  Schofield recalled Gator’s description of the hangar deck:

  ‘It’s like an indoor battlefield. I got artificial trenches, some low terrain, even a field tower set up inside the hangar.’

  It was true.

  The hangar deck had indeed been converted into a mock battlefield.

  However it had been done, it had been a gargantuan effort, involving the transplanting of several million tons of earth. The end result: something that looked like the Somme in World War I—a great muddy field, featuring four parallel trenches, low undulating hills and one high steel-legged tower that rose sixty feet off the ground right in the centre of the enormous space.

  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:

  PROJECT STORMTROOPER

  SECURITY CLASSIFICATION:

  TOP SECRET-2X

  DARPA/U.S. ARMY

  ‘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, dishevelled 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 supersoldier 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 DC. 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 farmboys 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 round ...’

  ‘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.’

  ‘Yeah, heard about that,’ Mother said. ‘Charming.’

  ‘And then they turned on you,’ Schofield said.

  ‘And then they turned on us. The most unexpected thing of all. While we were looking the other way, observing the exercise, they sent a sub-team to take this tower. Took us by surprise. They’re smart, tactical. They out-thought us and now they own this ship and the island. Marines, welcome to the end of your lives.’

  ‘We’re not dead yet,’ Schofield said.

  ‘Oh, yes you are. You’re completely screwed,’ Pennebaker said. ‘You have to understand: you can’t beat these things. They are stronger than you are. They are faster. Christ, they’ve been bred to fight for longer, to stay awake for ninety-six hours at a time—four days—so if they don’t kill you straight away, they’ll just wait you out and get you later, like they did with the last few regular Marines. Add to that, their technological advantages—Signet-5 radio-locaters, surgically-implanted digital headsets—and your headstones are practically engraved. These things are the evolution of the modern soldier, Captain, and they’re so damned good, even their makers couldn’t control them.’

  Mother shook her head. ‘How do you geniuses manage to keep doing things like this—?’

  Without warning, a voice exploded in Schofield’s earpiece: Astro’s voice.

  ‘Oh God no, we missed them! Shit! Captain! Duck!’

  Standing with his back to the main hangar, Schofield didn’t turn to verify Astro’s warning.

  He just obeyed, trusting his man, and dived to the floor—a bare instant before a black man-sized creature came swooping in over his head and slammed to the floor right where he’d been standing.

  Had Schofield remained standing for even a nanosecond longer, the K-Bar knife in the creature’s hand would have slashed his throat.

  The creature now stood before him and for the briefest of moments Schofield got a look at it.

  It was indeed an ape, perhaps five-and-a-half feet tall, with straggly black hair. But this was no ordinary jungle gorilla. It wore a lightweight helmet, from the front of which hung an orange visor that covered the animal’s eyes. On the helmet’s rear were some stubby antennas. Kevlar body armour covered its chest and shoulders. Wrist guards protected its arms. And in a holster on its back was a modified M-4.