Hell Island - Matthew Reilly [13]
She nailed six more, then dropped to her belly . . . at which point Astro hurdled her, guns blazing.
Then Astro ducked and Bigfoot hurdled him, and thus the four of them took down the small gorilla force in a textbook turnaround manoeuvre, and suddenly they were alone in the vast space.
Not for long.
The larger gorilla force had started banging on the door in the dividing wall. Then, with a loud mechanical groaning, a large vehicle-access door down on the floor began to roll upwards, opening . . .
‘Scarecrow! What do we do!’ Mother yelled. ‘I’ve never been in this kind of situation before!’
‘We stay alive, any way we can! There!’
He pointed at the aft-most elevator on the starboard side of the hangar. It was a giant thing, a huge hydraulic open-air platform that hung off the side of the carrier, designed to lift entire planes from the hangar deck up to the flight deck.
Today, a gangway branched off the outer edge of the massive elevator, stretching down to the dock of Hell Island.
‘The gangway!’ Schofield called. ‘Go!’
The six-man Marine team reached a long ladder that connected the high catwalk to the floor of the hangar, slid down it one after the other, Schofield leading the way.
The main gorilla force was now flooding into the aft hangar bay like bats out of hell. Their numbers were incredible, they literally poured through the access door from the forward hangar, then clambered over the muddy fake battlefield, climbing up and over the trenches and barbed wire, guns firing, teeth bared.
It was, quite simply, the most fearsome assault force Schofield had ever seen.
Armed, enraged, and completely lacking the fear of death—any human force that saw these things bearing down on it would in all likelihood just go to water.
Schofield was almost at the exterior elevator, only fifty yards away, when something completely unexpected happened.
The elevator began to rise.
‘Oh no . . . no . . .’
The great platform lifted fast, taking the gangway with it. As the elevator rose up and out of sight, heading for the flight deck, the gangway leading to dry land dropped down into the water with an ungainly splash.
‘They—,’ Bigfoot gasped. ‘Son of a bitch . . .’
‘Next plan?’ Sanchez said.
‘Stay moving.’ Schofield scanned the area for another escape. ‘Always stay moving. While you’re moving, you’re still in the game. If you stop, you’re dead. Never stop.’
As he spoke, he saw two large transport trucks parked over by the wall. ‘Those trucks! Get in and make for the flight deck!’
The squad split up, racing for the two trucks. They were five-ton troop transports, with high canvas awnings covering their rear trays.
Schofield and Bigfoot dived into the cab of one truck; Mother, Astro, Hulk and Sanchez jumped into the other one.
As Schofield slid into the driver’s seat, he spun to check on the scientist, Pennebaker, to see if he was keeping up—
—only to see Zak Pennebaker skulking into a side door of the hangar thirty yards away, on his own, preferring, it seemed, to handle this disaster by himself. He disappeared through the door.
‘What the—?’ Schofield frowned. But he didn’t have time to ponder the issue. The apes had cleared the battlefield and were now advancing across the open deck like the army of darkness.
Schofield gunned the engine.
*
The two trucks roared to life, shot off the mark, heading for the upward-spiralling vehicle ramp that led to the flight deck—a journey that involved briefly driving back toward the ape army and racing the oncoming army to the ramp’s wide doorway roughly halfway between the two forces.
It was a dead-heat. Mother’s truck reached the ramp’s doorway just as the ape force did.
The first gorillas launched themselves at her truck, clutching onto any handhold they could find, just as it sped inside the rampway. Eight of them got a grip on it.
It was worse for Schofield.
Driving behind Mother, he got to the ramp entrance two seconds too late. The ape army swarmed across the doorway,