Hell Island - Matthew Reilly [24]
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 eleva-tor 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