Hell Island - Matthew Reilly [3]
And so a mystery.
Equally suspicious to Schofield, however, was the presence of the other special operations units on this mission: the 82nd, the SEALs and Delta.
This was exceedingly odd. You never mixed and matched special ops units. They all had different specialties, different approaches to mission situations, and could easily trip over each other. In short, it just wasn’t done.
You added all that up, Schofield thought, and this smelled suspiciously like an exercise.
Except for one thing.
They were all carrying live ammunition.
Hurtling toward the world, freefalling at terminal velocity, bursting out of the cloudband . . .
. . . to behold the Pacific Ocean stretching away in every direction, the only imperfection in its surface: the small dot of land that was Hell Island.
A gigantic rectangular grey object lay at its western end, the Nimitz. Not far from the carrier, the island featured some big gun emplacements facing south and east, while at the north-eastern tip there was a hill that looked like a mini-volcano.
A voice came through Schofield’s earpiece. ‘All team leaders, this is Delta Six. We’re going for the eastern end of the island and we’ll work our way back to the boat. Your DZ is the flight deck: Airborne, the bow; SEALs, aft; Marines, mid-section.’
Just like we were told in the briefing, Schofield thought.
This was typical of Delta. They were born show-ponies. Great soldiers, sure, but glory-seekers all. No matter who they were working with—even today, alongside three of the best special forces units in the world—they always assumed they were in charge.
‘Roger that, Delta leader,’ came the SEAL leader’s voice.
‘Copy, Delta Six,’ came the Airborne response.
Schofield didn’t reply.
The Delta leader said, ‘Marine Six? Scarecrow? You copy?’
Schofield sighed. ‘I was at the mission briefing, too, Delta Six. And last I noticed, I don’t have any short-term memory problems. I know the mission plan.’
‘Cut the attitude, Scarecrow,’ the Delta leader said. His name was Hugh Gordon, so naturally his call-sign was ‘Flash’. ‘We’re all on the same team here.’
‘What? Your team?’ Schofield said. ‘How about this: how about you don’t break radio silence until you’ve got something important to say. Scarecrow, out.’
It was more important than that. Even a frequency-hopping encrypted radio signal could be caught these days, so if you transmitted, you had to assume someone was listening.
Worse, the new French-made Signet-5 radio-wave decoder—sold by the French to Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria and other fine upstanding global citizens—was specifically designed to seek out and locate the American AN/PRC-119 tactical radio when it was broadcasting, the very radio their four teams were using today. No-one had yet thought to ask the French why they had built a locater whose only use was to pinpoint American tactical radios.
Schofield switched to his team’s private channel. ‘Marines. Switch off your tac radios. Listening mode only. Go to short-wave UHF if you want to talk to me.’
A few of his Marines hesitated before obeying, but obey they did. They flicked off their radios.
The four clusters of parachutists plummeted through the storm toward the world, zeroing in on the Nimitz, until a thousand feet above it, they yanked on their ripcords and their chutes opened.
Their superfast falls were abruptly arrested and they now floated in toward the carrier. The Delta team landed on the island itself, while the other three teams touched down lightly and gracefully on the flight deck of the supercarrier right in their assigned positions—fore, mid and aft—guns up.
They had just arrived in Hell.
Rain hammered down on the flight deck.
Schofield’s team landed one after the other, unclipping their chutes before the great mushroom-shaped canopies had even hit the ground. The chutes were whipped away by the wind, leaving the ten Marines standing in the slashing rain on the flight deck,