Hell Island - Matthew Reilly [5]
Up a series of tight ladders that formed the spine of the command tower, moving quickly. Blood on the rungs.
Still no bodies.
Schofield’s team came to the bridge, the middle of three glass-enclosed lookout levels on the tower.
They were granted a superb view of the flight deck outside . . . albeit through cracked and smashed wraparound windows.
Nearly every window overlooking the flight deck had been destroyed. Blood dripped off what glass remained. Thousands of spent rounds littered the floor. Also, a few guns lay about: mainly M-16s, plus a few M-4 Colt Commandos, the short-barrelled version of the M-16 used by special forces teams worldwide.
Mother led a sub-team upstairs, to the upper-most bridge: the flight control bridge. She returned a few minutes later.
‘Same deal,’ she reported ‘Bucketloads of blood, no bodies. All windows smashed, and an armoury’s worth of spent ammo left on the floor. A hell of a firefight took place here, Scarecrow.’
‘A firefight that was cleaned up afterward,’ Schofield said.
Just then, something caught his eye: one of the abandoned rifles on the floor, one of the M-4s.
He picked it up, examined it.
From a distance it looked like a regular M-4, but it wasn’t. It had been modified slightly.
The gun’s trigger-guard was different: it had been elongated, as if to accommodate a longer index finger that wrapped itself around the gun’s trigger.
‘What the hell is that?’ Hulk said, seeing it. ‘Some kind of super gun?’
‘Scarecrow,’ Mother said, coming over. ‘Most of these blood splatters are the result of bullet impacts. But some aren’t. They’re . . . well . . . thicker. More like arterial flow. As if some of the dead had entire limbs cut off.’
Schofield’s earpiece squawked.
‘All units, this is Gator. My SEAL team has just arrived at the main hangar deck and holy shit, people, have we got something to show you. We aren’t the first force to have got here. And the guys before us didn’t fare well at all. I have a visual on at least two hundred pairs of hands all stacked up in a neat pile down here.’
Sanchez whispered, ‘Did he just say—?’
Gator anticipated this. ‘Yes, you heard me right. Hands. Human hands. Cut off and stacked in a great big heap. What in God’s name have we walked into here?’
While the rest of their team listened in horror to Gator’s gruesome report, Schofield and Mother strode into the command centre, the inner section of the bridge. It too was largely wrecked, but not totally.
‘Mother, do a power-grid check, all grids, all levels, even externals. I’m gonna look for ATOs.’
Mother sat down at an undamaged console while Schofield went to the Captain’s desk and attached some C-2 low-expansion plastic explosive to the commanding officer’s safe.
A muffled boom later and he had the Nimitz’s last fourteen ATOs—Air Tasking Orders, the ship’s daily orders received from Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor.
It was mainly routine stuff as the Nimitz hop-scotched her way back from the Indian Ocean to Hawaii, dropping in at Singapore and the Philippines on the way . . .
Until ten days ago . . .
. . . when the Nimitz was ordered to divert to the Japanese island of Okinawa and pick up three companies of US Marines there, a force of about 600 men.
She was to ferry the Marines—not crack Recon troops, but rather just regular men—across the northern Pacific and drop them off at a set of co-ordinates that Schofield knew to be Hell Island.
After unloading the Marines, the ship was then instructed to:
PICK UP DARPA SCIENCE TEAM FROM LOCATION:
KNOX, MALCOLM C. RYAN, HARPER R.
PENNEBAKER, ZACHARY B. HOGAN, SHANE M.
JOHNSON, SIMON W. LIEBMANN, BEN C.
HENDRICKS, JAMES F.
PERSONNEL ARE ALL SECURITY-CLEARED TO ‘TOP SECRET’. THEY WILL HAVE CARGO WHICH IS NOT TO BE SEEN BY CREW OF NIMITZ.
So. The Nimitz had been sent here to drop off a sizeable force of Marines and also pick up some scientists who had been at work here.
Again, it bore all the hallmarks of an exercise—Marines being unloaded on a secret island