Hell Island - Matthew Reilly [8]
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.
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.