Hell Island - Matthew Reilly [9]
Accompanied by the rest of his team, Schofield then crossed the gangway-bridge, came to the observation platform at the top of the field tower.
Broken computers and torn printouts littered the platform. Blood was everywhere.
‘What the hell was this place?’ Hulk asked.
‘An observation post. From here, the big kahunas watched the exercises down on the hangar floor,’ Mother said.
‘But the exercises, it seems, went seriously wrong . . .’ Schofield said, examining a printout. Like most of the other material lying around, it was headed:
PROJECT STORMTROOPER
SECURITY CLASSIFICATION:
TOP SECRET-2X
DARPA/U.S. ARMY
‘Stormtrooper . . .’ he read aloud.
Movement out of the corner of his eye.
Schofield spun—just as an attacker came bursting out of a cabinet at the back of the observation platform.
Six guns swirled as one, locking onto the attacker. But not a single one fired—since the ‘attacker’ had fallen to his knees, sobbing.
He was a young man, about thirty, dressed in a lab-coat and wearing horn-rimmed glasses. A computer nerd, but dirty, dishevelled and terrified.
‘Don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot! Oh my God, I’m so glad you’re here! You have to help me! We lost control! They wouldn’t obey us anymore! And then they—’
‘Hold it, hold it,’ Schofield said, stepping forward. ‘Calm down. Start again. What’s your name?’
‘My n-name is . . . Pennebaker. Zak Pennebaker.’ He peered around fearfully.
Schofield saw that the name matched the one on the man’s pocket-mounted ID badge. The ID badge also featured clearance levels and a silver disc at its base—an odd addition to a nametag. Schofield had never seen one before. Radiation meter, perhaps?
‘I’m DARPA. High-end project. Please, you gotta get me outta here, off this boat, before they ome back.’
‘Not until you tell us what this project was.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Let me put it another way: you tell us about the project or we leave you here.’
Zak Pennebaker didn’t need three degrees to figure out that one. It came out in a blurting flurry.
‘It started out as a supersoldier project, special ops stuff involving “Go” drugs, amphetamines, biomechanics and brainchip grafting. All on human subjects. But the human subjects didn’t work out. The ape subjects, however, worked very, very well.’
‘Ape subjects?’ Mother said in disbelief.
‘Yes, apes. Gorillas. African mountain gorillas to be precise. They’re twice as strong as human beings and the grafting technology worked perfectly with them.’
‘Not quite perfectly,’ Hulk said, indicating the state of the observation platform.
‘Well, no, no, not in the end,’ Pennebaker mumbled. ‘But when the apes took so well to the tech, the project morphed from a special forces operation to a frontline troop replacement project.’
‘What do you mean?’ Schofield asked.
‘The ultimate frontline trooper—lethal, vicious, remorseless, yet totally obedient. And best of all, totally expendable. No more letters from a grateful nation to grieving parents. No more onelegged veterans protesting in DC. Hell, no more veterans full-stop—the government would save billions in entitlements alone. Imagine you’re a general, facing a frontal assault, it’s a lot easier to send a thousand purpose-bred apes to their deaths than fresh-faced farmboys from Idaho.
‘And that’s the best part, we bred the gorillas ourselves in labs, so we aren’t even thinning the natural population, committing some crime against nature. They are the first custom-made artificially-produced armed force in the history of mankind. You could send them into hostile territory and they’d never question the order, you could send them on complete suicide missions and they’d never complain.’
‘How the hell do you manage that?’ Hulk asked.
‘The grafting technology,’ Schofield answered.
Pennebaker seemed surprised that Schofield would know about this. ‘Yes. That’s correct.’
‘What’s grafting technology?’ Mother asked.
Schofield said, ‘You attach—or graft—a microchip to the brain of your subject. The chip is biomechanical, semi-organic, so it attaches to the brain and becomes part of it. Grafting technology