Slither - Edward Lee [5]
"Debark! Heads down, single file!" barked the warrant officer.
Nora was first off, and so slight in frame that the rotor wind almost knocked her down. They all jogged away from the riotous noise.
"So this is Pritchard's Key," Annabelle remarked.
"It's a lot bigger than it looks," Trent added. "Ten square miles, and dense. I'll bet there are parts of it that no one's ever set foot on."
"But I still don't understand what the island has to do with the military."
"Some kind of radar station, I think," Nora said. She had to shield her eyes from the bar of sunlight flashing like a guillotine blade. Palm trees clotted with the greenest underbrush seemed to explode everywhere she looked.
"No, a missile station," Loren corrected. "The locals over in Clearwater used to call it Nike Island."
Annabelle's brow creased. "What do sneakers have to do with missiles?"
Nora laughed out loud.
"The Nike Missile Program wrapped up in the mideighties," Trent explained. "It was an army tactical airdefense missile that was first deployed in NATO countries in the late fifties, designed to shoot down enemy aircraft. As the missile became obsolete we started pulling them out of Europe and planting them in the continental United States. Our biggest fear back then was Leonid Brezhnev and his new Backfire Bomber. The Nike was no longer the fastest antifighter missile, but it still had great range against potential bomber threats. The army put fifteen Nikes right here on this island, to protect MacDill Air Force Base and the army's munition depot in Jacksonville. Fortunately, the dreaded Backfire turned out to be the biggest claptrap hunk of junk the Soviet Union ever put in the air, and now there's not even a Soviet Union anymore so we don't need them anyway."
Annabelle seemed alarmed. "You mean there are nuclear missiles on this island?"
"No, no, the Nikes here were never armed with nuclear payloads. The army took them all out of here by 'eighty-five."
The blonde sighed in relief. "Oh, wow, for a minute I thought you were going to tell us that there were radioactive things on the island."
Nora couldn't have been less interested, but by accident she noticed a strange pause in Trent's monologue, as if he were taken aback. "Nope. The Nike was strictly defensive, and we don't need them now. Now we've got the Patriots that take care of the whole ball of wax."
"Not much of a beach," Loren commented of the island's shoreline. Black boulders the size of compact cars seemed to ring the key. "Just a bunch of rocks."
"Yeah, big rocks," Annabelle said.
Almost as big as the ones in your head, Nora thought.
Annabelle hitched at her aqua-blue bikini top. "I was hoping to get a tan in between shoots, but how can I? There's no beach!"
Nora shook her head. Oh no! Dollface can't get a tan! Poor, poor struggling Dollface!
"There's a strip of beach on the other side," Trent told them. "It's blocked up by more rocks but there's enough room to lie out. But before we do that-a word to the wise." He passed everyone an OD-green aerosol can as well as a neon-green rubberized repellent bracelet. "This island is Bug City. Let's spray ourselves with repellent every chance we get. And put on your bracelet. They don't smell that great but they work."
"Oh, great. Mosquitoes, you mean?" Annabelle looked like she had a mouthful of lemon juice as she sprayed her arms and legs and put the bracelet on her wrist.
"The mosquitoes aren't that bad," Trent went on, "but there are ticks and chiggers."
"Even worse. I want to get a tan, not Lyme disease."
You're so pompous and annoying, Nora thought, the ticks won't come near you. When she was done spraying herself off and donning her own bracelet, she asked, "We're only a couple of miles off the coast. Why go to the expense of the helicopter trip when we could've taken a quick boat ride?"
Trent pointed to the boulders. "Those rocks encircle the island, it's very hard to get a boat ashore, and the current's so quick if you anchor out there and swim in, you might lose your boat. Sure, every now and then some kids get on,