Another burst of gunfire sizzled over Raleigh’s head.
His mind kicked into overdrive: Twelve armed soldiers are trying to kill you. Why? Doesn’t matter. Figure that out later. Right now, you have to get off this viewing platform.
Raleigh turned, saw the doorway at the rear of the viewing platform.
No.
Too easy. They’d be expecting him to panic and bolt that way.
He’d have to go the other way: over the concrete balcony’s railing and down into the cave
junction. But to do that, he’d need a distraction…
The master light lever caught his eye.
Raleigh shut his eyes and jammed it upwards. The lights in the cavern blazed to life.
The Night Vision-wearing D-boys were momentarily blinded. They reeled, yanked off their goggles, and as they did so, Raleigh switched the light switch off again.
More darkness, but he’d got the moment he needed.
And with that, Mitch Raleigh leapt over the balcony and dropped onto the killing floor of the cave junction.
TUNNEL RUNNING
Into the nearest tunnel. World all green. Walls flashing by on either side. Heart pounding inside his head…
…and heavy footfalls thundering down the tunnel behind him, bullets pinging off the walls.
‘Run, run, run, Book-Boy!’
‘We’s coming to getcha, you Australian pansy!’
Raleigh rushed into the tunnel maze—left, right, left, right—breathless.
‘Fire Team One!’ Daniels’ voice called out. ‘Left turn ahead! Fan out in formation Echelon Left!’
Echelon Left.
As he ran, Raleigh remembered his research. Echelon fire formations were pretty basic combat formations. Four men would form together in a diagonal line to cover a threat coming from the left.
Excellent for close-quarters tunnel fighting.
Raleigh found a heavy wooden box on the floor. Waited around a corner. A second later, a Delta man poked his head around the concrete corner and caught the box square in the face.
Raleigh grabbed his gun, just as the Delta net closed and three more D-boys entered his tunnel from the other end.
Time slowed.
Raleigh somersauts over the fallen man as the gunfire begins—lifts him up as a shield—real bullets smacking into flesh—but Raleigh was safe.
Shouts. Returning fire. Running. Into another tunnel.
Have to get out of this maze. Have to get to the outside world and get help. And why the hell am I still alive. These guys should have nailed me by now…
Now armed, Raleigh worked his way back to the cave junction, arrived there just as two D-boys did.
Quick draw.
And Raleight cut them down with a short burst of the MP-5. The men hit the ground, groaning.
Nine D-boys left now.
Raleigh saw the balcony—remembered the wall-phone up there.
The outside world…
Up the wall he climbed, moving like a kid on a jungle gym, hurling himself over the balcony’s stone railing and landing with a desperate, clumsy thump.
He grabbed the wall-phone, wound it up.
Dial tone.
‘Come on…’ he urged.
Clickety-click:
‘ Hello? Guardhouse. ’
‘Yes, this is Mitch Raleigh. I’m down in the cave system being fired upon with live ammunition by some of your Delta boys!’
‘ Who is this? ’ the voice at the other end demanded.
‘I’m a writer. One of your Delta guys, Captain Dwight Daniels, invited me to visit Bragg for research—’
‘ Listen to me, whoever you are. There is no Captain Daniels in the Delta Detachment here at Bragg. Now, you are calling from a restricted area. I’m sending the MPs down there. ’
Click.
Tone.
But Raleigh was already frozen.
‘ There is no Captain Daniels in the Delta Detachment here at Bragg…’
Daniels wasn’t Delta.
But if Daniels wasn’t Delta, what was he then?
And then it hit Raleigh.
Echelon Left…
Real D-boys would never use Echelon Left. They were too good to use procedures as basic as Echelon formations. No, Echelon formations were more suited to…
…Army Ranger groups.
Junior Army Ranger groups.
Infantry soldiers learning the basics of ground warfare.
This wasn’t a group of Delta men at all.
This was a group of regular Army Rangers—young Army Rangers— hardcore Rangers who mustn’t have been pleased at Raleigh’s negative depiction of their branch of the military in his book.
And so they had decided to teach him a lesson.
Bring him to Bragg…on a bus under a false name…ensuring that he didn’t tell anybody he was coming. Hell, so far as Raleigh’s publisher knew, right now he was relaxing in D.C. So if he vanished at Bragg, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, he had just disappeared in Washington, D.C.
Right, Raleigh thought. Time to blow this joint.
RACE FOR THE SURFACE
The young Ranger team was rattled.
Two of their men were shot plus the one he had used as a human shield.
Shouts rang out from the tunnels: ‘Where’d he go!’—‘Damn it!’—‘Find that cocksucker!’
When he saw them go back into the cave system, looking for him, Raleigh made a break for the surface.
Two men were guarding the exit.
Raleigh faked a scream and dropped to the dusty ground, just within sight of the two guards.
The two guards came to investigate. Two shots to their chests. Both men went down.
Raleigh bolted for the entryway...
RALEIGH DRIVING
…and burst out into the cool night-time air.
He saw the Light Strike Vehicle parked nearby.
Vrroooom!
The LSV kicked up a spray of sand behind it as it roared its way through the sand dunes, heading back towards the Main Post with Raleigh at the wheel.
With a gigantic roar, the Black Hawk that had dropped the Rangers at the tunnel system came blasting over a sand dune, all guns blazing, raining hell down on Raleigh’s LSV.
The Light Strike Vehicle skidded. Bullets raked the sand. The LSV turned—as more gunfire pelted the road in front of it.
Two more Light Strike Vehicles came bursting forth from the vicinity of the tunnel system—the Rangers in hot pursuit.
And then, with a whoosh, Raleigh skipped out of the sandy terrain and rushed onto bitumen.
He was at the riverside road, not far to go now.
He saw the barracks across the river, saw the men in straw cowboy hats now standing up on their porches, watching this unexpected pursuit curiously.
The Black Hawk swooped in low, loosed another burst.
The two Ranger LSVs behind Raleigh’s car pulled in close to his tailbar.
It was then that Raleigh realised.
He wasn’t going to make it back to Bragg.
Then you’d better do something else, stupid! A voice yelled inside his head.
Right…
And so, as he whipped alongside the wide flat river, his pursuers now almost beside him, Raleigh did what no-one expected him to do.
He swung his speeding LSV left— towards the river.
The move took all the Rangers by surprise. The Black Hawk overshot his sharply-turning car. The pair of pursuing LSVs also reacted too late, shooting past Raleigh’s skidding mobile.
The Light Strike Vehicle straightened and hit the banks of the river at speed and took off…soaring into the air, flying high.
And then it smashed with a glorious explosion of water smack-bang in the middle of the river.
Although Raleigh had been bracing himself for the inertial fling, when it happened, the force of it still took him by surprise.
The car hit the water nose-first, kicking up its rear-end, turning the
LSV into a virtual catapult that flung Mitchell Raleigh a further fifteen yards into the river.
Raleigh landed with his own ugly splash—but at least now he was already halfway across the river.
He started swimming, saw the cowboy-hatted men at the barracks start running towards him.
Looked back: saw the Rangers on the opposite bank, drawing their guns, but not firing, realizing that it was too late.
Two cowboy-hatted men lifted a sogging and sagging Mitch Raleigh from the river.
‘Christ, a civilian,’ one of them said.
‘Who the hell are you?’ the other asked.
‘My name’— breath—‘is Mitchell Raleigh’— breath—‘I’m a’— breath—‘writer…’
The second cowboy looked out at the Ranger group on the other side of the river as he herded Raleigh towards the barracks.
He turned to his buddy. ‘Better give the MPs a call. Looks like some of the Ranger bunnies have been up to some naughty shit tonight.’
The cowboy draped Raleigh’s arm over his shoulder and helped him toward the barracks.
‘My name’s Rick Coltin,’ he said, ‘I’m a captain with Delta. Mitchell Raleigh, huh? The author, right? God, man, I’ve read your books—that Detachment-5 was a real kick-ass read. Although if you don’t mind my saying so, I reckon you have to brush up a little on your real-life warfare research.
You can read whatever books you like, but until you’ve been there, it just ain’t the same.’
________________
HELL ISLAND
_____________
PROLOGUE
THE LAST MAN STANDING
Terrified, wounded and now out of ammo, Lieutenant Rick ‘Razor’ Haynes staggered down the tight passageway, blood pouring from a gunshot wound to his left thigh, scratch-marks crisscrossing his face.
He panted as he moved, gasping for breath. He was the last one left, the last member of his entire Marine force still alive.
He could hear them behind him.
Grunting, growling.
Stalking him, hunting him down.
They knew they had him—knew he was out of ammunition, out of contact with base, and out of comrades-in-arms.
The passageway through which he was fleeing was long and straight, barely wide enough for his shoulders. It had grey steel walls studded with rivets—the kind you find on a military vessel, a warship.
Wincing in agony, Haynes arrived at a bulkhead doorway and fell clumsily through it, landing in a stateroom. He reached up and pulled the heavy steel door shut behind him.
The door closed and he spun the flywheel.
A second later, the great steel door shuddered violently, pounded from the other side.
His face covered in sweat, Haynes breathed deeply, glad for the brief reprieve.
He’d seen what they had done to his teammates, and been horrified.
No soldier deserved to die that way, or to have his body desecrated in such a manner. It was beyond ruthless what they’d done to his men.
That said, the way they had systematically overcome his force of six hundred United States Marines had been tactically brilliant.
At one point during his escape from the hangar deck, Haynes figured he’d end his own life before they caught him. Now, without any bullets, he couldn’t even do that.
A grunt disturbed him.
It had come from nearby. From the darkness on the other side of the stateroom.
Haynes snapped to look up—
—just as a shape came rushing out of the darkness, a dark hairy shape, man-sized, screaming a fierce high-pitched shriek, like the cry of a deranged chimpanzee.
Only this was no chimpanzee.
It slammed into Haynes, ramming him back against the door. His head hit the steel door hard, the blow stunning him but not knocking him out.
And as he slumped to the floor and saw the creature draw a glistening long-bladed K-Bar knife from its sheath, Haynes wished it had knocked him unconscious, because then he wouldn’t have to witness what it did to him next...
* * * *
The death-scream of Razor Haynes echoed out from the aircraft carrier.
It would not be heard by a single friendly soul.
For this carrier was a long way from anywhere, docked at an old World War II refuelling station in the middle of the Pacific, a station attached to a small island that had curiously ceased to appear on maps after the Americans had taken it by force from the Japanese in 1943.
Once known as Grant Island, it was a thousand kilometres south of the Bering Strait and five hundred from its nearest island neighbour. In the war it had seen fierce fighting as the Americans had wrested it—and its highly-prized airfield— from a suicidal Japanese garrison.
Because of the ferocity of the fighting and the heavy losses incurred there, Grant Island was given another name by the US Marines who’d fought there.
They called it Hell Island.
* * * *
FIRST ASSAULT
HELL ISLAND
1500 HOURS
1 AUSUST, 2005
* * * *
* * * *
AIRSPACE OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN
1500 HOURS
1 AUGUST, 2005
The vicious-looking aircraft shot across the sky at near supersonic speed.
It was a modified Hercules cargo plane, known as an MC-130 ‘Combat Talon’, the delivery vehicle of choice for US Special Forces units.
This Combat Talon stayed high, very high, it was as if it was trying to avoid being seen by radar systems down at sea level. This was unusual, because there was nothing down there—according to the maps, the nearest land in this part of the Pacific was an atoll 500 klicks to the east.
Then the rear loading ramp of the Combat Talon rumbled open and several dozen tiny figures issued out from it in rapid sequence, spreading out into the sky behind the soaring plane.
The forty-strong flock of paratroopers plummeted to earth, men in high-altitude jumpsuits —full-face breathing masks; streamlined black bodysuits. They angled their bodies downward as they fell, so that they flew head-first, their masks pointed into the onrushing wind, becoming human spears, freefalling with serious intent.
It was a classic HALO drop—high-altitude, low-opening. You jumped from 37,000 feet, fell fast and hard, and then stopped dangerously close to the ground, right at your drop zone.
Curiously, however, the forty elite troops falling to earth today fell in identifiable subgroups, ten men to a group, as if they were trying to remain somehow separate.
Indeed, they were separate teams.
Crack teams. The best of the best from every corner of the US armed forces.
One unit from the 82nd Airborne Division.
One SEAL team.
One Delta team, ever aloof and secretive.
And last of all, one team of Force Reconnaissance Marines.
* * * *
They shot into the cloud layer—a dense band of dark thunderclouds—freefell through the haze.
Then after nearly a full minute of flying, they burst out of the clouds and emerged in the midst of a full-scale five-alarm ocean storm: rain lashed their facemasks; dark clouds hung low over the heaving ocean; giant waves rolled and crashed.
And through the rain, their target came into view, a tiny island far below them, an island that did not appear on maps anymore, an island with an aircraft carrier parked alongside it.
Hell.
* * * *
Leading the Marine team was Captain Shane M. Schofield, call-sign ‘Scarecrow’.
Behind his HALO mask, Schofield had a rugged creased face, black hair and blue eyes. Slicing down across those eyes, however, were a pair of hideous vertical scars, one for each eye, wounds from a mission-gone-wrong and the source of his operational nickname. Once on the ground, he’d hide those eyes behind a pair of reflective wraparound anti-flash glasses.
Quiet, intense and when necessary deadly, Schofield had a unique reputation in th
e Marine Corps. He’d been involved in several missions that remained classified—but the Marine Corps (like any group of human beings) is filled with gossip and rumour. Someone always knew someone who was there, or who saw the medical report, or who cleaned up the aftermath.
The rumours about Schofield were many and varied, and sometimes simply too outrageous to be true.
One: he had been involved in a gigantic multi-force battle in Antarctica, a battle which, it was said, involved a bloody and brutal confrontation with two of America’s allies, France and Britain.
Two: he’d saved the President during an attempted military coup at a remote USAF base. It was said that during that misadventure, the Scarecrow—a former pilot—had flown an experimental space shuttle into low earth orbit, engaged an enemy shuttle, destroyed it, and then come back to earth to rescue the President.
Of course none of this could possibly be verified, and so it remained the stuff of legend; legends, however, that Schofield’s new unit were acutely aware of.
That said, there was one thing about Shane Schofield that they knew to be true: this was his first mission back after a long layover, four months of stress leave, in fact. On this occasion someone really had seen the medical report, and now all of his men on this mission knew about it.
They also knew the cause of his stress leave.
During his last mission out, Schofield had been taken to the very edge of his psychological endurance. Loved ones close to him had been captured ... and executed. It was even said in hushed whispers that at one point on that mission he had tried to take his own life.
Which was why the other members of his team today were slightly less-than-confident in their leader.
Was he up to this mission? Was he a time-bomb waiting to explode? Was he a basketcase who would lose it at the first sign of trouble?
They were about to find out.
* * * *