‘But the tunnels on Hell Island had one extra purpose. They had a feature not seen anywhere else in the Pacific war: a flooding valve system.’
‘What was that?’
‘It was the ultimate suicide ploy. If the island was taken, the last remaining Japanese officers were to retreat to the lowest underground ammunition chamber—presumably followed by the American forces. From that chamber, the Japanese could seal off the entire tunnel system and then open two huge ocean gates—floodgates built into the walls of the system that could let the ocean in. The system would flood, killing both the Japanese and all the Americans now trapped inside. Kind of like a final “Screw you” to the victorious American force.’
‘Did the Japs use those gates in ‘43?’ Sanchez asked.
‘They did. But a small team of special-mission Marines braved the rising waters and using primitive breathing apparatus managed to close the ocean gates, saving five hundred Marines.’
‘How do you know this?’ Bigfoot asked.
Schofield smiled weakly. ‘My grandfather was a member of that special team. His name was Lieutenant Michael Schofield. He led the team that held back the ocean.’
* *
Schofield leaned back, staring at the map.
‘The ammunition chambers ...’ he said. ‘If they’re like other World War II-era chambers, they’re big, hall-sized caverns. If we could lure the apes into one of them, we could seal them all inside and—hmmm ...’
‘What about finding the Buck and whoever else is behind this?’ Sanchez said.
‘Too risky. They could be anywhere on the island. They are also currently trying to kill us. No. We’ve been on the back foot all day. It’s time we got proactive, it’s time we set the agenda. And the way I see it, if we can pull this off,’ Schofield said, ‘maybe they’ll find us. So what do you say, folks. Want to become gorilla bait?’
* * * *
XV
At exactly six p.m., the five Marines exited the Nimitz via the submarine docking door, swam over to the nearby shore and for the first time that day, set foot on Hell Island. The Nimitz loomed above them in the darkness, a dark shadow against the evening sky.
Schofield and his team quickly found an entrance to the underground tunnel system—a sixty-year-old cracked concrete archway that stank of decay, dust and the fearful sweat of soldiers long gone.
Inky darkness loomed beyond the old concrete arch.
Before they entered the tunnel network, Schofield stopped them.
‘Okay, hold here for a moment. There’s only one way this can work, and that’s if they’re right behind us.’
He reached for his throat-mike and pressed ‘Transmit’, opening up his regular radio channel.
‘But they’ll know where we are ...’ Astro said, alarmed.
‘That’s the whole point, kiddo,’ Mother said.
Schofield keyed his radio, put on a worried voice: ‘Delta Leader, come in! Flash ... Flash Gordon! You still alive out there? This is Scarecrow. Please respond!’
He received no reply from the Delta team.
But he did get another kind of response.
A terrifying howl echoed out from the flight deck of the Nimitz.
His transmission had been detected.
The gorillas were coming.
* *
And they didn’t take long getting there.
They swarmed off the Nimitz, an army of fast-moving shadows.
Zeroing in on Schofield’s radio signal, the three hundred apes converged on the tunnel entrance, howling and roaring.
Schofield’s team charged into the tunnel system, pursued by the monsters. It was scary enough moving through the dank concrete passageways— but doing it with an army of deadly creatures on your tail was even worse.
‘This way,’ Schofield said, referring to his map.
He was heading for the two massive gun emplacements of Hell Island. The two big guns— twelve-inch behemoths—were positioned on a pair of cliffs pointing east and south, designed to ward off any approaching fleet.
Actually, that wasn’t entirely correct: he was heading for the ammunition chambers buried underneath and in between the gun emplacements.
Through the tunnels they ran.
The gorillas caught up, firing and roaring. Schofield’s team fired behind themselves as they ran, picking off the apes, never slowing down. To slow down was to die.
Then abruptly they came to a freight elevator.
‘This is it. We’re beneath the first gun emplacement,’ Schofield said. ‘This elevator was used to feed ammunition to the guns from the chambers down below.’
Like the concrete world around it, the elevator was old and clunky, rusted beyond repair. It didn’t work, but that didn’t matter.
‘Quickly, down,’ Schofield ordered.
One after the other, they swept down a rusty ladder that ran down the elevator shaft.
Moving last of all, Mother grabbed the ladder just as an ape came leaping out of the darkness, grabbing her gun-hand.
She pivoted on the ladder and hurled the gorilla free—allowing it to take her gun, but flinging it out into the elevator shaft. The gorilla sailed down the shaft, disappearing into blackness, its shriek ending with a dull thud somewhere down there.
‘Hurry up, people!’ Mother called downward.
They hustled down the ladder.
On the way, Schofield found a huge iron door set into an alcove. Its Japanese markings had been painted over with English: ORDNANCE CHAMBER ONE.
Unfortunately, access to the door itself was obstructed by a cluster of heavy crates and boxes. They’d never get to it.
Down another level and they came to the bottom of the elevator shaft. Here Schofield found a second huge iron door marked ORDNANCE CHAMBER TWO. Not only was it free of obstructing crates, it was unlocked. Also here was a large circular pressure door that looked like the entry to a giant safe. It was easily ten feet in diameter.
Schofield ignored this circular door, pushed open the heavy iron door to the ordnance chamber and pulled a glowstick from his belt.
Beside him, Sanchez extracted a flare gun and raised it.
‘No,’ Schofield said sharply. ‘Not here.’
He cracked the glowstick—illuminating the room around them with its haunting amber glow—and suddenly Sanchez saw the wisdom of Schofield’s words.
The room around them was enormous, high-ceilinged and concrete-walled, with floorspace roughly the size of a basketball court. A network of overhead rails ran along its ceiling, dangling chains and hooks. An identical door lay on the far side, leading to a second elevator shaft that fed the other gun emplacement.
And piled up in its centre, like an artificial mountain sixty feet tall, was a pyramid-shaped stack of wooden crates. Each crate was marked in either Japanese or English with DANGER: EXPLOSIVES OR DANGER: FLAMMABLE, NO NAKED FLAMES.
In fact, Schofield couldn’t recall seeing the word ‘danger’ so many times in the one place.
‘This is what we wanted,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Come on.’
His team hustled inside.
* * * *
XVI
The apes arrived at the second ammunition chamber a minute later.
The first few must have been recon troops— for the first time that day they were cautious, checking things out, as if suspecting a trap.
They saw Schofield and Mother clambering up the mountain of wooden crates, heading for a catwalk near the ceiling—presumably to join the others up there, although they couldn’t be seen. The recon gorillas ducked back outside, to report back to the others.
Thirty seconds later, the onslaught came.
* *
It was spectacular in its ferocity.
The ape army thundered into the ammo chamber in full assault mode.
Screaming and shrieking, moving fast and spreading out, they stormed the subterranean hall—not firing. The scouts had informed the others of the flammable contents of the hall. They?
??d have to do this without guns.
The ape army leapt onto the mountain of crates, coming after Schofield and Mother with a vengeance, coming to finish them off.
Schofield and Mother stayed at the peak of the crate mountain, each holding two MP-7 submachine guns and firing them with precision, aiming carefully to avoid hitting the ordnance all around them, taking down apes left, right and centre.
Gunfire clattering.
Apes screaming and falling.
Muzzle flashes.
Two against an army.
And the apes just kept coming, live ones just clambering over the dead ones, scaling the artificial mountain. For every rank of gorillas that Schofield and Mother mowed down, another two ranks stepped forward.
Soon the mountain of crates was crawling with hairy black shapes, all scrambling in a fury for the two defiant Marines at the summit.
‘Scarecrow ... !’ Mother called.
‘Not yet! We have to wait till they’re all inside…!’
Then the last apes entered the great underground room, and Schofield called, ‘Now!’
As he yelled, the first gorillas reached the summit and clutched at his boots—only to be completely surprised when Schofield and Mother suddenly discarded their guns and leapt upward, grabbing a pair of chains hanging from the ceiling-mounted rail network and using them to swing across the length of the chamber, high above the army of apes swarming over the crate-mountain.
Schofield and Mother hit the western wall of the hall and unclipped clasps on their chains— causing the chains to unreel from the ceiling, lowering the two of them to the floor of the room right in front of the doorway leading back to the elevator shaft.
‘Marines! Now!’
It was then that the other three members of Schofield’s unit revealed themselves—from behind some crates near the entrance to the ammunition chamber. They all stepped back out through the heavy entry door, and raised their guns to fire back in through the gap.
And suddenly the trap became clear.
The entire guerrilla army was now inside the one enclosed space, swarming all over the most combustible mountain in history.
And with Schofield and Mother now down and safe, Bigfoot, Astro and Sanchez aimed their guns at the base of the mountain of crates.
‘Fire!’ Schofield commanded.
They squeezed their triggers.
* *
But then, from completely out of nowhere, a voice called: ‘Captain Schofield! Don’t!’
* * * *
XVII
Schofield snapped up. ‘Marines! Hold that order! Do not fire!’
The voice—it was a man’s voice—was desperate and pleading. It echoed out from ancient loudspeakers positioned around the great concrete room and inside the elevator shaft.
By this time the apes had started descending the mountain of crates, coming back down after Schofield and Mother, but then the voice addressed them:
‘Troops! Desist and stand down!’
Immediately, the apes stopped where they stood, sitting down on their haunches in total and absolute obedience.
What had moments before been a frenzied blood-hungry army of apes was now a perfectly-behaved crowd of three hundred silent mountain gorillas.
And then suddenly people appeared behind Schofield’s team, moving slowly and calmly, stepping down from the ladder in the elevator shaft: seven men in lab-coats, one officer in uniform, and covering them, a team of Delta commandos: the same ten-man team led by Hugh ‘Flash’ Gordon that had parachuted in with Schofield’s unit earlier that day.
Among the scientists in the lab-coats, Schofield recognised Zak Pennebaker, the ‘desperate’ scientist he’d met earlier.
He also recognised the officer in uniform, which happened to be the khaki day uniform of the United States Marine Corps. He was Captain William ‘Buccaneer’ Broyles, aka the Buck.
The leader of the lab-coated crowd stepped forward. He was an older man, with a mane of flowing white hair, an aged crinkled face, and dazzling blue eyes. He oozed authority.
‘Captain Schofield,’ he said in a deep voice. ‘Thank you for your quick response to my plea. My name is Dr Malcolm Knox, scientific consultant to the President, head of the Special Warfare Division at DARPA and overall commander of Project Stormtrooper.’
Knox walked out among the apes—they continued to sit obediently, although they did rock from side to side, fidgeting impatiently. But they did not attack him. Schofield noticed a silver disc on Knox’s ID badge—it was exactly the same as the one Pennebaker had been wearing earlier and, Schofield saw, was still wearing now.
Standing with the apes at his back, Knox turned to Schofield and his dirty, blood-covered team.
‘Congratulations. You have won this mission, Captain Schofield,’ he said.
Schofield said nothing.
‘I said, you won,’ Knox said. ‘I commend you on an incredible effort. Indeed, yours was the only team to survive.’
Still Schofield remained silent.
Knox stammered. ‘You really, er, should all be proud—’
‘This was a goddamned test,’ Schofield said in a low voice, his tone deadly.
‘Yes…yes, it was,’ Knox said, slightly unnerved. ‘The final test of a new technology—’
Schofield said, ‘You pitted your new army against three companies of Marines, and you beat them. But then the higher-ups said you had to beat Special Forces, didn’t they?’
Knox nodded. ‘This is correct.’
‘So you had us parachuted in here, with the SEALs and the Airborne. You used us as live bait. You used us as human guinea pigs for a test—’
‘This gorilla force could save thousands of American lives in future conflicts,’ Knox said. ‘You, Captain Schofield, are sworn to defend the American people and your fellow soldiers. You were doing exactly that, only in an indirect way.’
‘In an indirect way ...’ Schofield growled. ‘I’ve lost five good men here today, Dr Knox. Not to mention the other Marines, SEALs and Airbornes who also died here in your little experiment. These men had families. They were prepared to die for their country fighting its enemies, not its latest fucking weapon.’
‘Sometimes a few must be lost for the greater good, Captain,’ Knox said. ‘This is bigger than you. This is the future of warfare for our country.’
‘But your apes lost in the end. We had them in the cross-hairs and were about to fire the kill-shot.’
‘Yes, you did. You most certainly did,’ Knox said. ‘Your participation in this exercise was requested for precisely that reason: your adaptability and unpredictability. The apes needed such an adversary.
‘As it stands, however, the gorillas beat everybody but you, and your victory, it must be said, was based in large part on a few longshots, in particular a level of knowledge that 99 per cent of our enemies simply will not have: submarine docking doors in carriers and an unusually high level of knowledge of World War II Japanese tunnel systems. No, based on the results of this test, Project Stormtrooper will most certainly go live, and it will save many lives over the years to come.’
Knox started walking around the hall, checking the apes. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, we have a lot of follow-up to do and a whole lot of paperwork. An extraction plane has been called from Okinawa to come and take you home. It should be here in a few hours.’
‘Paperwork ...’ Schofield said. ‘Men have died and you have paperwork. You guys are something else. Hey, hold it. I have another question.’
Knox stopped.
Schofield nodded at Flash Gordon and the Delta team arrayed around him. ‘Why were they brought here at all, if they just stayed with you?’
Knox grinned. ‘They were brought in for my DARPA team’s protection. Just in case you did happen to survive and got angry with us.’
Knox resumed his casual appraisal of his apes.
Schofield said, ‘I should have offed your army when I had the chance.’
‘No, you sho
uldn’t have, Captain. What you should do is walk away and be proud of yourself. You have done future generations of American farmboys a great service. They will not need to die on the front lines ever again. Also, be proud that my apes defeated every other force they faced, but you beat them. Go home.’
‘This is not right. It shouldn’t be done this way,’ Schofield said.
‘What you think, Captain, is unimportant and irrelevant. You are not paid to think about such weighty issues. Better brains than yours have pondered these issues. You are paid to fight and to die, and you have successfully done half of that today. Farewell, Captain,’ Knox waved Schofield away. ‘Specialist Gordon and Captain Broyles will escort you and your men out.’
As he said this, Knox threw Flash Gordon and the Buck a look—unseen by Schofield—that said: they are not to leave this place alive.
Gordon nodded. So did the Buck.
The Delta team swooped in on Schofield’s five men, surrounding them perhaps a little more tightly than they needed to. Gordon indicated the door. ‘Captain ... if you will.’
Schofield entered the elevator shaft, followed by his team.
* * * *
XVIII
Throughout all this, the apes sat silently, swaying slightly from side to side, as if their lust for blood was being suppressed only by the chips in their heads.
Schofield stepped out into the elevator shaft, stood at its base, where he saw the huge circular safe-like door set into the wall. He headed for the ladder—
—when suddenly his Delta escorts released the safeties on their guns and aimed them at him and his Marines.
‘Hold it right there, Scarecrow,’ Gordon said.
‘Oh, you cocksuckers…’ Mother said.
‘Buck?’ Bigfoot asked in surprise.
‘Buck, how can you do this?’ Sanchez said, too, turning to his former commander.