Hell Island (4 page)

Schofield thought about that.

“And another thing,” Mother said. “I fired up the ship’s internal spectrum analyzer. I’m picking up a weird radio signal being transmitted inside the
Nimitz.
”

“Why’s it weird?”

“Because it’s not a voice signal. It sounds, well, like a digital signal, a binary beep sequence. Fact, sounds like my old dial-up modem.”

Schofield frowned. A power drain going off the ship. Digital radio signals inside the ship. A secret DARPA presence. And a gruesome stack of severed hands down in the hangar deck.

This didn’t make sense at all.

“Mother,” he said, “you got a portable AXS on you?” An AXS was an AXS-9 radio spectrum analyzer, a portable unit that picked up radio transmissions, a bug detector.

“Sure have.”

“Jamming capabilities?”

“Multi-channel or single channel,” she said.

“Good,” Schofield said. “Tune it in to those beeps. Stay on them. And just be ready to jam them.”

Gator’s voice continued to come over his earpiece. The SEAL leader was describing the scene in the hangar bay:

“
. . .
looks like the entire hangar has been configured for an exercise of some sort. It’s like an indoor battlefield. I got artificial trenches, some low terrain, even a field tower set up inside the hangar. Moving toward the nearest trench now—hey, what was that. . . ? Holy—”

Gunfire rang out. Sustained automatic gunfire.

Both from the SEALs and from an unknown enemy force. The SEALs’ silenced MP-5SNs made a chilling
slit-slit-slit-slit-slit-slit
when they fired. Their enemies’ guns made a different noise altogether, the distinct puncture-like clatter of M-4 Colt Commando assault rifles.

The SEALs starting shouting to each other:

“—they’re coming out of the nearest trench—”

“—what the
fuck
is that . . .”

“—it looks like a Goddamn go—”

Sprack!
The speaker never finished his sentence. The sound of a bullet slamming into his skull echoed through his radio-mike.

Then Gator’s voice: “
Fire! Open fire! Mow ’em down!”

In response to the order, the level of SEAL gunfire intensified. But the SEALs’ voices became more desperate.

“—Jesus, they just keep coming! There are too many of them!”

“—Get back to the stairs! Get back to the—”

“—Shit! There are more back there! They’re cutting us off! They’ve got us surrounded!”

A pained scream.

“—Gator’s down! Oh, fuck, ah—”

The speaker’s voice was abruptly cut off by a guttural grunting sound that all but
ate
his radiomike. The man screamed, a terrified shriek that was muffled by rough scuffling noises over his mike. He panted desperately as if struggling with some great beast. Indeed it sounded as if some kind of frenzied creature had barreled into him full-tilt
and started eating his face.

Then
blam!
a gunshot boomed and there were no more screams. Schofield couldn’t tell if it was the man who had fired or the thing that had attacked him.

And suddenly it was over.

Silence on the airwaves.

In the bridge of the supercarrier, the members of Schofield’s team swapped glances.

Sanchez reached for the radio—only for Schofield to swat his hand away.

“I said no signals.”

Sanchez scowled, but obeyed.

One of the other teams, however, came over the line:
“SEAL team, this is Condor. What’s going on? Come in!”

Schofield waited for a reply.

None came.

But then after thirty seconds or so, another rough scuffling sound could be heard, someone—or something—grabbing one of the SEAL team’s radiomikes.

Then a terrifying sound shot through the radio.

A horrific animal roar.

S
EAL TEAM
,
I repeat! This is Condor! Come in!”
the Airborne commander kept saying over the radio.

“Scarecrow!” Mother exclaimed. “I got something here . . .”

“What?” Schofield hurried over to her console.

“Those binary beeps just went off the charts. It’s like a thousand fax machines all dialed up at once. There was a jump thirty seconds ago as well, just after Condor called the SEALs the first time.”

“Shit . . .” Schofield said. “Quickly, Mother. Find the ship’s dry-dock security systems. Initiate the motion sensors.”

Every American warship had standard security features for use when they were in dry-dock. One was an infrared motion sensor array positioned throughout the ship’s main corridors—to detect intruders who might enter the boat when it was deserted. The USS
Nimitz
possessed just such a system.

“Got it,” Mother said.

“Initialize,” Schofield said.

A wire-frame image of the
Nimitz
appeared on a
big freestanding glass screen in the center of the control room, a cross-section shown from the right-hand side.

“Holy shit . . .” Hulk said, seeing the screen.

“Mama mia . . .” Sanchez breathed.

A veritable
river
of red dots was flowing out from the main hangar bay, heading toward the bow of the carrier . . . where a far smaller cluster of ten dots stood stationary: Condor’s Airborne team.

Each dot represented an individual moving past the infrared sensors. There were perhaps 400 dots on the screen right now. And they were moving at incredible speed, practically leap-frogging each other in their frenzy to get forward.

For Schofield, things were starting to make sense.

The binary beeps were the encrypted digital communications of his enemy, spiking whenever they radioed each other. He also now knew for sure that they had Signet-5 radio tracers. Damn.

“SEAL team! Come in!”
Condor said again over the airwaves.

“Another spike in the digital chatter,” Mother reported.

The dots on the glass screen picked up their pace.

“Christ. He’s got to get off the air,” Schofield said. “He’s bringing them right to him.”

“We have to tell him, warn him . . .” Sanchez said.

“How?” Mother demanded. “If we call him on our radios, we’ll only be giving away our own position.”

“We can’t just leave him there, with all those things on the way!”

“Wanna bet?” Mother said.

“The Airborne guys know their job,” Schofield interrupted. “As do we. And our job is not to babysit them. We have to trust they know what they’re doing. We also have our own mission: to find out what’s been happening here and to end it. Which is why we’re going down to the main hangar right now.”

Schofield’s team hustled out of the bridge, sliding down the drop-ladders.

Last to leave was Sanchez, covering the rear.

With a final glare at Schofield, he pulled out his radio, selected the Airborne team’s private channel, and started talking.

Then he took off after the others.

Descending through the tower, the Marines came level with the flight deck, but instead of going outside, they kept climbing down, heading belowdecks.

Through some tight passageways, lighting the way with their helmet- and barrel-mounted flashlights.

Blood smears lined the walls.

All was dark and grim.

But still no bodies, no nothing.

Then over the main radio network came the sound
of gunfire: Condor’s Airborne team had engaged the enemy.

Desperate shouts, screams, sustained fire. Men dying, one by one, just as had happened to the SEAL team.

Listening in, Mother stopped briefly at a security checkpoint—a small computer console sunk into the corridor’s wall. These consoles were linked to the
Nimitz
’s security system and on them she could bring up the digital cross-section of the ship, showing where the motion sensors had been triggered.

Right now—to the sound of the Airborne team’s desperate shouts—she could see the large swarm of red dots at the right-hand end of the image overwhelming the Airborne team.

In the center 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 subgroup 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.

S
HANE SCHOFIELD
stepped out onto a catwalk suspended from the ceiling of the main hangar deck of the USS
Nimitz.
It was an ultra-long 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 center 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.”

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