Hell Island Read Online Free

boom later and he had the
Nimitz’s
last fourteen ATOs—Air Tasking Orders, the ship’s daily orders received from Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor.
    It was mainly routine stuff as the
Nimitz
hop-scotched her way back from the Indian Ocean to Hawaii, dropping in at Singapore and the Philippines on the way . . .
    Until ten days ago . . .
    . . . when the
Nimitz
was ordered to divert to the Japanese island of Okinawa and pick up three companies of U.S. Marines there, a force of about 600 men.
    She was to ferry the Marines—not crack Recontroops, but rather just regular men—across the northern Pacific and drop them off at a set of coordinates that Schofield knew to be Hell Island.
    After unloading the Marines, the ship was then instructed to:
    PICK UP DARPA SCIENCE TEAM FROM LOCATION:
    KNOX, MALCOLM C.
    PENNEBAKER, ZACHARY B.
    JOHNSON, SIMON W.
    HENDRICKS, JAMES F.
    RYAN, HARPER R.
    HOGAN, SHANE M.
    LIEBMANN, BEN C.
    PERSONNEL ARE ALL SECURITY-CLEARED TO “TOP SECRET.” THEY WILL HAVE CARGO WHICH IS NOT TO BE SEEN BY CREW OF
nimitz
.
    So. The
Nimitz
had been sent here to drop off a sizeable force of Marines and also pick up some scientists who had been at work here.
    Again, it bore all the hallmarks of an exercise—Marines being unloaded on a secret island where DARPA scientists had been at work.
    DARPA was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the genius-level scientists who made high-tech weaponry for the U.S. military. After inventing the Internet and stealth technology, rumor had it that DARPA had recently been at work on ultra-high-tensile, low-weight body armor and, notoriously, a fourth-generation thermonuclear weapon called a
Supernova,
the most powerful nuke ever devised.
    “Scarecrow,” Mother said from her console. “I got a power drain in grid 14.2, the starboard-side router, going to an external destination, location unknown. Something on the island is draining power from the
Nimitz
’s reactor. Beyond that, all other electrical systems on the boat have been shut down: lights, air-conditioning, everything.”
    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.