Hell Island Read Online Free Page A

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 abig 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