Hell Island Read Online Free Page B

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 soundof 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 teamsfaster 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,