Free Hell Island by Matthew Reilly Page A

been remotely commanding the apes: with digital signals sent directly to the chips in their brains.
    The silver discs probably worked the same way—which was how Pennebaker had been able to enter the fray before to give Schofield information without having to fear the apes.
    “Mother,” Schofield whispered as he raised his hands above his head. “Still got your AXS-9 there?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Jam radios, all channels,
now.
”
    Mother was also in the process of raising her hands—when suddenly she snapped her right hand down and hit a switch on the AXS-9 spectrum analyzer on her webbing, the switch marked: SIGNAL JAM: ALL CH.
    The Delta man beside her swung his gun around, but he never fired.
    Because right then another
very loud
sound seized his attention.
    The sound of the apes awakening.
    The effect of what Mother had done was invisible, but if one could have
seen
the radio spectrum it would have looked like this: a radiating wave of energy had fanned out from Mother’s jamming pack, moving outward from her in a circular motion, like expanding ripples in a pond, hitting every wave-emitting device in the area, and turning each device’s signal into garbled static.
    The result: the silver discs on the ID badges of Knox, the DARPA scientists, the Buck and the Delta team all
instantly became useless.
    From his position in the elevator shaft, Schofield saw what happened next in a kind of hyper-real slow motion.
    He saw Knox in the ammo chamber with the army of deadly apes looming above him; saw the three apes nearest to Knox suddenly leap down at him, jaws bared, arms extended, slamming into him, throwing him to the ground, where they fired into him with their M-4s at point-blank range.
    In the face of their gunfire, Dr. Malcolm Knox was turned into a bloody mess, his body exploding in a millionbullet holes. Grotesquely, the apes kept firing into him long after he was dead.
    Complete pandemonium followed . . .
    . . . as the rest of the ape army leapt down from the mountain of crates looking for blood.
    Different people reacted in different ways.
    The DARPA scientists in the chamber spun, eyes wide with horror.
    In the elevator shaft, the Delta team also turned, shocked, Gordon and the Buck among them.
    Schofield, however, was already moving, calling, “Marines, two hands! Now!”
    As for the apes, well, they went apeshit.
    Freed from the grip of the silver discs, they launched themselves at the DARPA scientists in the ammo chamber, crashtackling them to the floor, clubbing them with the butts of their guns, tearing them apart—as if all their lives they had been waiting to attack their makers.
    Screams and cries rang out.
    Zak Pennebaker ran for the door to the elevator shaft, crying, “Buck! Do something!” before he himself was crashtackled from behind and assailed by six, then eight, then twelve apes.
    He disappeared under their bodies, arms flailing,screaming in terror, before he was completely overwhelmed by the hairy black monsters.
    In the elevator shaft, Flash Gordon and his team of Delta scumbags were caught totally by surprise.
    Gordon whirled back to face Schofield, bringing his pistol back around—
    —only to see both of Schofield’s Desert Eagle pistols aimed directly at his own nose.
    “Surprise,” Schofield said.
    Blam!
    Schofield fired.
    The apes were now rushing for the door, all three hundred of them, angry and deadly, heading for the elevator shaft.
    While they did so, Schofield’s Marines did battle with the Delta force surrounding them.
    It was a short battle.
    For Schofield’s men had obeyed Schofield’s shouted order—“Marines, two hands!”—so that by now they all held guns in
both
their hands: an MP-7 in one and a pistol in the other.
    The five Marines whipped up two guns each—and suddenly they’d evened the odds against the ten-man Delta squad encircling them.
    The Marines fired as one, spraying bulletsoutward, dropping the distracted Delta squad around them.
    Six of the