Free Hell Island by Matthew Reilly Page B

Delta men were killed instantly by head shots. The other four went down, wounded but not killed.
    The only bad guy left standing was the Buck, mouth open, gun held limply at his side, frozen in shock at the unfolding mayhem around him: the apes were completely out of control; Knox and his scientists were dead; and Schofield’s men had just nailed their Delta captors.
    A call from Schofield roused him.
    “Marines! Up the ladder! Now!”
    As his Marines climbed skyward, Schofield grabbed the ladder last of all, shoving past the immobile Buck.
    After he was ten feet up, Schofield aimed his pistol at a lever on the big round safe-like door set into the wall of the elevator shaft.
    “History lesson for you, Buck,” Schofield said. “Happy swimming.”
    Blam.
    Schofield fired, hitting the lever with a spray of sparks.
    And at which point all hell really broke loose.
    The lever snapped downward, into the RELEASE position.
    And the big ten-foot-wide circular door was instantly
flung
open, swinging inward with incredible force, force that came from the weight of ocean water that had been pressing against it from the other side.
    This door was one of the floodgates that the Japanese had used in 1943 to flood the tunnels of Hell Island. A door that backed onto the Pacific Ocean itself.
    A shocking blast of seawater came rushing in through the circular doorway, slamming into the Buck, lifting him off his feet and hurling him like a rag doll against the opposite wall of the elevator shaft, the force so strong that his skull
cracked
when it hit the concrete.
    The roar of the ocean flooding into the elevator shaft was absolutely deafening. It looked like the spray from a giant fireman’s hose, a
ten-foot-wide
spray of super-powerful inrushing water.
    And one more thing.
    The layout of the subterranean ammunition chamber meant that the incoming water flooded
into Chamber No. 2,
where the three hundred apes now stood, trapped.
    The apes scrambled across the chamber, wading waist-deep against the powerful waves of whitewater pouring into it.
    The water level rose fast—the apes continued howling, struggling against it—but it only took a few seconds for it to hit the upper frame of the doorway to the chamber, sealing off the chamber completely, cutting off the sounds of the three hundred madly-scrambling apes.
    And while they could swim short distances, the apes could not swim
underwater.
    They couldn’t get out.
    Ammunition Chamber No. 2 of Hell Island would be their tomb—three hundred apes, innocent creatures turned into killing machines, would drown in it.

F OUR GORILLAS , however,
did
make it out of the hall before the water completely covered the doorway.
    They got to the elevator shaft and started climbing the ladder, heading up and away from the swirling body of ocean water pouring into the concrete shaft beneath them.
    Higher up the same ladder, Schofield and his team scaled the shaft as quickly as they could.
    The roar of inrushing water drowned out all sound for almost thirty seconds until—ominously—the whole shaft suddenly fell silent.
    It wasn’t that the water had stopped rushing in: it was just that the water
level
had risen above the floodgate. The ocean was still invading the shaft, just from below its own waterline.
    “Keep climbing!” Schofield called up to the others, moving last of all. “We have to get above sea level!”
    He looked behind him, saw the four pursuing apes.
    Fact: gorillas are much better climbers than human beings.
    Schofield yelled, “Guys! We’ve got company!”
    Three-quarters of the way up the shaft was a large horizontal metal grate that folded down across the width of the shaft—notches in its edges allowed it to close around the elevator cables. When closed horizontally, it would completely span the shaft, sealing it off. It was one of the gates the Japanese had created to trap intruders down below.
    Schofield saw it. “Mother! When you get to that grate, close it behind