Hell Island Read Online Free PDF

Pennebaker didn’t need three degrees to figure out that one. It came out in a blurting flurry.
    “It started out as a super-soldier project, special ops stuff involving ‘Go’ drugs, amphetamines, biomechanics and brain-chip grafting. All on human subjects. But the human subjects didn’t work out. The ape subjects, however, worked very,
very
well.”
    “
Ape
subjects?” Mother said in disbelief.
    “Yes, apes. Gorillas. African mountain gorillas to be precise. They’re twice as strong as human beings and the grafting technology worked perfectly with them.”
    “Not quite perfectly,” Hulk said, indicating the state of the observation platform.
    “Well, no, no, not in the end,” Pennebaker mumbled. “But when the apes took so well to the tech, the project morphed from a special-forces operation to a frontline troop replacement project.”
    “What do you mean?” Schofield asked.
    “The ultimate frontline trooper—lethal, vicious, remorseless, yet totally obedient. And best of all, totally
expendable.
No more letters from a grateful nation to grieving parents. No more one-legged veterans protestingin D.C. Hell, no more veterans full-stop—the government would save billions in entitlements alone. Imagine you’re a general, facing a frontal assault, it’s a lot easier to send a thousand purpose-bred apes to their deaths than fresh-faced farm boys from Idaho.
    “And that’s the best part, we bred the gorillas ourselves in labs, so we aren’t even thinning the natural population, committing some crime against nature. They are the first custom-made artificially-produced armed force in the history of mankind. You could send them into hostile territory and they’d never question the order, you could send them on complete suicide missions and they’d never complain.”
    “How the hell do you manage that?” Hulk asked.
    “The grafting technology,” Schofield answered.
    Pennebaker seemed surprised that Schofield would know about this. “Yes. That’s correct.”
    “What’s grafting technology?” Mother asked.
    Schofield said, “You attach—or
graft
—a microchip to the brain of your subject. The chip is biomechanical, semi-organic, so it attaches to the brain and becomes part of it. Grafting technology has allowed quadriplegics to communicate via computers. Their brain engages with the chip and the chip sends a signal to the computer.
But . . .
I’ve heard it can also work the other way around . . .”
    “That’s right,” Pennebaker said. “When an outside agent uses a grafted microchip to control
the subject.
”

    “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Mother sighed. “Poindexter, you musta read a million books in college filled with words I couldn’t even understand, but didn’t you just once think about reading
Frankenstein?
”
    Pennebaker responded, “You have to believe me. The results were astonishing, at least at the start. The apes were perfectly obedient and shockingly effective. We taught them how to use weapons. We even created modified M-4 assault rifles for them, to accommodate their bigger hands. But even when they lost their guns, they were
still
hyper-effective—they could crush a man’s head with their bare hands or bite his whole face off.”
    As Pennebaker spoke, Schofield stole a glance at his four men guarding the north-south catwalk. None of them had moved.
    He keyed his UHF channel: “Astro? Hulk? Any contacts?”
    “Not a thing from the north, sir.”
    “Ditto the south, sir. It’s too quiet here.”
    Schofield turned back to Pennebaker. “You’re saying you tested these things against human troops?”
    Pennebaker bowed his head. “Yes. Against three companies of Marines that we had brought here from Okinawa. What are you guys?”
    “Marines,” Mother growled.
    Pennebaker swallowed. “The apes annihilated them. Down on the battlefield and also on the island proper. Five hundred gorillas versus 600 Marines. It was a hell of a fight. The gorillas lost heaps in