Kong: Skull Island - The Official Movie Novelization

TWENTY-SIX

Packard had seen two more of his men die, but all for a cause: to kill the thing that had first taken them down. To end King Kong. It was his driving force, the fuel that fed his interior fire, and the stench of more death in his nose did nothing to lessen his determination. He had smelled it many times before. This mission had become personal, and the outside world was now very far away. His war had never ended. It had simply shifted focus.

They climbed out of the valley of bones, and on the slopes they entered the jungle once more. Though his troops were traumatised, they still moved with true professionalism, alert to dangers and covering ground silently. Which was more than could have been said for the others.

He heard Marlow stomping towards him from fifty feet away.

“Look, this is crazy,” the old pilot said, drawing level with Packard. “You may outrank me, Colonel, but I’ve been here a helluva lot longer and I’m telling you that thing that just shredded us was the first. And we’re on their turf now. We need to turn back toot sweet!”

“Not with Chapman stranded out there,” Packard said with true passion. He had almost begun to believe his own lie. “No man left behind.”

“He’s not,” Conrad said. His comment brought the group to a standstill on the wooded slope, sun dappling through the trees, insects buzzing them. The atmosphere was loaded. Packard wondered whether he should have brought the ex-SAS man in on his plans from the beginning. That, or killed him.

“That thing we just killed got him.” Conrad held out a set of dog tags on their chain.

Mills took the tags, looked at them for longer than was necessary. Then he passed them on.

“This doesn’t change a thing,” Packard said. We’re still going to that crash site.”

“What’s at that crash site that you want so badly?” Conrad asked.

“Weapons,” Packard said. “Enough to kill it.”

“Kong didn’t kill Chapman,” Conrad said.

Packard pulled a handful of dog tags from inside his jacket and held them out. “But it did kill these men. My men! All dead!”

“No,” Marlow said, shaking his head. He looked like someone had just threatened to kill his momma. And Packard had almost started to respect him. “No way,” Marlow continued. “You can’t kill Kong. He’s just trying to protect this island from those things.”

“He’s right, Colonel,” Brooks said. “We can’t kill Kong. Those other creatures are the real threat.”

“The Skull Crawlers,” Marlow said.

“Right,” Brooks nodded. “There are more down there. Lots more.”

“And Kong keeps them in check,” San said.

“Take away a species’ natural competition and they’ll proliferate out of control,” Brooks said.

“And they have gills,” San said. “Marlow stabbed that thing there when he thought it was an eye.”

“Is this a goddamn biology lesson?” Packard asked. He was quickly losing his patience, but he had to be seen as in control. Not raging. Not mad.

“It means they could get off the island,” Brooks said.

“Then we’ll end them, too,” Packard said. “All of them. After we bring down that beast you call Kong.”

Marlow unsheathed his katana sword with a whisper of leather on steel, and levelled it at Packard’s face. “I can’t let you do that.”

Packard remained still and silent while his men aimed their guns at Marlow. They did so without fuss, but every single one of them meant it. He knew that each trigger was being squeezed to half of its limit. It would take only a twitch from Marlow for a fusillade of shots to be fired, and he would be torn apart.

“Hold it!” Conrad said. “Hold your fire!”

Packard stared from Marlow to Conrad and back again.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “it was always the ones that shrunk and ran or stared down at their shoes that got it from the older boys. Maybe that’s who you are. Me? I’m the one with a rock in his hand. Ready. And this is one war we will not lose.”

“You’re nuts,” Marlow said. “This is nuts!”

Packard moved quickly, ducking down and swinging his rifle around, pounding Marlow heavily in the ribs. Marlow gasped and buckled in pain, dropping his sword and pressing his hands to his stomach as he tried to catch his breath.

Mills darted in and grabbed the blade.

“Please,” San said, stepping forward towards the gun-wielding soldiers. “You need to listen to us.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Brooks said, supporting his friend and colleague.

“Your lies got my men killed,” Packard said. He clenched his jaw, resisting the urge to lash out at these people, these fools. “You’re the ones who made a mistake. I’m just putting things right.” They’d let their passion for science blind them against harsh realities. That’s why he was here. He was the realist.

“You’ve lost your mind,” Weaver said.

Packard spun and advanced on her, but Conrad had already grabbed her arm, staring at Packard as he said into Weaver’s ear, “Not our fight.”

Packard stopped and stared them down. He knew that Conrad meant business, and if it came down to it, he would offer a hell of a fight. But now was not the time, and that wasn’t what Packard wanted.

What he wanted was still out there somewhere, hiding in one of this damned island’s dark places.

“Whose side are you on?” Packard asked Conrad.

“You’ll find your Sea Stallion up that ridge,” Conrad said, pointing past Packard and neatly avoiding the question. “I’ll lead these civilians back to the boat. We’ll wait for you there.”

Packard couldn’t trust the captain, but he could also see no lie in the man’s eyes. Conrad wanted these civilians safe, and knew that where Packard was going, what he was doing, was far from safe. Besides, it would get the ex-SAS man out of Packard’s hair. That would be a blessing. If they remained together for too long, Packard knew they’d end up fighting for real.

He nodded to Conrad, then turned to his men. “Let’s send it to hell.”

As the soldiers followed their colonel, Conrad helped Marlow to his feet, handing him the sword that Mills had dropped. Marlow plucked a handful of leaves and cleaned the blade, then sheathed it, holding onto his bruised ribs. He didn’t seem shaken. Conrad wasn’t sure a man like this could be shaken after everything he’d been through. Not by a human, at least.

“We need to stop them,” Marlow said.

“Feel free to try,” Conrad said. “He seemed pretty open-minded and friendly. Or let them go, come with me, and maybe we get off this rock.”

“You told Packard we’d wait at the boat,” Weaver said.

“We do that and none of us gets out of here alive.” The implication was obvious. It wasn’t a decision that Conrad was comfortable with, but it was the only one that made sense.

“You’re sure you can do that?” Weaver asked.

“We really don’t have much choice,” he said. “Packard’s gone all Ahab on us, and I don’t think anything will change his mind. Come on. Let’s move out.”

“But Kong—” Marlow began. Conrad cut him off.

“I think Kong can look after himself.”

Taking a heading and leading the small group back down the valley side and towards the river, Conrad’s doubts began to grow. The giant ape might have spent his life fighting and defeating monsters, and he had the scars to prove that.

He had only just encountered the greatest monster known as Man.

Packard led, and Mills and the others followed. Mills would have followed his colonel pretty much anywhere, and over the past few years they’d been to hell and back together, several times. Now was the first time he was having doubts.

Packard was as cool and calm under pressure as he’d always been, but there was something about his actions that screamed obsession. Logic and good sense had taken leave. As his unit was slowly being whittled down, it was obvious that Packard needed to restrategise, to take into account the fewer soldiers at his command. So why didn’t he? Whatever drove him also seemed to blind him. Mills was troubled, but for now he kept his concerns to himself.

They moved across the rugged terrain, making their way up towards the ridge line where the Sea Stallion had crashed. The going was difficult but consistent, with the group making headway through dense undergrowth and beneath the shadowy jungle canopy. They remained alert for dangers known and unknown. Recent events had shown them they had to be prepared for anything.

Mills wondered whether any of them were destined to make it home. That idea had crossed his mind many times before, but usually when facing an enemy they all knew and understood, to some extent at least. Contemplating his own death was part of what it meant to be a soldier, but he’d always succeeded in keeping those ideas remote from his actions, not something that might interrupt or distract. This was different. Thinking about their possible annihilation by some unknown creature, in an unknown place, was horrific.

No one would ever find out what had happened to them. In the cruel jungles and fields of Vietnam, at least the news and circumstances of your death would be transmitted home. You died with honour. Here, he might cease to exist without his death impacting the world at all.

They remained quiet, with communications kept to a bare, whispered minimum. When the slope became steeper and they had to use their hands to pull on roots and trailing plants, several men at a time would remain motionless, weapons trained above and below them. Then they changed position, those who had climbed now standing guard while others scrambled up. They made good progress that way, and soon they were nearing the long ridge line.

Close to the ridge line and the crashed Sea Stallion, Mills saw a white object pinned to a tree slightly away from their trail. He worked his way across to it, glancing back at his fellow soldiers and making sure he wasn’t straying too far. Cole caught his eye and Mills nodded, acknowledging that he wouldn’t be long.

He knew what they were before he touched them. He pulled the knife from the tree and plucked the impaled pages from the blade. He held up the letters for Cole to see. Cole raised an eyebrow, then turned away and continued up towards the ridge.

“Dear Billy,” Mills said to himself, “your father was one of the best.” He followed Cole and the others, shoving the letters into a pocket inside his shirt and slipping the knife into his belt. “I’ll get these letters back to you,” he whispered.

They moved on and Mills took up the tail position. He glanced back every few seconds, making sure no one or nothing was following them. He hated bringing up the rear, but knew it was a position they had to share.

In Vietnam he’d been on a reconnaissance patrol with nineteen other men. Five days out, with heavy rain blurring their vision and supplies running low, their captain was trying to lead them to a pre-arranged LZ. As night fell Mills was in the middle of the line of troops, helping to carry an injured man on a stretcher. It was hard going. By the time they reached the LZ the following morning and heard the Hueys coming in to take them out, Mills was the last man in the patrol, and everyone behind him had vanished.

The jungle had swallowed up seven men. They were never found.

He refused to let that happen to him now. This jungle was more dangerous than any he had ever encountered. A tree trunk might be a creature’s leg. A rustling in the shadows could manifest into a swarm of flesh-eating flying monsters. Anything could be hiding just out of sight, and something probably was. He held in his fear and kept his senses alert.

Mills smelled the crash site before they saw it. The stench of leaking aviation fuel was almost overpowering. Luckily there had been no fire. If there had, the amount of armaments on the Sea Stallion would have blown out the side of this hill, taking with it everything they had come here to retrieve.

Pieces of the wrecked aircraft were strewn around the main fuselage. Trees had fallen, others bore scars from detached rotors. The crash site was large, and the remains of the successfully crash-landed helicopter was a sad testament to Chapman’s final moments on this earth.

Mills approached the helicopter and saw the dead copilot’s body, still strapped into his seat. He was already stinking of decay. Something had eaten his eyes.

“Over here,” Cole said. He was looking down at his feet thirty feet away. Another body. “Must’ve been thrown out in the crash.”

“Bury them,” Packard said. His voice was strained with grief and rage. “We bury our dead, then kill the beast that killed them.”

Mills helped. They dug shallow graves and heaved the bodies inside, trying to ignore the damage done to their hardening flesh by creatures of the jungle. When they dragged the co-pilot across to the grave, a black scuttling shape fell from the open wound in his chest and tried to run. Cole stomped on it. It took three more stamps to burst the spider’s hard body. He ground it into the soil.

They shovelled dirt into the graves and then stood back, sweating and sad in the heavy heat. They’d buried too many men in shallow graves on the jungle floor. Reles planted two rough crosses made of tied sticks above the graves and hung the dead men’s dog tags around them.

Packard stepped forward with another cross and pushed it into the ground between the graves, hanging Chapman’s dog tags from it. His body nowhere to be found, it was as if the captain shared these graves with his crewmen.

“These men didn’t die in vain,” Packard said. “Nor will their deaths, or those of the other men lost on this island, go unanswered.” He spoke quietly, but Mills and everyone else heard the passion in his words.

They stood motionless and silent for a while, silently saying goodbye to their friends.

It was Packard who broke the silence.

“Let’s kill the monster,” he said. “Rescue as much ordnance as you can. Pile it up. We’ll see what we’ve got, then formulate a plan.”

Mills, Cole, Reles and the others approached the downed helicopter and started delving inside. Dusk was falling, and the light quality was fading. They had to hustle.

“What do you think about this?” Mills asked quietly as they worked. The aircraft’s contents had been disturbed in the crash, but the loadmaster on the ship had done his job well, and most of the weapons were still safety stowed.

“Old man’s got a plan,” Reles said. “We follow it.”

“Cole?” Mills asked.

“You’re asking me like you want me to disagree with him,” Cole said, tugging at one of the napalm barrels. “Ain’t gonna do that.”

Mills helped Cole with the barrel.

“So what about you?” Reles asked.

“We’ve never faced anything like this before,” said Mills. “If the colonel suggested we’d win this war by jumping from a cliff, would you? That’s what this is.”

“He’s always been there at the bottom to catch us,” Cole replied.

“Yeah,” Mills agreed.

Half an hour later they stood in a rough circle around the pile of weaponry they’d extracted from the wreck, and Mills felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickling. Even he hadn’t realised just how much heat they were carrying. There was enough shit here to take on and defeat a small country.

Packard looked grim but satisfied as he surveyed the neatly stacked equipment.

“Those seismic charges seemed to get the thing’s attention last time,” he said. “Mills, Cole, prep that ordnance.”

“Where are we going to set the ambush, sir?” Cole asked.

“That lake we passed in the valley bottom,” Packard said. “Flat ground, good cover, decent vantage points. Any thoughts?”

Nobody spoke. No one offered any criticisms. If any of them were doubting what they were doing, they kept quiet.

Mills and Cole set to work preparing the seismic charges for setting and priming. Mills had followed orders his whole life, and he believed that was what made him a good soldier. Whatever doubts he might harbour over what they were about to do, Reles and Cole were right. Now was not the time to start questioning their colonel.

A good soldier didn’t do that.