Painkiller

by Will Staeger

  The Zodiac approached the raft, and in fewer than five minutes, Cooper and Laramie were deposited on the deck of the nuclear attack submarine USS Hampton. Their raft was quickly deflated and hidden by the men as Cooper and Laramie were escorted through a hatch at the base of the conning tower.

  Eight minutes following its arrival, the sub slipped silently beneath the surface, its new and unofficial cargo of two civilian passengers safely aboard.

  48

  Inside the Hampton, Cooper and Laramie were taken to a minuscule cabin equipped with two doors. There was little between the doors other than a pair of cots so small they appeared to have been designed for children. Their escorts left, closing and locking the door they’d entered through, leaving them alone inside the room.

  After a moment the bolt shifted in the opposite door. The seal popped, and the door eased open an inch or two. Nobody appeared; nobody reached through. Cooper watched the door, waiting, but nothing else happened. Finally he reached out and opened it, revealing, when he peered through, a hallway that from all appearances matched the one through which they’d just arrived. Noticing an unmistakable, pungent scent, he took a step into the passageway and saw, maybe halfway down the hall, the back of a short, beefy man in a blue T-shirt and the lower half of a wetsuit. Cooper could see as the guy walked away that he possessed forearms the size of a running back’s thighs. A wisp of smoke lingered in the hall, leading in a curlicue contrail to its source: a joint, lodged in the man’s mouth, of a size falling somewhere between a Cuban cigar and the state of Texas.

  About twenty paces off now, the man turned a corner and ducked through another doorway, massive left forearm extended above his head in a wave Cooper figured was meant for him. Laramie stepped into the hallway behind him.

  “What have we got?” she asked.

  “What we’ve got,” he said, “is some very good weed.”

  U.S. Navy SEAL submarine-based diving platforms, or SEAL Holes, were technical operations rooms housed aboard every U.S. Navy nuclear attack submarine built after 1992. The two-room compartments were isolated from the rest of the host submarines, accessible only by way of a subsurface dive port and one interior entrance, an example of which Cooper had seen the thick-limbed SEAL turn into from the passageway inside the Hampton. None of the ordinary crew members could access the Hole without an encrypted code-key which, in most cases, was only provided to the SEALs working the Hole, along with the captain and executive officer of the boat.

  The sole function of the Hole was mission control for clandestine operations. If so ordered, the captain and executive officer of the submarine would steer the boat according to the needs of a SEAL Hole operation; even in such cases, though, none of the submarine’s regular crew possessed any idea of the purpose behind the submarine’s change in course.

  Just after 4:15 A.M., twenty-two miles east of the southern tip of Martinique, the USS Hampton inched along at a depth of four fathoms. She maintained a speed of six knots at a distance of approximately two thousand yards from the windward shoreline of Mango Cay. Along this shore, the island’s primary geographic feature was a sheer cliff face. With only a brief, scraggly pause to deposit a short, black sand beach, the cliffs plunged sharply below the ocean’s surface, creating a depth of many hundreds of feet of ocean in as short a horizontal distance as twelve feet from shore.

  Inside the SEAL Hole, planted in a seat with his back to a wide control board, the man who had opened the hallway door for them sat smoking his cigar-size joint, alternately pulling in the reefer and taking in gulps of fresh air. He canted the joint to the side when he sought the fresh air between tokes, but otherwise kept it lodged between his teeth.

  “Code name’s Popeye,” the man said, facing his audience of two. He’d just offered them a pair of stools. “I’ll call you Olive,” he said to Laramie, “and you Brutus. That’s who we’ll be for the duration.”

  He sucked in a lungful of Colombia’s finest.

  “Chief tells me I work for you the next eight hours. I take orders from you,” he said to Cooper, “not out of any disrespect to you, Olive, but simply because I work best with a direct chain of command, and it’s you, Brutus, I’m choosing.” He clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back, the cigar-size blunt curling smoke into the sub’s otherwise highly controlled atmosphere.

  “Now what,” he said, “can I do you for?”

  Cooper said, “We’re wondering if our friends running the resort up top have anything to hide. Specifically, we’re wondering if they’ve got a way of getting in and out-or off and on-from underwater. Maybe with a small submarine.”

  “Good people, your friends?” Popeye said. “I ask ’cause I’m wondering if they mind us snooping around. In other words, how clandestine,” he said, drawing out the stine, “we need to be?”

  Laramie said, “Pretty clandestine. Not to speak out of turn, of course.”

  “You can assume they’ve got it all,” Cooper said. “Sonar, cameras, motion detection of one kind or another. I’m figuring a Hole run by a guy named Popeye, though, comes loaded with the latest devices engineered to circumvent such security systems.”

  Joint between his teeth, Popeye said, “Correctamundo.”

  “After looking around, we find anything interesting, we might need to get inside. You get us in and you’ve got an all-expenses-paid three-week vacation on a white sand beach a few miles from here. You name the time.”

  Popeye looked at Cooper, then Laramie, then back at Cooper before pulling the joint from his mouth and rolling it around between his fingers. “I don’t know who you are or where you come from, Brutus,” he said, “but for you to get a free ride in my room, you must be one well-connected hombre. And come to think of it, I could use a little R & R next month. Maybe bring along the missus?”

  “She’s invited and we’re paying for her too,” Cooper said.

  Popeye jammed the thick joint back into the corner of his mouth.

  “In that case,” he said, “lemme introduce you to my little friend.”

  SEAL Hole data was fed to a segmented large-screen plasma monitor, so that images from the equivalent of eight television screens were visible at any given time on the single monitor. One segment, the largest, was dedicated to digital video playback, and in this portion of the screen Popeye had activated the moving image of a sheer face of underwater rock wall. Cast in a red hue symptomatic of the infrared lens capturing its images, the picture moved slowly from right to left on the screen. There was little to see besides rock, seaweed, uninteresting groupings of rock-based plant life, and the occasional small fish.

  The video rolling across the monitor had been shot fifteen minutes prior by the Hole’s unmanned underwater vehicle, or UUV. Popeye had loaded up the drone with commands, sent it out to fulfill its data capture mission, and digitized its video to the Hole’s hard drive upon its return.

  “UUV hung a left here,” Popeye said. He pronounced the acronym uve. “Puppy’s got artificial intelligence in its chip. Following the curve of the wall.” The sheer rock face on the monitor dropped out of sight, then appeared again as the camera made a sharp turn and the infrared spotlight affixed to the lens reilluminated the cliff. A number of times, the UUV had found its way into underwater caves, something that took Cooper about two minutes of surveillance to learn were a common geographic feature beneath Mango Cay. In one such cave, the images recorded by the UUV showed the flat surface of the water above the drone’s lens, but aside from an unusual preponderance of looming tiger sharks, the cave was featureless.

  It was another three-quarters of a mile along the rim of the island’s submarine strata where a more interesting feature presented itself on the monitor.

  “More fish here,” Cooper said.

  Schools of small fish, gray in the infrared video image, surged in and out of sight of the camera’s eye.

  Cooper watched the monitor as the image progressed from blank rock wall and three fish, to a dozen fish, then a hundred, a
nd then suddenly the screen was filled with thousands of fish of all kinds-Cooper seeing the same set he got in the Conch Bay coral beds, wrasse and damselfish, a few sergeant majors, the bigger bar jack, yellowtail snapper, even barracuda. The rock wall became difficult to see behind the teeming mass of sea life.

  Once he was able to catch a glimpse of the wall again, Cooper pointed at the monitor.

  “More seaweed too,” he said.

  Popeye said, “Water temperature’s kicked up about ten degrees.” He pointed to one of the data segments on the monitor.

  “How deep is the drone?” Laramie asked.

  “No change in depth.” Popeye eyed another segment on the screen. “Four fathoms.”

  As the drone turned back to the right-knifing between what Cooper thought might have been a million fish-the video image revealed a massive hole in the face of the rock wall. The opening was entirely natural in its contour, but it was the glow emanating from the rear of the cave-brightening as the UUV entered the cavern-that they could see wasn’t the least bit natural. In fact, it was quite obviously man-made.

  “Aye, aye,” Popeye said when he saw the bright cone of light.

  Cooper’s first impression was that they’d found an underwater ballpark, that glow you got when you saw a distant baseball diamond at night. Or, he thought, an underground cave housing an illicit nuclear power plant. As the video image relayed the UUV’s continued trek along the shoreline, the diffuse white light moved to the left, faded, then vanished. Popeye banged out a series of commands on his keyboard and the image of the underwater cliff popped off the monitor. The squat man turned to look at them.

  “I’m guessing,” he said, “you’d like our friend the uve to take a deeper recon tour inside that cave.”

  Laramie nodded.

  “Correctamundo,” she said.

  In surveying Mango Cay for the location of the operation’s nuclear power plant, Deng’s civil engineering team had pinpointed the island’s largest cavern as the ideal clandestine depository for contaminated runoff, primarily due to its considerable underground lagoon. Surviving intact from its days as the power cell aboard the USS Chameleon, the nuclear plant generated power in sufficient quantity to run the facility’s day-to-day operations, but also generated a hundred thousand gallons a day of scalding, highly radioactive runoff, plus a steady seep of mildly radioactive steam.

  Due to the resulting swath of irregularly warm water, there was, outside Mango Cay’s underwater docking facility, a splash of sea life more concentrated than that inhabiting the most photographed coral reef in the hemisphere-a preponderance of creatures that ultimately punched a hole in Deng’s otherwise bulletproof security blanket.

  The underwater docking station within the missile cavern was canvassed by both closed-circuit video surveillance and sonar-based motion sensors. By their nature, the closed-circuit cameras positioned at the entrance to the underwater cavern were basically useless, since the images fed to the mainframe’s software were composed of nothing but wall-to-wall fish. The routine presence of sharks and other predators required the sensitivity of the sonar package be set to near infinity in order to avoid hundreds of false alarms daily.

  This meant that the methodical, preprogrammed second voyage through the cavern by the Hampton’s UUV went undetected outside of the shiver of fear it inspired in countless fish. Despite this, it appeared there wasn’t much to see: the cove contained what appeared to be some sort of dock, a thick pipe that opened into the cove, a series of other, smaller pipes, and little else. The cove itself, Cooper could see on the display, was huge.

  Laramie watched Popeye as he studied a data window alongside the video playback.

  “Water coming out of that pipe,” he said, “is just under two hundred degrees Fahrenheit.” He clicked the mouselike tool that allowed him full control of the console, checking another readout. “It’s also highly radioactive.”

  The video images concluded their playback on the monitor. Popeye reclined in his seat and eyed the instruments. He was still smoking. Laramie looked at Cooper.

  “You know,” she said, “if we were to send a sample of that water to the appropriate lab, I’d bet the tests would come back with a positive ID on a familiar combination of uranium-235 and -238.”

  “Mm,” Cooper said.

  “And unless somebody suddenly appears in a patrol boat now that our drone’s been in there, it seems we’ve found a flaw in whatever system Muscle-head is using to safeguard the island from intruders.”

  “Like us,” Cooper said. He watched her as she spoke.

  “If the system can’t tell the difference between a three-foot-long uve,” she said, “and, say, a barracuda, then it probably can’t tell the difference between a seal, or a shark, or a six-foot person, either.”

  Cooper said, “And you aren’t even six feet tall.”

  “I’m five-four, in fact.”

  “So,” he said, “if we want to see what’s going on at the underwater ballpark Muscle-head is trying to hide, you’re saying we skin-dive in there and find out?”

  “Besides the fact that I can’t swim?”

  “Besides that.”

  “Yes.”

  Laramie looked at Popeye. “What do you think, Popeye? That is, if you don’t mind answering a question from Olive.”

  Popeye grunted and stood. Cooper could see he wasn’t much taller than Laramie, even with Laramie sitting in the stool.

  “No need for skin-diving up in here,” Popeye said. “You got me for another five hours and forty-five minutes, and as long as I’m on the clock, we got us a special SEAL Hole bus service, take you anywhere you want to get within a travel radius somewhere near five nautical miles.”

  Laramie said, “You need some spinach to back that up?”

  Popeye grinned, sucking in another lungful of Colombia’s leading agricultural product as he flashed his smile.

  “Olive,” he said, “I got all the spinach I need right here.”

  49

  Peter M. Gates had his morning routine nailed. As DDCI, he was one of six officials who received a preview of the daily intelligence briefing, which would in turn be shown to the president. The preview version went out to its limited-distribution roster via encrypted fax at four-thirty each morning. By 4:37, Gates would pull the fax off the machine in his study, set it on the kitchen table, pour himself some coffee-already brewed with the aid of a timer-then read the report while he drank two cups from his favorite mug. He then made any necessary calls, reviewed a trio of daily newspapers, hit the treadmill, shaved before a sink of water so hot it steamed up his bathroom mirror, and concluded with a cool shower. Choose a suit for the day, fill another favorite-his burnished metal travel mug-with a third cup of coffee, and he was on his way by seven sharp. Most days, Gates came out his door thinking he’d got a two-hour jump on the bad guys.

  This particular morning, however-the same morning Cooper and Laramie were busy getting high off Popeye’s secondhand ganja fumes-Gates didn’t feel so hot about the two-hour jump.

  It was on this morning that Gates’s fax machine failed to ring. The coffee timer delivered his brew on schedule, but as he drank his two cups, the taste of the coffee seemed slightly bitter. He read the Times and Post, rode the tread-mill, shaved, showered, dressed, filled his travel mug with his third dose of java, then, at the door leading from his kitchen to the garage, Gates stood, unmoving, until, slowly, he lowered his head almost to where his chin pressed against his chest.

  He stood that way for a long time; while doing so, Gates found it odd that his thoughts turned to a place with no apparent relevance to the conversation he’d had in Lou Ebbers’s office the day before.

  The DCI had fired him unceremoniously. No one else had been present, and there was no call for a letter of resignation; Gates was simply dismissed. Let go like a middle-management drone, as though he were a man who had never held in his grasp history’s greatest and broadest-reaching spy shop.

  As though, G
ates observed at the time, he were a common corporate loser.

  Still, his head bowed as he stood before the garage door, Gates found that he thought not of Lou Ebbers, or of his firing, or even of his mistakes-but of marriage. His wife was not home this morning; she was almost never home in the morning. He assumed that this morning was no different from other mornings; that she was sleeping in the bed of whatever man she’d fucked the night before. He hadn’t spoken to her in days. He might have seen her a week ago, but he couldn’t be sure.

  What occurred to Gates, standing there in the kitchen, was that he now had nothing. Previously it had not been an issue, taking the big house that came with his wife’s money, taking all the shit she shoveled at him along with it. It hadn’t been an issue, because Gates had his work. It was all he cared about; it was all he did. Now it had become the only issue: he was a married man bereft of marriage. A human being utterly without home.

  He tried for a moment to determine whether he should affix the blame to Cooper, Laramie, or possibly even his own mistakes for doing himself in, but in the end, he found it didn’t matter. A flash of brilliance surged through his skull, and Gates realized he did possess something after all. There was, he decided, one last action he could undertake to secure his rightful place in the annals of Washington diplomacy and intrigue.

  He took a moment to think through the logistics.

  The media would have to get hold of the story; this meant local law enforcement would need to arrive on the scene before Lou Ebbers and his crew got their grubby hands on matters. If Ebbers found out before the local police did, Gates knew that he didn’t have a prayer of getting the story into a single newspaper.