Painkiller

by Will Staeger

  The details now properly arranged in his head, Gates placed a call to the local 911 operator. To the woman who took the call, he said, “Christ, there’s been a shooting!” He provided the address where he claimed to have heard the shots fired-his own-and hung up while the operator was asking for further clarification. He then retreated to his study, opened the drawer where he kept his Walther P99, exited through the kitchen to his garage, got situated in the driver’s seat of the Lexus he rarely drove, and, inexperienced as he was with the device, somehow managed to put a bullet through his right temple.

  50

  Cooper breathed rhythmically through the regulator. The breathing apparatus he wore generated a noise only its occupant could hear and emitted no bubbles; the noise it made sounded to Cooper like the rushing of a brook through the woods. He heard it each time he exhaled.

  Cooper, Laramie, and Popeye rode in the SEAL Hole’s mini-submarine landing craft. Built in various sizes and launched solely from SEAL Holes, the skin of the minisubs appeared to all existing underwater detection systems as organic matter; they were also internally amphibious, so that their passengers could occupy and operate an MSLC with the cockpit either flooded with seawater, or empty and dry.

  Popeye had them operating in wet mode along Mango Cay’s eastern shoreline. Along with their wet suits, Cooper and Laramie wore masks equipped with infrared underwater scopes, so that even in the murk of dawn, they could observe the approach of the island’s underwater cliffs in a splash of pale red light.

  As Popeye took them into the cavern, Cooper looked around through the windshield of the sub. The entrance, now passing behind them, was massive. The sides of the hole consisted of pockmarked lava rock, strewn with splotchy outcroppings of algae and seaweed. He looked over at Laramie. She found his eyes through the masks and shrugged.

  Between the curtains of fish, he could see they were approaching the rear of the cavern, the glassy surface of the water a few feet above them. Cooper noticed he was sweating, then remembered the water temperature inside the cave. He guessed it was upward of ninety-five degrees.

  The light source they’d seen on the video playback shifted-changing, as they neared the surface, from a single, diffuse glow to a series of crisp white circles. Popeye pulled back on the joystick and hovered.

  “SEAL Hole bus service ends here,” he said, speaking over their sonar headsets. He pointed. “When I get us around that corner, punch the yellow knob on the console. It’ll release you below the sub. I’d get out ASAP-Geiger count doesn’t bode well for the lymph nodes.” He adjusted a knob on the control panel. “You’ve got four and a half hours on the clock, Brutus. The Hampton will remain within SEAL Hole range of this location for no longer than that time period. Your knapsack contains a remote homing device; if you need a ride before the carriage turns into a pumpkin, press the button and I’ll find you.”

  Popeye got on the joystick again and the MSLC nosed its way into the corner of the cove where the video playback from the UUV had registered a tangle of utility pipes. A cloud of fish darted from the nook; it looked to Cooper as though they were about three feet beneath the surface.

  “Adiós, compañeros,” Popeye said. “End of the line.”

  Cooper and Laramie followed Popeye’s orders and punched their release buttons.

  Free of the sub, Cooper watched as Popeye spun the MSLC around, waved at them through the cockpit glass, and motored toward the gaping exit hole.

  “Adiós,” Cooper said.

  When the pager buzzed on his waist, Spike Gibson whipped his arms to their fully extended state, dropped the barbell on its twin hooks, and stood. He checked the pager and saw, among other facts, that it was 6:39 A.M.

  There were two computer workstations on Mango Cay that were immediately and electronically notified in the case of a breach of the island’s security perimeter. The first was the primary guard station; the second was Gibson’s personal desktop.

  Gibson unlocked the twin doors to his office, entered the appropriate codes on the keyboard, and checked the location of the breach. The half-crescent outline of a sector, highlighted in red, flashed lazily on the monitor.

  The entrance to the missile cavern.

  This sort of notification had happened maybe five or ten thousand times before, most frequently in the six months following the installation of the monitoring system. With the alarm ringing now, though-long after they’d made the changes in sensitivity-Gibson knew that whatever had breached the perimeter had to be, at a minimum, the approximate size of a whale. Examining the stat line on his monitor, Gibson saw that the object that had just slipped into the cavern was a great deal larger than that. The object, according to his monitor, was big enough to land a plane on, and was already surfacing inside the outer cove.

  When this type of object had arrived in the past, Gibson had at least been given suitable advance notice. Today, though, there had been no such notification. No matter: he knew what-and who-had come. Playing back the relevant footage, Gibson confirmed his surmise: there, floating behind the usual canvas of teeming fish, was a colossal, cigar-shaped vessel of some five hundred feet in length.

  The Eagle, he thought, has landed.

  Considering that the next twenty-four hours represented the culmination of approximately fifteen years of meticulous planning, it occurred to Gibson that even a man so bold and vain as General Deng-Premier Deng-would be unlikely to commit so vain and foolhardy an act as to make an appearance now. At least not without something up his sleeve.

  Gibson had already been giving a great deal of thought to the question Deng had asked him on his last visit. It had been a simple question, loaded with any number of meanings-And your other projects?-but Gibson figured he could translate the intended message with ease.

  Deng had not previously referred to any facets of Operation Blunt Fist as Gibson’s “projects”-in fact, Gibson hadn’t heard Deng use that term for any purpose. Upon hearing Deng’s question, Gibson had shut down his harvest operation for a couple days. He examined each of the archived closed-circuit feeds from the last couple of months to see whether something Deng had seen might have given him away; he examined everything else he could think of that could possibly have brought his “project” to Deng’s attention. He found nothing.

  Mildly uneasy, Gibson restarted the extraction sessions, and it wasn’t until now, with Deng slipping his PLN submarine into the docking station of the main missile cavern, that Gibson admitted he’d been outfoxed.

  Deng knew.

  Gibson walked downstairs, jumped aboard his golf cart, and started up the trail to Admiral Li’s bungalow. He figured the admiral would want to join him for whatever it was Premier Deng had up his sleeve.

  51

  Crawling down the ladder built into the submarine’s hull, Deng stepped gingerly onto the missile cavern’s narrow pier and turned to face his welcoming committee. Gibson, Li, Hiram, and four mercenaries stood watching him from their place on the dock; Li offered a deep bow, then, after a time, Gibson too lowered his head. Hiram and the soldiers made no gesture or expression, about what Deng expected, since none of these men was worthy of greeting him anyway.

  “I’ve come,” Deng said, “to conduct a prelaunch missile test.” He had to shout to be heard over the sound of water cascading from the reactor’s runoff pipe. “I am also here to announce an acceleration of the launch plans.”

  Gibson’s face stiffened almost imperceptibly.

  “We will now launch at noon, or eighteen hours ahead of schedule,” Deng said, checking his watch, “and precisely five hours, seven minutes, and thirty seconds from now.”

  A second hatch on the deck made an unlocking noise, and the panel opened to emit the figure of an emaciated Chinese man wearing a white lab coat. It was hard to tell given his ill health, but the man looked to be seventy or so. He climbed from the hole, established his own footing on the deck, and bowed, first to Deng, then to the others.

  Deng said, “I’m sure you reme
mber Dr. Chu. This morning he will select four missiles at random and perform readiness tests on each. Mr. Gibson?”

  Gibson raised his eyebrows.

  “Lead the way.”

  Popeye had provided Cooper and Laramie with a pair of sea-to-land assault knapsacks, called “Silks,” based on their commonly used, incomplete acronym of SLK. Strapped into each of the forty-pound knapsacks, Cooper and Laramie had found a hybrid assault pistol called a UR-14, twelve clips of ammunition, a suit of lightweight body armor, a change of civilian clothes, disposable military boots, a series of explosives, rations, and a sonar-based homing device. At Laramie’s request, Cooper had stuffed his Nikon into his.

  Equipped with a tutorial given by Popeye back in the Hole, Cooper and Laramie were able to remove their wet suits and pull on the body armor, clothes, and boots by the time Deng emerged from his sub.

  With Cooper and Laramie watching from their hiding place, Deng and his entourage ambled through a massive set of cargo doors into the bigger internal cavern. The bigger cavern, Cooper observed, was the source of the ballpark-genre floodlighting they’d seen by way of the UUV.

  “That,” Laramie said, “would be Premier Deng Jiang of the People’s Republic of China.”

  Cooper nodded. “Who would seem to be in charge, in fact.”

  “You have your camera?”

  “I do.”

  “Please get CNN some shots.”

  Cooper snapped a few. When Deng’s entourage was no longer visible, Cooper pulled Laramie from the nook and led her to the doorway the others had just passed through. They stuck to the walls but still needed to walk a good seventy yards completely exposed-crossing, in the process, the dock, a lava walkway beside the vacated guard station, and finally the broad gap beneath the arch of the doorway.

  Coming inside the bigger internal cavern, Cooper stood still for an instant, gawking at the sight of the cavern and its contents. He nudged Laramie along the wall opposite the doorway; they ducked behind a section of piping wide enough to obscure them. Cooper could feel the heat popping off the pipe from a few feet away. From this hiding place, they could see the forest of white-and-black missiles in its full glory; there was also an odd, hourglass-shaped structure of ceramic, somewhere around twenty-five feet high, connected to the pipe beside them.

  Seeing these things, Cooper considered that Julie Laramie had turned out to be one of three things: either she was the best SATINT analyst ever to set foot in the Langley headquarters building, the world’s greatest organic lie detector machine, or simply psychic.

  “Forty-two,” he heard her say.

  “I’d like to take back what I said before,” Cooper said. “Your theory was ludicrous after all. Correct, but ludicrous.”

  “They’re Tridents, by the way. They’re supposed to be found in U.S. Navy Ohio-class and Los Angeles-class submarines.”

  Cooper looked around at the towering missiles, each touting an eight-digit identification code painted beneath a checkerboard stripe and an American flag about two-thirds of the way up its bulk.

  “I’m no professor,” he said, “but I’ll hazard a layman’s guess these particular Trident missiles weren’t put here by the navy.”

  “At least not the American one.”

  Deng came to the base of the missile with the numeral 6 painted on the cavern floor beside it. The rest of the group gathered behind him in a loose semicircle, the mercenaries distributing themselves in a way that allowed them to keep an eye on Li, Deng, and Dr. Chu. By Chu’s order, Hiram had gathered two boxes of tools from a maintenance cubicle.

  Standing beside Deng, Gibson watched the leader of the most populous nation on earth examine the painted 6 on the ground beneath them and incline his head to take in the sight of the missile above. This, Gibson knew, was where Hiram and his just-keeled slave had most recently pillaged a W-76 warhead.

  Deng lowered his gaze until it settled on Gibson. The premier eyed him in the same manner as when he’d asked the question, pre-tour, out by the pool, about Gibson’s other projects.

  Then Deng thrust his arm past Gibson’s shoulder to point at a missile in the next row of silos.

  “That one,” he said to Chu. “We’ll start there. Missile twelve.”

  Chu barked a series of orders; Hiram, following the commands, got to work unloading his dolly-bound equipment so the inspection of missile 12 could begin.

  Considering that Deng was fucking with him, and doing it in so blatant a fashion, it had become evident to Gibson that Deng had been fucking with him for some time. Looking at the situation from this new perspective, it didn’t take Gibson long to figure out the parts he hadn’t already. At least not until now.

  Strolling over to missile 12, he assembled the missing pieces of the puzzle and decided that he’d pretty much put it together.

  All of it.

  52

  Cooper’s instinct had been to do it the minute he saw all of them together on the dock. He’d suppressed it then, deciding to give current events a little breathing room-by seeing what went down, maybe he’d come to understand things a little better-but as the seconds ticked past, the two of them crouching halfway out on the open floor, he decided there wasn’t much more to learn.

  Sure, he thought, I’ve got a few questions I could ask these guys-maybe probe the topic of what it is, exactly, that Muscle-head does with the zombies once he brings them in here-but he was starting to feel exposed. It began to occur to him that even in his prime-presuming he’d ever had a prime-that he hadn’t exactly been a crackerjack military strategist anyway. Back then, he thought, all you were was a goon: a highly trained, stupid goon, taking orders from people any idiot could have told you not to trust. And now? Now you’re a flaccid, drunken beach bum, who ought to be out riding a wave, or taking a look at a starfish, or an anemone, or maybe some octopus hiding somewhere inside a shallow coral reef. You have no business tangling with these motherfuckers, and no intelligent reason to be doing it either.

  Thinking that the opportunity for surprise rarely came around at all, he figured that once it had, maybe what was needed was a goon such as himself, stupid enough to be willing to seize the moment. He checked the clip on the UR-14, and, finding it to be in working order, leaned over until his lips brushed against Laramie’s ear.

  “The way I see it,” he said, “right about now, we’ve got three options.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Considering the look he saw in her eyes, peering past the pipe at Deng and his team, Cooper suspected Laramie was thinking the same thing he was, but he took her through it anyway.

  “Option one,” he said, “we do nothing and get caught.”

  She nodded. “Hang around another five minutes and we may as well just pick that one. How about two and three?”

  “Use Popeye’s homing beacon to bring him back, and, pictures in hand, get the hell out of here.”

  “If he can make it back.”

  “Yes-if.”

  “And if he does, it would probably take, well-at least five minutes of hanging around, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’d say longer,” he said.

  “How about door number three?”

  “For the moment at least, we possess both the element of surprise and a pair of automatic weapons.”

  “We could look to hide out,” she said. “You know-avoid option one for as long as we can while we figure out what to do.”

  “We could.”

  “My lie-detecting talents lead me to surmise that, if given your druthers, you would choose option three.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him. “I can’t say that I’ve ever shot anybody. I can say that I’ve never killed anybody.”

  “Get on the floor.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Get on the floor’?”

  “I have.”

  “You-um,” she said. “Both?”

  “Get on the floor.”

  He moved across the phalanx of Gibson’s rented soldiers, a staccat
o-firecracker echo caroming through the cavern as he went. Hiram popped up next in the shooting gallery-dropping his grip on the dolly he’d been wheeling along, Hiram stepped away from it and squeezed the trigger of his Uzi before the dolly hit the cavern floor, but only one of the shots he popped off came close before the last three shells from Cooper’s first clip pierced the former bartender’s neck, shoulder, and heart, and Hiram’s body leaned sideways and draped itself lifelessly over the fallen dolly.

  Having dispensed with the bodyguard contingent, Cooper ejected his spent clip, popped in another, and drifted out from his hiding place to seek a better angle on the principals. He continued firing as he moved; each of the others had found his way behind some obstruction or other, but as he rotated, pulling the UR-14’s trigger, Cooper could see a few of his bullets landing. As he emptied the second clip, he saw a partially hidden body bounce from the impact of his shells, flopping sideways to the cavern floor. He couldn’t tell who it had been.

  He was in the process of ratcheting load number three into the gun when his unprovoked assault on the denizens of Mango Cay came to an abrupt end.

  Gibson spun to the cavern floor, reaching out as he spun, slapping Deng to the ground with an open palm to the side of the premier’s head-the effect, due to Gibson’s arm strength, that of a grizzly knocking a spawning salmon off its intended trajectory up a waterfall. Deng bounced across the cavern floor and tumbled out of sight into the hole beneath missile 36.

  Gibson himself landed behind a transformer, which approximately forty percent of the bullets from Cooper’s second clip proceeded to riddle. The transformer sparked, whinged, thwacked, and burst into flame, a narrow stream of black smoke curling roofward from its louvered vents. A bank of lights overhead doused, and half the cavern went dark.

  Lacking the benefit of a Gibson grizzly swat, Admiral Li did not fare as well as his comrade premier. While he did manage to dive for cover and draw his pistol in a single fluid motion during the dive, the porous silo-housing he fell behind did little to stop the onslaught of the remaining percentage of bullets from Cooper’s second clip. Li’s pistol fell from his fingers as his body performed a spastic dance in objection to the rapid intake of bullets it was forced to endure. The forward momentum of his dive dissipated, and he collapsed on the cavern floor a few feet from Gibson.