by Will Staeger
He brought the Hampton to within seven hundred yards of the bogey.
In order to provide sufficient power to ignite forty-two Trident intercontinental missiles over a launch period of eighty-four minutes, Deng’s engineers had recommended a five-plant in-line generator grid that, while spearheaded by an accelerated use of the nuclear reactor, had little resemblance to the clandestine power-generation the reactor produced in the course of its routine duty.
Stage one of the power boost involved the automated sinking of six times the typical count of U-238/U-235 fuel rods into the pool within the reactor; stages two through five supplemented that energy glut with the ignition of four massive diesel generators. The diesels providing the power for these generators had been diverted from a Chinese strip-mining site in Mongolia; each engine’s twenty-four cylinders displaced 110 liters and burned nearly ten gallons of fuel per minute, belching an unfiltered cloud of soot.
Once the generators ramped up to the specified 4,000 rpm, the power grid feeding the missile-launch system contained sufficient juice to light the rocket engine propellant within a missile forty-two times in rapid succession, at least by aerospace standards. This process began thirty minutes ahead of Deng’s revised launch time of noon and would hit full wattage nine minutes before the first missile was set to enter the history books.
In the meantime, with the reactor accelerated and the diesels kicking on in sequence, Mango Cay was subjected to the kind of uproar normally associated with cataclysmic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
One of the fastest items to move off the shelf when the Soviet Union disbanded was a set of fourteen diesel-powered midget submarines that had operated out of Ukraine’s Sevastopol harbor in the Black Sea. Upon dissolution of the empire, primary authority over Soviet matériel housed in the former republics was ceded to the newly independent republics-meaning, among other things, that various superpower-grade implements of destruction were placed in the hands of nations so poor and corrupt that nearly everything of value was sold within minutes, and the midget subs were no exception.
Sporting only a fraction of the beam of a typical nuclear sub at eighty-five feet, the subs had been built in the late 1970s as the Soviet precursor to SEAL Holes. They were designed as two-man vehicles, with a freight capacity similar to that of a forty-eight-foot shipping container. Twelve of the fourteen subs had been sold on the open market between 1991 and 1996 to various tourism companies; the thirteenth sub had been decommissioned and sold as scrap metal due to a series of accidents that occurred during its time of service.
The fourteenth had been purchased by Spike Gibson.
He used it sparingly, since he’d procured the sub primarily to get the hell off the island when the shit hit the fan-such as a time like the present-but he had applied its services from time to time. One use had been as a handy-dandy disposable laborer-retriever.
Gibson drove into the cargo cave and ditched his cart. Moving past the yellow crane, he ambled through a doorway that was normally locked, but which he’d opened along with all the island’s other doors once Deng hit the road. He flipped a switch, and the pocket cavern housing his Ukrainian sub revealed itself under the lights.
He leaped aboard the sub’s deck, scaled its six-foot conning tower, and boarded through the main hatch. When he started it up, the old contraption belched a cloud of black smoke but soon settled into a mellow purr. Gibson sealed the hatch, worked the crude controls, and navigated beneath the underwater ledge separating the pocket cavern from the cargo cave’s main lagoon. He parked it against the dock before spending a laborious few minutes opening the sub’s corrugated roof, a task accomplished by means of an ill-greased hand crank. When he had the roof open, he climbed out directly from the freight bay, stalked across the floor of the cave to the yellow crane, took the control seat, and started her up.
He maneuvered the crane on the tracks until its arm was positioned above the warhead storage container at the back of the cavern. There was a six-inch eye bolted to the top of the container; Gibson worked the crane’s arm, causing the hook end of its cable to swing like an upside-down metronome, and jammed the left-hand lever forward and took a shot at the eyebolt with the hook. It clanged off the hole on the first couple of attempts, but he nailed it on the fourth. As the hook slipped through the hole, Gibson pulled back on the right-hand lever, elevating the arm. The cable tautened.
He gunned the engine and lifted the box, the rear of the crane creaking under the strain of the weight. When he had the container a few feet off the cavern floor, he steered his way backward and to the left, swinging the container across the stacks of equipment and debris until he had it hanging above the open cavern floor. Easing the container to the floor, he slackened the cable another notch and locked the crane in place.
Pulling the wireless remote from his belt, Gibson keyed the sequences on its pad, and the container’s padlocks popped open one by one. He removed the eight locks, and then, squatting with a perfectly rigid back, slipped his fingers under the lid of the container and lifted the slab as though it were a cardboard stage prop.
Lid open, Gibson surveyed his merchandise: three W-76 warheads, each capable of generating an explosion equivalent to the simultaneous detonation of one hundred thousand tons of TNT. According to some casual probes he’d ordered up, Gibson estimated the market value of each of the warheads at just over two hundred million dollars gross. This meant that after the necessary but obscenely expensive middlemen and the various bribery, transport, and money-laundering-related expenses, Gibson figured he was now staring at a minimum of one hundred and eighty million bucks, net-free, clear, and tax-free.
Two-forty sounded even better.
He dropped the lid and examined his watch. Lana was late, and while it was certainly possible that good ol’ Albert Einstein had caused her some difficulty, he was confident she could handle him, and instead attributed her delay to the mud that inevitably plagued the tunnel following a morning rain. Moving a golf cart holding a hundred-kiloton warhead through a quarter mile of mud, he thought, might just take their latest disposable laborers a little longer than usual.
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Lana had the accelerator pinned to the floor, allowing her to kneel backward on the seat to monitor her captives while the cart’s motor kept on. She had the MAC-10 trained on Cooper, the strap draped over her shoulder-if any bumps caused her to fumble it, the gun would spring back to her trigger hand.
Cooper pushed, Laramie beside him. The cart’s fat wheels kept getting stuck in the mud, and there wasn’t enough horsepower in the vehicle’s battery-powered motor to lessen the challenge in the slightest.
The ordeal, though, was not as difficult as Cooper made it seem. Hanging his head, he made sure his movements took on a slow, exaggerated quality-Cooper, the beaten-down man. He grunted as he pushed, his chest heaving, face and neck slick with perspiration. Laramie watched him, initially trying to figure out whether he’d been wounded, but she soon caught his eye and found that the look he was giving her didn’t match the show. Seeing this, she decided to join in, curious where he was headed but along for the ride wherever it took them.
Cooper began to experience a form of flashback. Slices of his recurring nightmares streamed across his interior field of vision, appearing as a kind of picture-in-a-picture, his normal vision the regular screen, the nightmare segments superimposed as a miniature moving image in the upper-left corner. The images were familiar to him-the hands, guiding him through the tunnel-crescents of light searing his eyes through gaps in the blindfold-hacking swings with the machete, killing them all in a sea of blood.
He wondered whether what he was seeing was some new variation of the post-traumatic stress disorder that had brought him to the Caribbean to start with, and kept him bathed in a cold sweat night after night-or just his soul’s way of telling him this wasn’t the way he wanted to cash out. Telling him he was just as fucked as he had been in that Central American dungeon, and if he didn’t figure somethi
ng out by the time they reached the end of the tunnel, he’d join Marcel in that place where zombies reside in the ever-after.
Listening to whatever message it was, broadcast by way of the picture-in-a-picture, Cooper continued to set the stage for the only play he held any hope of making, which was to lull the maid to sleep. He figured if he got her accustomed to slow movements passing before her eyes, if he convinced her he truly was dragging ass, then, when he made whatever move he had in him, he would at least have a fraction of an advantage going for him when he did it.
He noticed that the tunnel was beginning to fill with a black, sooty layer of smoke, laden with particles he could taste on his tongue. He assumed the smoke was related to the noise that had begun to pulse through the tunnel in waves-maybe it came from backup power generators, maybe from something else, he thought, but either way, it was getting harder to see, and breathe.
Which might have helped him, except that the maid was very good. The soulless black eye at the end of her gun never blinked, and the soulless hands that held the gun failed to waver. Cooper trudged on, playing his drag-ass game, all too aware of the approaching doorway at the end of the tunnel.
When they reached it, he figured their time was up.
The countdown clock in Deng’s Mobile War Room told him that fourteen minutes remained until the first missile was airborne, but his sonar-mapping feed told him the U.S. Navy reconnaissance boat would reach the island in three minutes tops. This wouldn’t give the navy much time before the first of the missiles got airborne, but while it was possible the American troops could wreck a few of his missiles, this didn’t bother him. Enough of the missiles would make it out to accomplish the aims of Operation Blunt Fist.
What bothered him was the remote likelihood that circumstances would allow the U.S. Navy to discover something tying him to Mango Cay. The only way this could occur was through the slim chance that an operations team could sabotage the power grid prior to the ignition of the very last missile in the series.
The forty-third missile.
Deng believed he hadn’t left a shred of evidence; except for the remaining presence of Admiral Li’s body and Gibson’s pending departure-both of which fit snugly into the strategy Deng had planned from the outset-he had been fanatical about keeping the People’s Republic of China out of all affairs related to the island and its contents. He found it unlikely that his visit this morning, including his tumble into the exhaust hole, had blemished his carefully cleaned slate-Deng assumed Gibson would dispatch his captives and vanish with his maid in tow.
Had the navy boat been scheduled to reach the island an hour from now, or anytime toward the conclusion of the launch sequence, none of this would matter. At that late stage, Deng defied anyone to pry open or otherwise affect the unique lockbox he’d installed beneath another of the exhaust holes. Utilizing a final set of four W-76 warheads, Deng had arranged for the forty-third “missile” in the sequence-really just a warhead grouping buried beneath a slab of lava-to skip any form of launch and simply detonate.
At that point there would be nothing left of Mango Cay-or, for that matter, most of the Windward Islands. This, of course, meant that even the spinmasters running the American publicity machine would have nothing to work with. Risk vulnerability to some form of sabotage, though-including the possibility of a U.S. Navy reconnaissance team making landfall within minutes-and Deng knew he’d be exposing himself to exactly the sort of self-serving inquiry the American government yearned to make.
The crew of Deng’s submarine had been monitoring the U.S. Navy destroyer’s approach for hours, having first detected it prior to his visit to the missile cavern. Deng guessed that the Americans in the cavern had something to do with its presence, but he wasted no time speculating.
He connected to the captain of the sub with the War Room’s hotline. When the captain asked how he could be of service to his comrade premier, Deng ordered him to activate the submarine’s torpedo tubes.
“Fish on the loose!”
It was the first time Captain Zeke Sampson had heard the exclamation uttered for real. His crew aboard the Hampton had used the phrase endlessly during their quarterly exercises, the phrase signifying a live enemy torpedo had been fired into the water. The words now spread like wildfire up and down the chain of command, sparking the calculated, practiced series of actions forming the Hampton’s counterattack strategy.
Sampson immediately ordered a dual-salvo torpedo attack. Seconds after he gave the order, another call the crew had previously made only during war games came back up the radio grapevine:
“Shark out of the cage! Two! Two sharks out!”
Catchphrase delivered, the crew members aboard the Hampton braced for the concussion they knew would come almost instantaneously with the detonation of two nuclear-tipped torpedoes in fifteen fathoms of water at a distance of only seven hundred yards.
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When Deng’s twin torpedoes struck the hull of the PX-38 U.S. Navy reconnaissance launch boat, the vessel and its crew erupted in an explosion so overwhelming that within twenty-five seconds not a single scrap of shrapnel remained on the ocean’s surface. One moment the thirty-eight-foot sea-to-land attack craft had been skimming the Caribbean at thirty-five knots; in the next, there was a thud; the third marked an explosion that blasted the boat into a cloud of shrapnel mist.
Then the Caribbean returned to the state in which it had found itself prior to the boat’s arrival.
Deng was able to savor the destruction of the launch boat for two full seconds.
In the third, his War Room monitors told him two additional torpedoes had been released into the sea in fatally close proximity to his submarine lair. He knew immediately what this meant, and since he also knew there would be little time to do anything else, he simply set his jaw and stared with satisfaction as the last seconds of his life ticked off the countdown clock.
Now that he’d destroyed the reconnaissance boat, Deng knew the countdown would continue.
No one could stop it.
Eight seconds following the direct hit of Deng’s torpedoes against the launch boat, the Hampton’s modified Mk-48 nuclear-tipped torpedoes commenced a dual-stage explosion that resulted in the complete disintegration of three-quarters of Deng’s submarine.
The first Mk-48 detonated mid-hull on the starboard side of the sub, vaporizing most of the sub’s steel skin. This resulted in an implosion; the submarine folded partly in on itself, sucking over a million gallons of water into its cavities, a brief underwater black hole. On the ocean’s surface fifteen fathoms above, an oval-shaped area depressed by two inches.
Then the second Mk-48 struck; with so many of the sub’s cavities flooded, the detonation blasted outward in all directions. At sea level, the ocean shot suddenly skyward in a geyser of salt water and shrapnel.
Because they took place beginning at T-minus 00:13:39 on the Mobile War Room’s countdown clock, the twin Mk-48 explosions meant that Premier Deng Jiang would not live to witness the manifestation of Operation Blunt Fist.
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Lana had no need to cock her weapon, nor pull back its hammer. The gun was already trained on Cooper’s chest, a bullet positioned in its chamber, so all that remained for her to accomplish in order to dispose of Cooper and Laramie was the transmission of a signal from brain to index finger.
At the instant the cart nosed beneath the doorway to the cargo cave, her brain relayed this intention and her index finger flexed. The finger pulled the trigger of the MAC-10, and the inevitable followed.
At the instant Cooper felt the overburdened golf cart dip into a rut-the same instant in which Lana tugged the trigger of her MAC-10-reality adjusted itself within Cooper’s being. The culmination of his picture-in-a-picture images, the images that came to him blurred, then eliminated what little remained of the line dividing the existence of his own being and that of the twice-dead Marcel S.
Over the course of a ten-millisecond span of time, an unimaginably long seque
nce of visions played out in the mind of the temporarily insane Cooper. He saw, in a continual, fast-forward band of muted colors, his torture in the Central American prison; his machete-fueled counterattack on his captors, followed by his flight; the usual content of his third dream-lost sections of his life afterward, the time spent in gutters, sewer pipes, drainage culverts and hospices; and, blended with the rapid-fire images from his dreams, there came images of a flight he had never known. Jagged leaves, black in the wet night, whipped his cheeks as he ran; sores bled beneath a torn jersey. A gust of wind knocked him off balance and he slipped, fell, and rose again, only to flee, stumbling, over the edge of a cliff in the howling winds and rain of a hurricane. He smashed against the rocks below, felt bullets pummel him from above, and clawed his way across a thrashing dock to the tiny wooden rowboat lashed to its end.
In this ten-millisecond instant, Cooper was not present on Mango Cay, but instead became lodged in an endless nightmare from which it seemed he would never awake or emerge, and in this endless instant he realized there was no other explanation except to admit that he and Marcel, both dead, had become enjoined, then arrived in hell, where Cooper had no doubt they would remain for eternity. Assuming it was his fault, not Marcel’s, that hell was the prison to which they’d been sentenced, Cooper’s mind burned through a thousand-year loop, a trap, an inescapable sentence stretching into a hideous, burning eternity, and then, in stubborn objection to this impossibility of instantaneously occurring eternal damnation, his physical being generated a counter-eternity of opposing energy.
His rage at the absurdity rose up against the images confronting his mind-the equivalent of the jerking twitches made by a sleeping man in his attempt to awaken from a frightening dream-and Cooper’s body, starkly aware of the importance of this single moment of eternity, channeled its counter-energy back into and out through the same instant of real time through which the altered-reality vision of hell had come.