by Will Staeger
In a flash of bloodred blindness, Cooper burst from his nightmare with the propulsion of a shell launched from a firearm, and he made, at least for the moment, an escape from damnation. In the eleventh millisecond following the golf cart’s dip in the rut, Cooper’s body shot forward, flying, more catlike than human, across the three and one half feet separating him from Lana. His body covered the distance in so short a time that, for Lana, time did not pass between her depression of the trigger and the impact of two-hundred-plus pounds of conch-fritter-filled human projectile against her solar plexus.
Cooper’s leap was not quick enough to escape the pummeling strike of the first two bullets. As he got himself airborne, one struck the edge of the sheath-thin SLK-issue body armor; partially ricocheting, it plunged into the flesh of his shoulder but delivered no permanent damage. The other succeeded in burrowing into the meat of his upper thigh.
A pair of Lana’s ribs snapped on impact and her body flew backward over the cart’s steering wheel. Landing on the floor of the cavern, her head bashed against the unforgiving lava rock. The injuries would not have kept a soldier of Lana’s constitution from fulfilling her intent to kill were it not for the speed with which Cooper then got his hand around Lana’s fingers, spun the MAC-10 into her bosom, and put thirteen shells into her broken rib cage, thereby extinguishing the light that had, until now, burned within the muscle-bound maid.
At that point Cooper collapsed, landing facefirst beside Lana’s body on the damp stone floor beside the doorway to the cargo cave.
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Rusty since her training days at The Farm, Laramie still possessed a loose familiarity with the weapons they’d trained her to recognize. Stumbling past the golf cart over the prone bodies of Cooper and Lana, acting without conscious thought, she lifted the assault pistol from Cooper’s bloody hand, found a loaded clip on Lana’s ammo belt, switched it with the clip Cooper had just emptied, stepped out from the doorway into the cargo cave, took aim, and let loose.
Spike Gibson had been working the controls of the yellow crane to bring it over to the doorway, and while he’d ducked and drawn his weapon at the sound of the initial shots, he returned to his seat in the brief lull that followed. He’d got the crane back in motion when Laramie stepped out from the transport tunnel and threw down on the yellow machine with Lana’s bequeathed MAC-10.
The automatic pistol’s stream of bullets honed in on Gibson after Laramie’s initially terrible aim. She wasn’t sure whether she scored any direct hits by the time Gibson, aiming at her muzzle flash, pelted her first in the thin flesh of the upper arm just beneath the lip of the body armor she wore; Laramie’s bone fragmented and she spun and fell from the impact, gasping as the breath shot from her lungs. On Laramie’s way down, Gibson caught her with a second shell in the lower-right portion of her back. The thin body armor caught and deflected much of the bullet’s force, but the shell was still able to penetrate Laramie’s abdomen, and ultimately ripped an exit wound the size of a Ping-Pong ball just above her right hip.
The concussive momentum of the dual strike knocked her unconscious; Laramie, bleeding badly, was out by the time she hit the ground.
Once pushed through the doorway from the tunnel, Lana’s all-terrain golf cart set forth on an independent, slow-motion journey across the cavern. Its accelerator still pinned to the floor, the cart propelled itself across the cave one inch at a time, the warhead load dragging its axles. The vehicle wasn’t able to establish significant momentum along the way but still made steady progress and, in due course, passed through the open doorway of the pocket cavern normally belonging to the Ukrainian sub.
Once through the door, the cart encountered an impassable mound of industrial debris. Its electric motor hummed on, pressing stubbornly but to no avail against the stack of I-beams and engine parts.
Disengaging the crane hook from the container’s eyebolt, Gibson reassumed the control seat in the crane and tracked the machine to the far end of its twin rails. He locked the arm in place, came over to the cart, affixed the hook to the harness wrapped around the warhead, retreated to the crane, and lifted the warhead out of the pocket cavern and into the container. He worked the levers until he’d managed to dunk the warhead into the fourth and final slot in the foam padding, then locked the arm and came around to switch the hook from the warhead harness to the eyebolt. Performing a reverse military press with no apparent effort, he lowered the lid into place. In the interest of time, he flipped and locked only three of the eight latches, leaving the rest for when he’d loaded the container into the submarine.
With Gibson back in the control seat, diesel engine whining like a possessed lawn mower, the crane’s hydraulics tautened the cable holding the weight of the crate, and the sagging arm lifted Gibson’s precious cargo from the cavern floor.
Face plastered against the soggy grit of the mud-coated lava, Cooper opened his eyes and observed the inert body of Gibson’s maid-and, beyond the maid, Laramie. Laramie lay prone on the tunnel floor beneath the door-way. Through the doorway, he could see what appeared to be another cavern. The maid, he thought, had been trying to take them in there. The cart was now gone.
He could see that Laramie was unconscious. Fighting a spasm of pain from the movement, he crawled over to hold a hand above her nose and mouth. She was breathing, but he could see that she’d been shot: there was an exit wound above her right hip, and, from what he could see from his place on the floor, she was bleeding badly. He would have to find a way to stop the flow.
The booming thrum of distant engines throbbed through the cavern, the same rumble he’d heard during the journey over. He could taste the same layer of foul, black exhaust and saw that it hung lower now.
Cooper found he could move all of his limbs, which was good, but even the smallest motion caused searing bolts of pain to assault him from his two bullet wounds. He could move; that was all he needed to know, Cooper thinking that in the last ten years he’d sucked down enough medicine to last a hundred men a hundred years, so he shouldn’t feel one bit of the pain.
Lifting his head, he felt such a crackling shock of agony that he determined his theory to be bullshit. Persevering, he crawled to a place on the tunnel floor from which he could see into the cavern.
Thirty or forty feet across the room was Muscle-head. Seated at the controls of a yellow crane, Gibson was using the device to lift a chubby container off the floor of the cavern. Cooper watched as Gibson inched the crane arm across the cave, and the brief expanse of water beyond, toward the submarine parked in the lagoon.
Cooper noticed something familiar about the sub’s conning tower, and even in his semiconscious state, it didn’t take him long to realize where he’d seen it before-it was the shortie submarine he and Laramie had picked out on the Gates-issue satellite photos. The rest, he thought, is obvious: Gibson is looking to remove his warhead bounty from Mango Cay by way of that submarine.
He checked for anybody who might be standing guard for Gibson while the weightlifting behemoth ran the crane. The pain from this simple act of swiveling his head sent debilitating convulsions down Cooper’s back, but he saw nobody else in the cavern, so he reached over and got his hands on the MAC-10. He checked the clip, found it to be two-thirds full, and found another clip, spent, on the tunnel floor. Thinking about this, he looked at Laramie. It didn’t make much sense, with Gibson nonchalantly operating his crane across the way, but if he had to guess, he’d say that Laramie had popped off a few rounds and been taken down by Gibson.
My kind of woman, he thought.
Straining through multiple bolts of pain, he lifted the gun with his healthy right arm, secured his aim with his injured left, and pulled the trigger.
60
Gibson detected the sound of the shots around the time Cooper’s second bullet struck the crane’s protective cage. He dove too late; Cooper’s third bullet penetrated his massive latissimus dorsi, but had about as much effect on Gibson’s health as a paintball pellet might have h
ad on an elephant. Bullets four and five tore through the air precisely where Gibson’s head had been positioned before his dive.
The evasive action got him safely over and behind the body of the crane, but also resulted in the violent jerking of the crane’s control levers. The command was duly executed by the hydraulic system operating the arm of the crane, and under the propulsion of the violently whipping arm that held it, the fully loaded warhead container swung across the remaining expanse of lagoon Gibson had intended for it to cross. Packing tremendous momentum, the crate smashed headlong into the side of the Ukrainian submarine.
The stress brought on by the collision proved too great for the three padlocks Gibson had used to secure the container’s lid. Had all eight been sealed, the lid might have held, but with only three locks struggling to contain the violence of the smash, the container’s latches snapped clean off. Responding to gravity, the body of the container immediately dropped, yawing open at the hinges as it clanged a second time against the metal skin of the submarine. Two of the warheads tumbled immediately from their foam nests in the container and splashed into the lagoon; a third slid halfway out, its rounded head slipping from its slot but still holding. Having shed seven-hundred-odd pounds of bulk with the loss of the two warheads, the container then righted itself.
Held into the foam by the added width of the harness Gibson had left wrapped around it, the fourth bomb remained wedged in its slot.
Cooper stayed at it with the MAC-10, hammering another half-dozen bullets into the body of the crane in hopes it would blow, or maybe tilt over and fall on Muscle-head. Bullet holes cut into the crane’s yellow skin; a rubber gasket snapped, releasing a geyser of hydraulic fluid; sparks flew, and a wisp of smoke rose from the crane’s engine block. Finally, the engine sputtered, then died.
The instant Cooper paused, opting to save the remaining bullets in his clip, Gibson reached around the side of the crane with his Glock and took a pair of potshots. He missed by a few feet, and Cooper got off a couple more-realizing as the bullets whinged off the crane and pocked off the lava wall that he’d fired the last of the shells from his clip. He dropped, making sure to turn away from the place where Laramie lay, and ducked back into the tunnel. As he moved, he heard a series of shots fired by Gibson, one of the bullets clipping the SEAL-issue cross-terrain disposable boot on Cooper’s right foot but otherwise coming up empty.
Gibson’s next pull on the trigger, Cooper heard, resulted in a dry click.
The thrum of the four diesel generators groaned on outside the cavern, and the third of the W-76 warheads, tail dipping deeper from its slot in the container, finally slid, like a fish from a dock, into the water of the lagoon.
Given the relative silence, Cooper guessed that Gibson was doing something smarter than he was-maybe sneaking around behind him, for instance. Stumbling forward, Cooper folded the MAC-10 between his good elbow and his waist, and, grimacing, fumbled through the mess of blood, guts, and canvas jersey formerly composing the maid’s stomach in search of another clip. He snagged nothing but muck until he heard the sound of metal against rock, and then it was heavy in his hand-full, loaded with all thirty-two bullets, and just about enough, Cooper thought, to remove Spike Gibson from cavern and earth.
He yanked the clip out of the mess of gore and struggled to get it into the gun.
Gibson came out from his hiding place and strode across the cargo cave.
As Cooper took his best shot at jamming the slippery clip into its slot, he was faced with the realization that he was completely fucked.
No way would he get the clip loaded in time.
Gibson stepped over Lana’s body and grinned.
“Albert!” he exclaimed. “How are you, buddy?”
Cooper resorted to a pathetic surprise attack, ferociously whacking at Gibson’s face with the butt of the MAC-10, a distraction that bought him about two seconds. Cooper felt the gun land on the hard bone of Gibson’s left cheek at least once, but the bodybuilder soon threw his heavy forearm in the way of Cooper’s thrashing blows and swatted the gun from his hands.
Then Gibson proceeded to unload on him.
Releasing the raw, sinewy power he’d stored in bulk form across years of exercise, Gibson pummeled Cooper with successive blows. Even with the bullet that had pierced his right lat, Gibson had both arms to work with, and Cooper’s one-armed defensive maneuvers did nothing to stop the creatine-boosted onslaught. He tore open the skin on Cooper’s face with the blows, loosened teeth with elbow shots, broke Cooper’s nose for maybe the twenty-seventh time in Cooper’s life with a succession of head butts. When Cooper could no longer stand, Gibson held him upright, grasping the collar of Cooper’s body armor with his left fist while bashing Cooper’s face with his right.
Finally Gibson let go, and Cooper dropped like a dress on the body of a woman who’d just had her shoulder straps snipped. Gibson straightened, inclined his head, breathed deeply of the foul air of the cavern, and, vaguely satisfied, turned and retraced his route across the lava rock floor.
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The pool of blood from Lana’s intestines seeped along the cargo cave’s floor, moving along the same downward slope that helped the electric cart propel itself into the pocket cavern. The blood, however, failed to make the full trip. Instead, it dripped into a crack in the floor, where it found a new slope to follow, and flowed into the lagoon.
Accustomed to the routine deposit of expired disposable laborers and totalitarian dictators here, a school of eleven tiger sharks-roaming the region independently, but linked by hunger and conditioning-knew that when blood was released into the water in a certain location beneath Mango Cay, a meal was in store. Thus, once Lana’s blood began to perfume the water-blooming outward from the crack in the floor where it emptied into the lagoon-the sharks arrived in short order beneath the belly of the Ukrainian sub. Soon, each shark, its nervous system confused at the lack of an available meal, began thrashing around and biting at random. The frantic pattern of cannibalistic abuse only worsened when the three lost warheads, splashing into the lagoon, proved inedible.
Prior experience, though, supported the possibility that more food was on the way, and so-driven by a primordial hope-the eleven sharks, each mildly confused and fully pissed off, remained within the confines of the lagoon.
Gibson vaulted from the dock to the nose of the sub and surveyed the damage. The collision between container and hull had put a wide dent in the side of the boat, but the dent was close enough to the waterline that it did not appear to have damaged the corrugated steel door he’d need to seal in order to keep the freight bay from springing a leak.
The container itself was lodged too low to drag or flip into the freight bay; it rested against the body of the submarine with its lid draped partially across the top of the sub, the main body of the container dangling nearly to the water. The good news for Gibson was that the fourth warhead occupied the slot closest to the sub, so that if he could get himself down to the main body of the container, it wouldn’t be difficult to grab hold of the bomb. Of course there was the issue of the warhead tipping the scales at just under four hundred pounds, but Gibson chose not to acknowledge this as a factor.
He climbed out of the open freight bay onto the bent container lid. Scaling down to the container’s main body, he lodged his left foot into the base of one of the empty warhead slots. Seizing the warhead’s harness, he disconnected then reconnected the various clips, buckles, and Velcro straps, securing the harness both to the warhead and around his shoulders and waist.
Thinking he could buy the leverage he needed by wedging his right foot against the skin of the submarine, Gibson planted himself, legs splayed, as a bridge between container and sub. He tested his footing with a bouncing motion. It held.
Tightening the straps, he sucked in a series of thick, heaving breaths, and lifted. The warhead began to inch from its slot, Gibson the bodybuilder doing a single squat rep under a 375-pound barbell. In fact, he just about had the r
ounded head of the warhead’s heavier side fully out of the foam padding when his right foot slipped on the wet steel of the submarine and he flipped sideways and splashed wildly into the water.
The warhead slunk back into its padded slot, so that the harness straps, affixed dually to Gibson and the warhead, prevented Gibson from dropping entirely beneath the surface. His right leg plunged into the lagoon, almost to the hip, but that was it. He flailed for one of the container’s latches with his right arm, but since it took him two attempts to grab hold, his escape from the water was accomplished a fraction of a second late.
Battling for position once the splash had alerted her to the possibility of food, one of the tiger sharks shot directly toward the source of this agitation and clamped down on the first flesh she found. When she locked her multiple rows of teeth around the muscled ligament and bone of Spike Gibson’s right shin, it took a few frenzied, thrashing jerks of her head to rip the bite off in her mouth, but, fiercely determined to eat, she succeeded in biting off a thick chunk, which she swallowed whole before spinning around to take another run at the offering.
Gibson screamed as his foot was torn from his leg midway up the shin, but when his ankle and foot separated from the rest of his leg, he popped high enough out of the water to grasp another, higher latch. Making a scrambling left-leg thrust into the padding, he pulled himself back onto the body of the container.
Seeing the stump where his right foot had previously been, Gibson first whimpered like a boy, then cursed at the top of his lungs, then screamed a level-toned roar of fury that echoed through the cargo cave.
Due partly to sheer brute strength borne of more than a decade of weight training, partly to unadulterated greed, and largely due to a freakishly large and instantaneous excretion of adrenaline into his bloodstream, Gibson, bearing down on his one good leg and pulling with bursting forearms from one latch to the next, somehow managed to uproot the W-76 warhead from its slot a second time and lift its immense weight fully out of the container.