Painkiller

by Will Staeger

  Screaming and grunting in staccato bursts, every muscle popping with striated arteries, Gibson hefted the bomb across the six-foot gap spanning the container and the submarine’s freight bay. He set the warhead on the rim of the freight bay, threw himself over the edge, and, warhead still tottering on the rim, body half inside, Gibson snatched an exposed interior length of pipe and pulled on it until both he and the warhead rolled down and in.

  Like a tug towing a barge, the falling weight of the warhead towed Gibson the eight long feet to the bottom of the freight bay, where his dual collision with the bomb and the floor crushed one of his shoulders. The arm and collarbone on either side of his shoulder snapped with a dull stereo-phonic crunch.

  Otherwise, Gibson survived the tumble unscathed.

  His heart pounding to the bursting point, Gibson nonetheless had the presence of mind to detach himself from the warhead harness, stand, and hop to the rusted hand crank controlling the bay’s retractable lid. One-armed and one-legged, he slowly turned the crank until he had the overhead door sealed shut. Taking an additional three minutes to tie off and wrap his stub leg with the shirt he wore, Gibson then ducked into the control room and executed the series of commands that would put the sub in gear.

  A moment later, Spike Gibson, piloting his Ukrainian sub, dipped beneath the surface of the cargo cave’s underwater lagoon and vanished permanently from the island called Mango Cay.

  62

  Cooper had always been able to take a punch; back in the world now relegated to his nightmares, it was one of the ways he’d been able to lull his original captors into complacency too. This time, though, like a stupid iron-jawed fighter who’d stretched his career one fight too far, he had the feeling the beating he’d just taken would eventually leave him harebrained or dead. If he didn’t get himself to a very good hospital very soon, he’d be joining Marcel a little earlier than planned.

  It wasn’t long before a crushing pain replaced the numbness in his head and shoulders. He came out of the beating with a headache made for an elephant, but between waves of agony and nausea he started to be able to see around the cavern again. He wiped the blood, sweat, and grime from the narrow slits once known as his eyes and saw Laramie there beside him, exactly where she’d been before. He could feel that his face had been torn open across his cheekbones and lips. He could taste the blood flowing as he moved; he tried to move his jaw, couldn’t, and decided it was broken. Feeling as though he weighed four thousand pounds, he performed a clumsy one-armed push-up and succeeded in pulling his good knee up under him. He shifted his weight from arm to leg and took a look around.

  He could see-after another wiping of his eyes-that Spike Gibson, the fourth warhead, and the submarine were all gone. The lights in the cavern were failing, the black haze now so thick and low it reached almost to his face, crouched as he was on the cavern floor. He spotted movement through a doorway across the cavern, braced for another fight, then realized he was seeing the rear of the golf cart they’d pushed down the tunnel. The cart was bobbing against something that blocked its path.

  He took about five minutes walking over to it, but once there, looked below the seats and unearthed what he remembered having seen on their journey through the tunnel: the maid had stowed their SLKs beneath the front seat. He slumped behind the steering wheel, solved the issue with the pinned accelerator, and drove back to Laramie. Once there, he opened one of the SLKs, found its first aid kit, and, through a remedy composed of strips of the shirt he was wearing, a portion of his body armor, and the contents of the first aid kit, did his best to stem the flow from Laramie’s wounds. He pulled from the same SLK the homing device Popeye had told them to use before the carriage turned back into a pumpkin, and pocketed it. Not that it mattered any longer, but he found himself wondering whether his camera was still inside his knapsack and, figuring Laramie would want to know, checked, and found it there.

  Then he zipped both SLKs shut and strapped them on.

  Small and light though she was, as Cooper lifted and loaded Laramie’s unconscious body onto the rear seat of the cart, he decided it was one of the most physically challenging tasks he’d ever endured-second only to his trek up the hill with Alphonse strapped to his waist. Still, he got Laramie aboard, fell into place again behind the steering wheel, and drove into the transport tunnel.

  The mud made for slow going, but the lack of a warhead in the backseat helped. He found the side passage they’d passed on the way in, followed it for a while, eventually saw what appeared to be daylight, gunned the cart up a short slope, bounced through a rut, and shot suddenly into the blinding midday sunlight. He thought of the parable he’d heard about the man who saw only shadows on the wall of the cave in which he lived, until, years later, he turned around, discovering that the shadows had been caused by the sun he hadn’t known was there. He tried to remember where he’d heard this, or read it, but couldn’t.

  Turning past the main building he’d noticed from their earlier visit with Gibson, he crossed the marble tiles of the poolside lounge and bounced onto the white sand beach. Reaching the beach’s trio of cedar deck chairs, he stomped the brake into place and, fighting a set of back spasms from the effort, lifted Laramie from the cart into one of the chairs. He pulled the homing beacon from his pocket, punched the red button protruding from one end of it, set the beacon on Laramie’s lap, and unloaded himself into the chair beside her.

  It was as Cooper sat there, his swollen, pulpy head drooped, that the beach below him began to vibrate. From his limited perspective, staring down, he saw grains of sand tumble from the crests of the miniature hills built by the wind.

  Then, against the sky behind him, a glorious explosion of white smoke and yellow flame burst from the peak of Mango Cay’s lone hill. The roar of an immense fire raged, Cooper feeling the heat of its flame against the back of his neck even from three-quarters of a mile away, and the first blunt-nosed C-4 Trident I missile blasted from its silo beneath the hill. The missile rose through the clouds of its own rocket fuel and the diesel exhaust until, as Cooper turned to watch, it cleared the smoke and sliced into the clear blue Caribbean sky. To Cooper the missile looked like a photograph of itself cut and pasted on a glossy, bluish purple background intended to represent the sky.

  He blinked in the blinding yellow glare, turned away, and let his swollen head droop so low that his broken jaw almost touched his chest.

  “Aw, crap,” he said.

  When the first of Operation Blunt Fist’s missiles reached an elevation of five hundred feet above sea level, three simultaneous notifications were immediately transmitted by the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s primary computer system. The first notification went to the staff manning a room on the grounds of Peterson Air Force Base, NORAD’s headquarters near Colorado Springs. The second notification was sent by the equivalent of a multimedia instant messaging service to a series of government officials. Lou Ebbers, Alan Kircher, Carlos Muske, Secretary of Defense Wally Parke, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the vice president, and the president were among those receiving immediate notification.

  The third missive triggered an instantaneous escalation of the U.S. military’s readiness status to DEFCON-1, known also as “maximum force readiness.” Civilian agencies were placed on EMERGCON alert.

  Under DEFCON-1, the required approvals for a counterlaunch of American strategic nuclear assets could be granted, based on historical precedent from simulation exercises, no faster than seven minutes following the moment at which the president received notification that enemy missiles had got airborne. Transit time for the average U.S. ICBM to just about any worldwide target, including one in the Caribbean, involved a minimum of sixteen minutes, due to the ballistic trajectory of the weapons.

  Thus, in all likelihood-if in fact it were ever ordered at all-at least twenty-three minutes would pass before any U.S. nuclear counterstrike could reach Mango Cay.

  Sitting with his head slumped forward, staring blank
ly out at the lagoon, Cooper realized something.

  Somebody had turned the float plane around.

  It now faced the water, rather than the beach, and while this might ordinarily have held no particular meaning, with the fireworks show under way behind him, Cooper had been waging a brief internal skirmish.

  It occurred to him that, depending on where the missiles were aimed, somebody was going to have to stop the launch before all forty-two caught air-and it didn’t currently seem as if Washington, Langley, or anybody else was making any progress toward shutting this thing down. Cooper also considered that if Washington were to do something, the way the response might happen didn’t bode well for anybody sitting on the cedar beach chairs along Mango Cay’s blue lagoon.

  He wondered how the hell he had drawn the shortest straw-that of all the expert, capable people who might have been perfectly suited to stop the ignition of four rows of Trident missiles aimed God-knows-where, it was an irascible, emotionally scarred societal reject with a made-up name who was the only conscious one on-site, and therefore the only one with any shot at doing a goddamn thing about bin-Laden’s ultimate wet dream come true.

  He wasn’t sure what the new orientation of the float plane meant, but he knew it meant something, so he dipped his head and closed his eyes. He watched the backs of his eyelids as thoughts of Spike Gibson, Deng Jiang, the bartender, the maid, and Popeye floated past; he listened to what he remembered each of them saying, saw what he’d seen each of them doing. He gathered the sum of the impressions, splashed them into a blender, and let whirl. Some of the concoction spilled from the cylinder-blends of images, sounds, sensations-until, at length, one particular dollop splashed across the frame of the picture-in-a-picture window and stuck. What he saw, and heard, was Spike Gibson barking orders to his maid inside the missile cavern.

  Get in, bring me another two hundred mill, and get off the island, he’d said.

  In addition to the value of the fourth warhead, the bodybuilding behemoth had been talking about something else: they had planned for the maid to leave the island on her own. Presumably, of course, only to meet up again with Gibson and collect her share-at least presumably for the maid. That, he suspected, was not what Spike Gibson presumed.

  Cooper had met people like Gibson before-at least somewhat like him. In the world of such people, he knew, there existed no such conceits as comradeship, brotherhood, or marriage; accordingly, Cooper understood as well as if he’d known Gibson his whole life that there was no way in hell the man would allow a single member of his staff to survive Mango Cay, let alone share the take.

  And yet the maid had been instructed to take the plane.

  He thought about this for a moment, Cooper considering Gibson’s plan for the maid’s ill-fated escape in the context of the highly boring reading he’d done some three weeks back on the beach at Conch Bay. He decided that the idea that came to mind represented, at best, an idiotic long shot-but that, he mused, is why we highly trained, stupid goons exist.

  To roll the dice on the idiotic long shots no one else is dumb enough to try.

  He stood and limped down the beach to the float plane. As he approached the plane’s pontoons, a burst of artificial sunlight and billowing white smoke shot from the hill and another missile cleared its silo and tore into the sky. He checked his watch and placed the launches about two minutes apart.

  Thinking about how many two-minute sets it would take him to accomplish his aim, Cooper began a systematic search of the plane. He explored every cavity where Gibson might have hidden what he was looking for, knowing full well that Muscle-head would need to have stowed it in a place where the maid would not have been able to find it. This said a lot, considering the haggard-faced bitch had looked like a person with some pretty good ideas about how to keep people from killing her. There was a chance, however-Cooper trying to think things through the way Gibson might-that the maid’s search, had she lived long enough to conduct it, might only have been sufficient to convince herself that her boss hadn’t fucked her over.

  He checked behind the engine block, beneath the seats, under the rug in the cargo hold, below the toilet seat in the lavatory apparently built for passengers the size of chimpanzees. He was forced to wipe the blood and exhaust grime from his swollen eyelids three or four times a minute just to see what he was doing, but in due course he found an access panel on the plane’s tail. In order to remove it, he had to retrieve a wrapped package of tools he’d discovered under the pilot’s seat; during the time it took him to get back and forth between the two sections of the plane, another missile rose into the sky from the hill.

  Behind the panel he found a hydraulic assembly which he assumed controlled the plane’s rudder. He stabbed his head through the opening, peered through his eye slits, and discovered within-held against the plane’s interior skin with a series of suction cups and a stripe of Velcro-something that appeared to be a porcelain brick. Noting a barometric pressure gauge and a series of wires affixed to one edge, Cooper immediately knew what he was looking at, and it certainly wasn’t a porcelain brick.

  Judging from its color, he figured the chunky cube for either PENO or Semtex plastic explosive compound.

  Cooper also figured the barometric pressure gauge affixed to the bomb was designed to accomplish for Gibson-and his late, doomed maid-precisely what Cooper sought to accomplish via the harebrained scheme percolating in his bruised mind.

  He unfastened the explosive brick from the interior of the float plane’s tail, tucked it under his good arm, and headed back up the beach. As he sped across the poolside marble and turned the corner past the Greathouse behind the wheel of the cart, another missile rocketed from its home and knifed into the sky.

  63

  Because of its proximity and the weapons it had on board, the destroyer USS Scavenger did not need to endure a sixteen-minute trajectory to apply its firepower against Mango Cay. Firing the Scavenger’s inventory of deadly weaponry, though, wasn’t as simple a task as it might have seemed. Martinique, for instance, was part of France, and since the launching of cruise missiles against a NATO ally wasn’t included on the crew’s list of preauthorized actions, a recommendation had to be submitted, and approval granted from the Pentagon, before counterattack even became a possibility.

  Further, the missiles rocketing from Mango Cay were not automatically understood to be a threat to the United States. Accordingly, it wasn’t until twenty-two minutes following the first Trident’s clearing of the hill-eleven missiles in-that the Scavenger’s initial salvo came.

  To kick things off, the Scavenger’s captain targeted a pair of Tomahawk cruise missiles at the island’s main heat source and sent four SN-3 “missile killers” after the two most recently launched ICBMs. At a distance of twelve miles from the launch point, the SN-3s had the deck stacked against them and went 0-for-4 in the first wave, narrowly missing missiles 8 and 9 as they climbed out of range. The Tomahawks reached their intended target, but without “bunker-busting” capabilities, merely succeeded in shearing eight feet of soil and surface rock from the crown of the island’s hill.

  Jerking and crumbling, the missile cavern survived the first wave of Tomahawk missiles, and Operation Blunt Fist continued forth.

  Cooper crashed into the wall of the transport tunnel. Once he cleared the debris that had fallen in his path he was able to get going again, but as he approached the missile cavern, the tunnel was becoming so thick with diesel smoke and rocket exhaust that if he weren’t able to cover his nose and mouth with some sort of filter, he was sure he’d suffocate, or simply die from the concentrated intake of too many toxins. He resorted to tearing off a piece of the pants he wore, which he tied over his face, a task made near impossible by the bullet lodged in his left shoulder blade.

  He kept banging the cart into the walls of the tunnel, his course impossible to control as he steered through the field of rock shards dislodged by the Tomahawk strikes. Soon the toxic haze brightened a fraction, and in another
twenty feet he was able to make out the shape of the doorway leading to the main cavern. Using the illuminated doorway as a target, he floored it, keeping the cart off the tunnel walls as best he could, and in another five seconds he shot from the tunnel and found himself immediately assaulted by a wall of heat.

  The temperature in the missile cavern was pushing the mercury to a minimum of 165 degrees. In his condition Cooper knew he’d probably last about five minutes in this kind of heat, and with each successive launch-he’d heard three more while crashing his way down the tunnel-he felt sure the cavern would get another ten or fifteen degrees hotter.

  He pulled Gibson’s altitude-triggered brick of plastic explosive and the bag of warhead-extraction tools from the cart. He had to hold the heavy block in his right hand with the tool bag folded under the same arm-Cooper the one-armed man, he thought, here to save the fucking day.

  He would have to pick the right missile. If he chose the next missile in the launch sequence, he’d be killed as it blasted off; if he worked on the forty-second, forty-one Tridents would make it out. He limped from one row to the next until he found a suitable number, settling on 16. He could see through the toxic haze that missiles 1 through 12, all in the same row, were gone, their silos burned to pieces. Paint and excess fuel and whatever else had been at the base of 12 burned in pockets of flame.

  Cooper opened the cage door of the silo elevator, stepped in, and flipped the lever. The cavern shook with another impact from a heavy blast and another, less resounding explosion, both originating somewhere above the cavern. With no idea as to the source or nature of these external detonations, Cooper understood only that these blasts were having zero effect on the launch sequence and pelting him with clumps of lava rock in the process. With the elevator rising, he could see he was about to slip into the dankest portion of the haze cloud; he sucked in a maxed-out breath of midlevel air and held it. When he reached the access panel he got to work prying it off. He could already feel his body losing its battle against the heat.