Painkiller

by Will Staeger

  He got the panel off and it tumbled to the ground, banging back and forth between the missile and silo on its journey down. The cavern shook beneath him, the silo trembling, then weaving, and suddenly a wave of intense heat and deafening noise blasted him from all sides as the missile in silo 13 underwent primary ignition. Cooper had to stop working and cover his ears. The noise chattered his skull as the missile rose within the cavern, the blast of wind from its launch temporarily clearing the cavern of the poisonous haze; then the silo door in the roof of the cavern folded downward, revealing the sky above, and the missile shot upward, slow at first, but accelerating exponentially. As the base of the missile passed through the ceiling of the cavern, the intense heat, shrieking wind, and jet-fuel-scented exhaust filled the cavern completely.

  Then the missile was gone.

  Cooper’s hair was singed, his eyebrows burned completely off. Putting his free-diving lung capacity to use, he continued to hold the breath he’d taken on the way up, and ducked into the warhead bay. He secured Gibson’s bomb as best he could to the skin of what he figured for the nearest warhead, picking a spot where the warhead, if that’s what it was, appeared exposed. Then-lungs exploding, his skin on fire-Cooper jumped aboard the lift, pulled the lever, and waited with the increasing panic of a drowning man for the elevator to make its way down.

  Alternating between passing out, vomiting, and crashing into the walls of the transport tunnel, he came awake for successive brief instants of the return trip, enough to recall where he was and mash his foot against the cart’s accelerator before passing out again until the next crash into the wall. With each burst in this circuit of his own private demolition derby, he got the cart another fifteen or twenty yards along the muddy uphill slope of the tunnel; as he got farther he was able to breathe cleanly again, pulling in massive heaves of air and smoke alike while he sucked down enough oxygen to keep him momentarily conscious.

  Negotiating the last turn past the Greathouse, Cooper the zombie began to lose consciousness, his head dangling forward and banging against the steering wheel while the cart, lacking any human hand to pilot its wheel, careened downhill, building speed, wobbling, then roving up for an instant on two wheels, utterly out of control.

  About forty feet from the pool, the cart’s velocity approached fifty miles an hour as, with no idea where or who he was or what was going on, Cooper whacked his head against the aluminum dashboard and slumped, unconscious, the world around him going black as his brain tuned out and shut down.

  64

  Once his equipment detected the signal from Cooper’s homing beacon, Popeye’s first action had been to contact Captain Sampson. Communicating with Sampson over his radio headset, he explained that the source of the beacon’s signal was most likely the civilians the Hampton had retrieved earlier that morning. He told Sampson why the civilians had asked to be deposited on the island to begin with-that they had been onto whatever was going down on the island well before any of the shit had hit the fan. Popeye then said he thought it was worth Sampson’s consideration to grant him permission to retrieve the civilians and bring them back aboard the sub, and to wait for him while he did it.

  Sampson, who knew a lot more than Popeye about the situation above water, remained silent for somewhere around ten seconds before telling Popeye he would give him only twenty minutes-no discussion, no extension, and no guarantee he’d even wait that long.

  “If additional shit hits the fan, SEAL,” Sampson said, “we will not be here when you get back. It’s your risk to take.”

  Popeye accepted the terms and, piloting the MSLC at top speed, reached the shore of the resort’s lagoon in seven minutes. Two minutes later, he was in the process of slinging Laramie over his shoulder when the screeching tires of the careening golf cart sounded out on the poolside tile. Popeye turned just in time to witness the cart skid onto its side, slam directly into the pool-side bar, then spin, catch, and roll end over end in a headlong whirl that concluded in the changing room of the nearest poolside cabana. The cart’s long-since-unconscious occupant had been ejected from his seat during the second-to-last roll across the poolside tile, and, following a bounce, splashlanded in the pool.

  Popeye mobilized, and from the time he pulled Cooper from the pool, it took him ten minutes and forty-seven seconds to get across the lagoon, out into the depths, and back into the clutches of the SEAL Hole, his passengers intact, latch closed, and Captain Zeke Sampson notified of his arrival thirteen seconds shy of the deadline Sampson had fully intended to enforce.

  With Cooper out cold, Neither Sampson nor Popeye could have known how fortunate they had been that Popeye sealed the hatch between the SEAL Hole and the sea at the very moment he did.

  Missile 16 launched much the way the preceding fifteen had before it. Flooding the cavern with flames, heat, and spent rocket fuel, it pushed partially up through the silo hole at the peak of the missile cavern, its blunt nose beginning to emerge from the hill above. Then, as the missile crossed the designated height of seventy-eight feet above sea level, the magnetic bubble within the air pressure-based altitude trigger of Spike Gibson’s conventional bomb snapped into place, causing the strip of metal that housed the magnetic bubble to strike an electronic contact. A current then initiated the detonation of the Semtex compound.

  The yield of the conventional explosion that followed was easily sufficient to vaporize the float plane Lana had planned on using to flee the island but would not, ordinarily, have been of adequate yield to penetrate or otherwise impact the skin of a W-76 warhead. The second round of SN-3s fired from the Scavenger, for instance, had taken down the fourteenth missile in a ball of flame, but no further detonations had resulted.

  Missile 16, however, was one of the original Tridents Deng had salvaged from the USS Chameleon. Sustaining water pressure of some thirty-eight times that found at sea level, the warhead had incurred substantial weakening of its infrastructure and developed a subsurface longitudinal fracture that went undetected by Deng’s scientists. Over time, the internal fracture had broken the warhead’s skin, a minuscule crack reaching from nose to fantail.

  Detonation of a W-76 thermonuclear warhead occurred when the bomb’s conventional explosive charge, called HE for high explosive, was triggered by an armed altitude trigger functioning in the reverse capacity of the device in Gibson’s bomb. Once triggered, the conventional HE explosion directed one subcritical U-235 mass against a larger, supercritical mass-110-plus pounds of fully enriched uranium. The splitting of the U-235 atom resulted in an uncontrolled chain reaction that took place in its entirety in under a millionth of a second.

  To reduce size and weight, the HE substance chosen by the engineers was impervious only to heat of temperatures up to fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. W-76 production had therefore been ordered by the Pentagon inclusive of this single known risk: that an accidental ignition of a substance that burned at exceedingly high temperature could cause the detonation of the HE compound, and therefore trigger the nuke blast, were the skin of the warhead somehow breached.

  At the eighty-foot mark, the explosion of the Semtex compound ignited the fuel in missile 16’s booster rocket. The dual explosions breached the skin of the flawed warhead, and the eighteen-hundred-degree heat of the explosions ignited the HE.

  It was in this manner that a thermonuclear explosion occurred atop what had previously been a lush Caribbean island called Mango Cay.

  The breach in the warhead’s skin permitted a significant percentage of the energy released by the HE blast to escape. In the end, this meant that Cooper had managed to deliver only a low-efficiency nuclear explosion amounting to a yield of under one-half of one percent of the potential of a technically sound W-76 warhead. The blast nonetheless laid its wrath upon the world immediately surrounding its flash point.

  The detonation vaporized the hill and decimated every item within the missile cavern, including the ignition and trigger mechanisms for Deng’s secret, forty-third missile. A rim of wat
er extending two hundred feet from shore immediately boiled, while an eight-foot tidal wave spread at great speed in an expanding circle from the explosion’s epicenter. Instantaneously generated winds of nearly 250 miles per hour churned the atmosphere and the ocean’s surface across a five-mile radius from ground zero.

  Nearby, the USS Scavenger incurred debilitating structural damage and was nearly capsized by the one-two punch of the initial blast concussion and subsequent tidal wave. Beneath the surface of the ocean, the force behind the initial concussive blast was reduced by nearly fifty percent per quarter mile, so that the initial sledgehammer strike of the blast wave had less impact on the Hampton than on the Scavenger-but still, the Hampton’s crew, along with its limited civilian guest roster, got tossed around the sub like confetti in a windstorm.

  Some repair work necessitated a delay in the provision of medical attention to the civilians in the Hampton’s SEAL Hole, but once Captain Sampson regained control of the vessel and conditions returned to normal, the civilians were taken to the sick bay and treated by the submarine’s excellent medical staff.

  Cooper and Laramie snoozed through the whole ordeal.

  65

  Of the fourteen Tridents that were able to clear the Mango Cay vicinity, only missiles 3 and 13 penetrated the NORAD-guided strategic defense weaponry to reach their targets within the borders of the United States. Missile 13 was a replica created by Deng’s team of scientists and turned out to be a dud; failing to release its MIRVs, it crashed uselessly into the tarmac on the longest runway of one of its four intended targets, Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

  Missile 3, an original, delivered fifty percent of its payload. Due to advancing age, poor maintenance, and the physical abuse wrought upon them by the sinking of the USS Chameleon, two of the missile’s MIRVs nose-dived past the altitude-trigger height assigned their warheads and disintegrated on impact well off target near Mount Shasta, in northern California; MIRVs 3 and 4 delivered their warheads between ten and fifteen miles off course, at an elevation of approximately two thousand feet above, though well east, of the additional California-based targets of Edwards Air Force Base and Camp Pendleton.

  With this limited list of strikes, Operation Blunt Fist failed to deliver the punishing blow Deng had sought. The planned invasions by the member nations of the so-called revolutionary brotherhood, already on hold following the demise of its leaders, were hastily aborted. The dual thermonuclear explosions nonetheless caused the deaths of 4,784 American citizens, in addition to 673 foreign visitors, within twenty seconds of their detonations. Authorities estimated another three to four thousand casualties would result from extreme radiation exposure outside of the core blast zone.

  Once certain intelligence came to light-including photographs retrieved from a severely damaged digital camera strapped to the back of a Caribbean-based CIA operative-the United States implemented a series of military actions referred to by the president as “global peace-keeping efforts.” Amassing significant naval power in the South China Sea to deter China from responding, the American military effected an occupation of Taiwan to ensure the republic’s independence; peace-keeping or defensive occupations followed in Yemen, South Korea, and eight other nations around the globe.

  The president used the catastrophe to his advantage in two additional ways: first, in a series of diplomatic summits with China’s newly appointed premier, he gained sweeping free-trade concessions hugely favorable to American corporations; second, his stratospheric popularity ratings discouraged Senator Alan Kircher from seeking the Republican presidential nomination, virtually assuring the president’s re-election.

  66

  Laramie was trying to get oriented. She found she was coming awake in a hospital bed someplace where the sun shone through her window. Palm trees swayed and flipped in an easy breeze. An anesthesiologist, and then a surgeon, visited her, each examining her before informing her she was doing just fine. She asked the surgeon where she was, and he told her she’d been brought here to South Miami Hospital by the U.S. Navy. When she asked why they’d brought her to Miami, he told her it was because of his expertise-that the navy relied on him for such things. When she asked what his area of expertise happened to be, he told her he was pretty good at repairing internal damage from bullet wounds, but that she didn’t need to worry, since the bullet they’d been concerned with had failed to exact any long-term toll on its path through her lower back and upper hip.

  She asked him whether there had been anyone else the navy had sent to him for treatment, and he told her there hadn’t been, at least not recently. Laramie thanked the surgeon and he left.

  She fell asleep the moment he was gone.

  The sun was still out, though more orange than yellow, when she woke up again to see a nurse standing in the doorway of her room. The nurse apologized for the intrusion, but informed her there was a visitor who had been waiting in the lobby for some time, and was quite insistent on seeing her. When Laramie asked who it was, the nurse told her that the man had identified himself as Jacob Bartleby.

  Laramie tried to shrug but found this to be unexpectedly challenging and discovered they’d put a splint on her right arm. It kept the arm pinned against her body.

  “I don’t know anyone by that name,” she said, “but I suppose you can send him in.”

  A moment later, a short man wearing a navy blue business suit entered through the doorway, smiled curtly, and said, “Thank you for seeing me. I understand you’re recovering from surgery, and so, will be brief.”

  “Thank you.” Laramie felt vaguely woozy.

  The man set a briefcase on the table beside the bed, opened it, withdrew a manila folder, and shut the briefcase.

  “Please allow me to introduce myself-as the song goes,” he said and smiled at his own joke. Laramie nodded dutifully.

  “I represent a real estate investment firm incorporated in the Cayman Islands,” he said. “From time to time my clients make strategic investments in exotic resort properties and related recreational assets.”

  “Recreational assets?”

  “Deep-sea charter vessels, SCUBA training schools, tropical-”

  “How can I help you? Excuse me, but I’m very tired.”

  “Of course.” He withdrew a notarized sheet of paper from the manila folder and turned it around so Laramie could see it.

  “As I understand it,” Bartleby said, “this is the deed to your condominium property in Falls Church, Virginia. I’ll leave this on the table for you, or would be happy to arrange storage in a safe-deposit box at the bank of your choosing.”

  “Deed-what day is it?” Laramie attempted to sit up and look around for a wall calendar but found she could neither sit up nor find a calendar, so she gave up and said, “The payment couldn’t be that late, could it?”

  “You’re not late at all. Allow me to explain: my clients have paid off your mortgage.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My clients understand you to have been suspended without pay by your employer. And while my clients believe it unlikely the suspension will hold once the independent counsel submits its report on the matter to which your suspension relates, they have nonetheless arranged for your utilities, auto loan, health insurance, and gym membership to be paid in full for a two-year period beginning on the date of your discharge from the hospital. The U.S. Navy is apparently somewhat more appreciative of your recent activities than your employer, as they are footing the bill of your current hospital stay.”

  Bartleby withdrew a second sheet of paper to which a small blue rectangular slip had been stapled. Laramie watched, wondering whether the odd words coming from this man’s lips meant that she was still asleep.

  “My clients are periodically in need of research consultants-a scout, I believe they call the role-and a source has identified you as a candidate for one of these positions.” He turned the sheet of paper around, and Laramie could see that the smaller slip of paper was a check. “This is an indepen
dent consulting agreement which you would need to sign, or can execute by deposit of the attached cashier’s check. The mortgage payoff and utilities advances are in no way contingent upon execution of this agreement. Incidentally, the check is made out in the sum of one hundred thirty-one thousand dollars.”

  Laramie blinked and said, “Two years of my salary.”

  “I believe that is how the figure was calculated.”

  Bartleby stacked the contract, check, and deed on the bedside table, withdrew a pen from the breast pocket of his jacket, set the pen on the contract, then removed another item from the folder: a thin, colorful paperback book.

  “You would be required to travel extensively but would receive a per diem and be entitled to first-class travel and accommodations. All such arrangements would be subject to your approval, and paid by my clients on a direct-billing basis.” He held up the book, which Laramie saw was called Caribbean Hideaways. “Your assigned scouting duties would include the list of resorts described in this publication. You would be required to submit a report on each resort at the conclusion of your stay. My clients will provide you a notebook computer with wireless Internet access for this purpose.”

  He set the book on the table.

  “If the terms of my clients’ offer are acceptable to you, sign the consulting agreement at your leisure and fax the executed agreement to the number provided. And I apologize,” he said, “but I nearly forgot to mention that you would of course not be expected to travel alone, and may bring a guest. My clients would pay the travel expenses of your guest as well.”