Painkiller

28

Eleven revolutionary leaders stood behind the resort on Mango Cay in freshly pressed hiking gear.

Arriving here over the course of two days, the dignitaries had traveled through four different regional hubs-San Juan, Kingston, St. Lucia, and, for some of the higher-profile leaders, Havana. From these hubs, arrangements had been made for clandestine transportation to six different Antilles harbors, where private float planes, free of all customs inspection or other unwelcome review, completed the trip to the resort. Each man’s personal security detail, if any, was disallowed for this last leg of the journey, as had been agreed.

On the third morning of their visit to the resort, the leaders were told to meet at 8 A.M. sharp in front of the Greathouse. The men were told to wear clothes suitable for a hike in the woods, such clothes having been set out for each man in his private cabana.

Not accustomed to being made to wait, the men lingered uncomfortably until the sound of thrumming motors approached from the woods. It was then that Spike Gibson and a man the leaders had come to know as the resort’s bartender appeared from a trailhead at the base of the island’s lone hill. Each drove his own stretch golf cart, three rows of seats per cart, outfitted with all-weather tires and raised suspensions. Gibson and the bartender, whose name was Hiram, pulled the carts to either side of the trail.

Gibson made small talk with some of the men, speaking to several in their native languages. Then, at five past eight, General Deng and Admiral Li arrived on a smaller-though equally equipped-cart. Deng and Li wore hiking gear too, and when they exited the smaller cart, Hiram and Gibson boarded it and drove off, disappearing around a corner on their way up the island’s rainforest hill.

Deng invited the men to board the limo carts and took the wheel of one; Li took the other. With Li following directly behind, Deng led the two-cart procession along the same route taken by Gibson and Hiram.

This was the first time the brethren had seen their mentor, and Deng knew one or two of them would still be wondering who he was, while others must have been bursting at the seams with surprise, even awe. China! he figured much of the brethren to be thinking. And not just a midlevel officer, acting alone, but a vice premier, overseeing the entire military of the greatest revolutionary nation on earth!

He began a disjointed narration as they drove, his speech aided by a wireless translation system, its software rendering his Mandarin into Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, and a pair of African dialects. The system required his guests to wear earpieces and receivers resembling iPods; running on a three-second delay, Deng’s words were delivered into the ears of his guests in their native tongues.

Deng told the men about the salvage operation. He told them how he had shown patience where the Americans had not. How he had taken one of the C-4 Trident I missiles and shipped it in pieces to a laboratory in Hangzhou, where a team of military scientists created an exact, working replica. How he had shipped the replica to another lab, where a second team of scientists assembled another dozen replicas based on the prototype. The circuit was repeated until, in addition to the full complement of twenty-four missiles he’d ultimately recovered from the USS Chameleon, Deng had another twenty-four replicas on his hands. He told the guests that each of the forty-eight missiles was, in theory, fully functional, with each C-4 ICBM loaded with four 100-kiloton W-76 thermonuclear warheads and Mk-4 MIRV re-entry vehicles. Six of the forty-eight missiles-all six part of the inventory of originals pilfered from the Chameleon-had been partially damaged from the American submarine’s sinking, he reported, and were being repaired in a secondary cave.

One of four African revolutionary leaders in the procession inquired as to how Deng had kept the work quiet. Deng answered through the translation headsets.

“We keep the work quiet,” he said, “with something our security director prefers to call ‘disposable labor.’ ”

He did not explain further, and nobody asked for clarification.

The gravel path had become a skinny dirt road, then a muddy trail, and in due course they were ducking palm fronds, snapping twigs with the rearview mirrors, and spinning out in muddy sections of the road. They reached another trailhead, and Deng parked, locked the foot brake, and turned to face his passengers. Some of the men appeared bewildered, others suspicious.

Deng said, “If you continue past this point on the trail, your last payment will be immediately drawn and posted to the operation’s account. The banking information and preauthorization we required from you will be used to execute the wire transfer, and the transaction will be executed within sixty seconds of Admiral Li’s e-mail notification.” Li held aloft a BlackBerry-like device. “You could, of course, turn around and walk back to the resort and the float planes there. If you decide to do so, bear in mind that Mr. Gibson knows how to find you-and always will. Your silence is not only expected, but will be strictly enforced. In a sense, if you withdraw now, you will become as ‘disposable’ as Mr. Gibson’s labor pool.”

When no leader took the exit option, Deng steered down a brief, steep slope. He worked the buttons of a handheld key-code remote, which, as they drove past a grove of squat palms, opened a hidden, reinforced steel door. He made a sharp turn to the left, and with Li following in the cart behind, the two loads of dignitaries found themselves in Mango Cay’s transport tunnel, an eight-foot-wide passageway with muddy gravel beneath the wheels of the carts. Timbers-not unlike those found in a mine shaft-spanned the ceiling at fifteen-foot intervals. They came shortly to another reinforced steel door. Deng stopped his cart, and Li did the same.

“Behold,” Deng said, “the supreme weapon of the Revolution. Though I, of course, prefer to use its code name: ‘Operation Blunt Fist.’ ”

He punched another code on the remote keypad and the door slid open to admit the procession into a vast cavern, its wide expanse carved by the hand of God but outfitted with man-made artifacts including at least two hundred ceiling-mounted floodlights and, most notably, forty-two white-and-black pillars of steel. Uniformed mercenaries, roving the facility in pairs, appeared from time to time behind one missile or another.

Each missile had its own freestanding silo, resembling scaffolding, reaching halfway to the cavern’s domed ceiling. There was a series of what looked like storm drains in the ceiling immediately above each silo, and numbers were painted on the cavern floor, the numbers climbing in sequence across each row of missiles from 1 to 42.

“All forty-two missiles in this cavern,” Deng said over the translation headsets, “will be operational within the week. The replica C-4s will-even upon detonation-be indistinguishable from authentic U.S. Navy-issue C-4 Trident I ICBMs. We have purchased metals from the supplier for Lockheed, stolen and duplicated guidance system components from Martin Marietta, constructed the warheads using uranium and plutonium with a signature matching that produced in Los Alamos. We have even used the same brand of paint for the exterior markings. There will be no accountability.”

The dignitaries followed Deng through the maze of silos, most of them dumbfounded that, at least by all appearances, he had actually succeeded with his plan.

Deng described the targeting strategy in general terms, naming a number of American military installations, and finished by saying, “The American military-industrial complex will be rendered impotent for at least months, and possibly years. As though struck,” he said, “by a blunt fist.” Deng liked this part, so he repeated it, trusting that in some form the translation would take:

“As though struck,” he said, “by a blunt fist.”

Deep in the cavern, near the back, stood a guest who had for-gone the walking tour. He leaned against a wide opening in the wall of the cave where, behind him, there stood the calm waters of an underwater docking bay. The conning tower of a medium-size submarine bereft of national insignia protruded from the water in the bay.

This man, like the others, wore a headset. He had been following the tour on audio, but had only come as far from his submarine as the position he occupied now.

In the world of the communist brotherhood Deng had recruited, there were few VIPs, and even fewer men-including those found throughout history-who qualified to function as royalty. The man leaning against the cavern wall, however, was to these men, as Deng well knew, quite literally a symbol of revolution itself.

An aging fossil of defiance in the face of capitalism, friend to all Marxist-Leninist regimes, the man had now, thanks to Vice Premier General Deng Jiang, inherited the role of royal mascot for the next phase of the revolution. As Deng’s tour came around the forty-second silo, the man stepped forward and raised a hand to his brethren. One by one, the faces of the other dignitaries in the procession registered precisely the look Deng had sought: a combination of shock, awe, and self-satisfaction. The man’s beard was thick and gray-even unruly-but he didn’t look nearly as old as most of the dignitaries had pegged him for.

At that point the mascot from Cuba grinned through teeth yellowed from too many years of gluttonous cigar consumption and joined his comrades for the conclusion of the tour.