Painkiller

50

Cooper breathed rhythmically through the regulator. The breathing apparatus he wore generated a noise only its occupant could hear and emitted no bubbles; the noise it made sounded to Cooper like the rushing of a brook through the woods. He heard it each time he exhaled.

Cooper, Laramie, and Popeye rode in the SEAL Hole’s mini-submarine landing craft. Built in various sizes and launched solely from SEAL Holes, the skin of the minisubs appeared to all existing underwater detection systems as organic matter; they were also internally amphibious, so that their passengers could occupy and operate an MSLC with the cockpit either flooded with seawater, or empty and dry.

Popeye had them operating in wet mode along Mango Cay’s eastern shoreline. Along with their wet suits, Cooper and Laramie wore masks equipped with infrared underwater scopes, so that even in the murk of dawn, they could observe the approach of the island’s underwater cliffs in a splash of pale red light.

As Popeye took them into the cavern, Cooper looked around through the windshield of the sub. The entrance, now passing behind them, was massive. The sides of the hole consisted of pockmarked lava rock, strewn with splotchy outcroppings of algae and seaweed. He looked over at Laramie. She found his eyes through the masks and shrugged.

Between the curtains of fish, he could see they were approaching the rear of the cavern, the glassy surface of the water a few feet above them. Cooper noticed he was sweating, then remembered the water temperature inside the cave. He guessed it was upward of ninety-five degrees.

The light source they’d seen on the video playback shifted-changing, as they neared the surface, from a single, diffuse glow to a series of crisp white circles. Popeye pulled back on the joystick and hovered.

“SEAL Hole bus service ends here,” he said, speaking over their sonar headsets. He pointed. “When I get us around that corner, punch the yellow knob on the console. It’ll release you below the sub. I’d get out ASAP-Geiger count doesn’t bode well for the lymph nodes.” He adjusted a knob on the control panel. “You’ve got four and a half hours on the clock, Brutus. The Hampton will remain within SEAL Hole range of this location for no longer than that time period. Your knapsack contains a remote homing device; if you need a ride before the carriage turns into a pumpkin, press the button and I’ll find you.”

Popeye got on the joystick again and the MSLC nosed its way into the corner of the cove where the video playback from the UUV had registered a tangle of utility pipes. A cloud of fish darted from the nook; it looked to Cooper as though they were about three feet beneath the surface.

“Adiós, compañeros,” Popeye said. “End of the line.”

Cooper and Laramie followed Popeye’s orders and punched their release buttons.

Free of the sub, Cooper watched as Popeye spun the MSLC around, waved at them through the cockpit glass, and motored toward the gaping exit hole.

“Adiós,” Cooper said.

When the pager buzzed on his waist, Spike Gibson whipped his arms to their fully extended state, dropped the barbell on its twin hooks, and stood. He checked the pager and saw, among other facts, that it was 6:39 A.M.

There were two computer workstations on Mango Cay that were immediately and electronically notified in the case of a breach of the island’s security perimeter. The first was the primary guard station; the second was Gibson’s personal desktop.

Gibson unlocked the twin doors to his office, entered the appropriate codes on the keyboard, and checked the location of the breach. The half-crescent outline of a sector, highlighted in red, flashed lazily on the monitor.

The entrance to the missile cavern.

This sort of notification had happened maybe five or ten thousand times before, most frequently in the six months following the installation of the monitoring system. With the alarm ringing now, though-long after they’d made the changes in sensitivity-Gibson knew that whatever had breached the perimeter had to be, at a minimum, the approximate size of a whale. Examining the stat line on his monitor, Gibson saw that the object that had just slipped into the cavern was a great deal larger than that. The object, according to his monitor, was big enough to land a plane on, and was already surfacing inside the outer cove.

When this type of object had arrived in the past, Gibson had at least been given suitable advance notice. Today, though, there had been no such notification. No matter: he knew what-and who-had come. Playing back the relevant footage, Gibson confirmed his surmise: there, floating behind the usual canvas of teeming fish, was a colossal, cigar-shaped vessel of some five hundred feet in length.

The Eagle, he thought, has landed.

Considering that the next twenty-four hours represented the culmination of approximately fifteen years of meticulous planning, it occurred to Gibson that even a man so bold and vain as General Deng-Premier Deng-would be unlikely to commit so vain and foolhardy an act as to make an appearance now. At least not without something up his sleeve.

Gibson had already been giving a great deal of thought to the question Deng had asked him on his last visit. It had been a simple question, loaded with any number of meanings-And your other projects?-but Gibson figured he could translate the intended message with ease.

Deng had not previously referred to any facets of Operation Blunt Fist as Gibson’s “projects”-in fact, Gibson hadn’t heard Deng use that term for any purpose. Upon hearing Deng’s question, Gibson had shut down his harvest operation for a couple days. He examined each of the archived closed-circuit feeds from the last couple of months to see whether something Deng had seen might have given him away; he examined everything else he could think of that could possibly have brought his “project” to Deng’s attention. He found nothing.

Mildly uneasy, Gibson restarted the extraction sessions, and it wasn’t until now, with Deng slipping his PLN submarine into the docking station of the main missile cavern, that Gibson admitted he’d been outfoxed.

Deng knew.

Gibson walked downstairs, jumped aboard his golf cart, and started up the trail to Admiral Li’s bungalow. He figured the admiral would want to join him for whatever it was Premier Deng had up his sleeve.