Painkiller

56

Lana had the accelerator pinned to the floor, allowing her to kneel backward on the seat to monitor her captives while the cart’s motor kept on. She had the MAC-10 trained on Cooper, the strap draped over her shoulder-if any bumps caused her to fumble it, the gun would spring back to her trigger hand.

Cooper pushed, Laramie beside him. The cart’s fat wheels kept getting stuck in the mud, and there wasn’t enough horsepower in the vehicle’s battery-powered motor to lessen the challenge in the slightest.

The ordeal, though, was not as difficult as Cooper made it seem. Hanging his head, he made sure his movements took on a slow, exaggerated quality-Cooper, the beaten-down man. He grunted as he pushed, his chest heaving, face and neck slick with perspiration. Laramie watched him, initially trying to figure out whether he’d been wounded, but she soon caught his eye and found that the look he was giving her didn’t match the show. Seeing this, she decided to join in, curious where he was headed but along for the ride wherever it took them.

Cooper began to experience a form of flashback. Slices of his recurring nightmares streamed across his interior field of vision, appearing as a kind of picture-in-a-picture, his normal vision the regular screen, the nightmare segments superimposed as a miniature moving image in the upper-left corner. The images were familiar to him-the hands, guiding him through the tunnel-crescents of light searing his eyes through gaps in the blindfold-hacking swings with the machete, killing them all in a sea of blood.

He wondered whether what he was seeing was some new variation of the post-traumatic stress disorder that had brought him to the Caribbean to start with, and kept him bathed in a cold sweat night after night-or just his soul’s way of telling him this wasn’t the way he wanted to cash out. Telling him he was just as fucked as he had been in that Central American dungeon, and if he didn’t figure something out by the time they reached the end of the tunnel, he’d join Marcel in that place where zombies reside in the ever-after.

Listening to whatever message it was, broadcast by way of the picture-in-a-picture, Cooper continued to set the stage for the only play he held any hope of making, which was to lull the maid to sleep. He figured if he got her accustomed to slow movements passing before her eyes, if he convinced her he truly was dragging ass, then, when he made whatever move he had in him, he would at least have a fraction of an advantage going for him when he did it.

He noticed that the tunnel was beginning to fill with a black, sooty layer of smoke, laden with particles he could taste on his tongue. He assumed the smoke was related to the noise that had begun to pulse through the tunnel in waves-maybe it came from backup power generators, maybe from something else, he thought, but either way, it was getting harder to see, and breathe.

Which might have helped him, except that the maid was very good. The soulless black eye at the end of her gun never blinked, and the soulless hands that held the gun failed to waver. Cooper trudged on, playing his drag-ass game, all too aware of the approaching doorway at the end of the tunnel.

When they reached it, he figured their time was up.

The countdown clock in Deng’s Mobile War Room told him that fourteen minutes remained until the first missile was airborne, but his sonar-mapping feed told him the U.S. Navy reconnaissance boat would reach the island in three minutes tops. This wouldn’t give the navy much time before the first of the missiles got airborne, but while it was possible the American troops could wreck a few of his missiles, this didn’t bother him. Enough of the missiles would make it out to accomplish the aims of Operation Blunt Fist.

What bothered him was the remote likelihood that circumstances would allow the U.S. Navy to discover something tying him to Mango Cay. The only way this could occur was through the slim chance that an operations team could sabotage the power grid prior to the ignition of the very last missile in the series.

The forty-third missile.

Deng believed he hadn’t left a shred of evidence; except for the remaining presence of Admiral Li’s body and Gibson’s pending departure-both of which fit snugly into the strategy Deng had planned from the outset-he had been fanatical about keeping the People’s Republic of China out of all affairs related to the island and its contents. He found it unlikely that his visit this morning, including his tumble into the exhaust hole, had blemished his carefully cleaned slate-Deng assumed Gibson would dispatch his captives and vanish with his maid in tow.

Had the navy boat been scheduled to reach the island an hour from now, or anytime toward the conclusion of the launch sequence, none of this would matter. At that late stage, Deng defied anyone to pry open or otherwise affect the unique lockbox he’d installed beneath another of the exhaust holes. Utilizing a final set of four W-76 warheads, Deng had arranged for the forty-third “missile” in the sequence-really just a warhead grouping buried beneath a slab of lava-to skip any form of launch and simply detonate.

At that point there would be nothing left of Mango Cay-or, for that matter, most of the Windward Islands. This, of course, meant that even the spinmasters running the American publicity machine would have nothing to work with. Risk vulnerability to some form of sabotage, though-including the possibility of a U.S. Navy reconnaissance team making landfall within minutes-and Deng knew he’d be exposing himself to exactly the sort of self-serving inquiry the American government yearned to make.

The crew of Deng’s submarine had been monitoring the U.S. Navy destroyer’s approach for hours, having first detected it prior to his visit to the missile cavern. Deng guessed that the Americans in the cavern had something to do with its presence, but he wasted no time speculating.

He connected to the captain of the sub with the War Room’s hotline. When the captain asked how he could be of service to his comrade premier, Deng ordered him to activate the submarine’s torpedo tubes.

“Fish on the loose!”

It was the first time Captain Zeke Sampson had heard the exclamation uttered for real. His crew aboard the Hampton had used the phrase endlessly during their quarterly exercises, the phrase signifying a live enemy torpedo had been fired into the water. The words now spread like wildfire up and down the chain of command, sparking the calculated, practiced series of actions forming the Hampton’s counterattack strategy.

Sampson immediately ordered a dual-salvo torpedo attack. Seconds after he gave the order, another call the crew had previously made only during war games came back up the radio grapevine:

“Shark out of the cage! Two! Two sharks out!”

Catchphrase delivered, the crew members aboard the Hampton braced for the concussion they knew would come almost instantaneously with the detonation of two nuclear-tipped torpedoes in fifteen fathoms of water at a distance of only seven hundred yards.