Painkiller

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.

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.