Painkiller

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 water 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.