Sampson did not view this as an exercise. For him, nothing was-he ran a tight sub, and, loose, tight, or otherwise, a U.S. Navy nuclear attack submarine always operated at wartime readiness.
He brought the Hampton to within seven hundred yards of the bogey.
In order to provide sufficient power to ignite forty-two Trident intercontinental missiles over a launch period of eighty-four minutes, Deng’s engineers had recommended a five-plant in-line generator grid that, while spearheaded by an accelerated use of the nuclear reactor, had little resemblance to the clandestine power-generation the reactor produced in the course of its routine duty.
Stage one of the power boost involved the automated sinking of six times the typical count of U-238/U-235 fuel rods into the pool within the reactor; stages two through five supplemented that energy glut with the ignition of four massive diesel generators. The diesels providing the power for these generators had been diverted from a Chinese strip-mining site in Mongolia; each engine’s twenty-four cylinders displaced 110 liters and burned nearly ten gallons of fuel per minute, belching an unfiltered cloud of soot.
Once the generators ramped up to the specified 4,000 rpm, the power grid feeding the missile-launch system contained sufficient juice to light the rocket engine propellant within a missile forty-two times in rapid succession, at least by aerospace standards. This process began thirty minutes ahead of Deng’s revised launch time of noon and would hit full wattage nine minutes before the first missile was set to enter the history books.
In the meantime, with the reactor accelerated and the diesels kicking on in sequence, Mango Cay was subjected to the kind of uproar normally associated with cataclysmic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
One of the fastest items to move off the shelf when the Soviet Union disbanded was a set of fourteen diesel-powered midget submarines that had operated out of Ukraine’s Sevastopol harbor in the Black Sea. Upon dissolution of the empire, primary authority over Soviet matériel housed in the former republics was ceded to the newly independent republics-meaning, among other things, that various superpower-grade implements of destruction were placed in the hands of nations so poor and corrupt that nearly everything of value was sold within minutes, and the midget subs were no exception.
Sporting only a fraction of the beam of a typical nuclear sub at eighty-five feet, the subs had been built in the late 1970s as the Soviet precursor to SEAL Holes. They were designed as two-man vehicles, with a freight capacity similar to that of a forty-eight-foot shipping container. Twelve of the fourteen subs had been sold on the open market between 1991 and 1996 to various tourism companies; the thirteenth sub had been decommissioned and sold as scrap metal due to a series of accidents that occurred during its time of service.
The fourteenth had been purchased by Spike Gibson.
He used it sparingly, since he’d procured the sub primarily to get the hell off the island when the shit hit the fan-such as a time like the present-but he had applied its services from time to time. One use had been as a handy-dandy disposable laborer-retriever.
Gibson drove into the cargo cave and ditched his cart. Moving past the yellow crane, he ambled through a doorway that was normally locked, but which he’d opened along with all the island’s other doors once Deng hit the road. He flipped a switch, and the pocket cavern housing his Ukrainian sub revealed itself under the lights.
He leaped aboard the sub’s deck, scaled its six-foot conning tower, and boarded through the main hatch. When he started it up, the old contraption belched a cloud of black smoke but soon settled into a mellow purr. Gibson sealed the hatch, worked the crude controls, and navigated beneath the underwater ledge separating the pocket cavern from the cargo cave’s main lagoon. He parked it against the dock before spending a laborious few minutes opening the sub’s corrugated roof, a task accomplished by means of an ill-greased hand crank. When he had the roof open, he climbed out directly from the freight bay, stalked across the floor of the cave to the yellow crane, took the control seat, and started her up.
He maneuvered the crane on the tracks until its arm was positioned above the warhead storage container at the back of the cavern. There was a six-inch eye bolted to the top of the container; Gibson worked the crane’s arm, causing the hook end of its cable to swing like an upside-down metronome, and jammed the left-hand lever forward and took a shot at the eyebolt with the hook. It clanged off the hole on the first couple of attempts, but he nailed it on the fourth. As the hook slipped through the hole, Gibson pulled back on the right-hand lever, elevating the arm. The cable tautened.
He gunned the engine and lifted the box, the rear of the crane creaking under the strain of the weight. When he had the container a few feet off the cavern floor, he steered his way backward and to the left, swinging the container across the stacks of equipment and debris until he had it hanging above the open cavern floor. Easing the container to the floor, he slackened the cable another notch and locked the crane in place.
Pulling the wireless remote from his belt, Gibson keyed the sequences on its pad, and the container’s padlocks popped open one by one. He removed the eight locks, and then, squatting with a perfectly rigid back, slipped his fingers under the lid of the container and lifted the slab as though it were a cardboard stage prop.
Lid open, Gibson surveyed his merchandise: three W-76 warheads, each capable of generating an explosion equivalent to the simultaneous detonation of one hundred thousand tons of TNT. According to some casual probes he’d ordered up, Gibson estimated the market value of each of the warheads at just over two hundred million dollars gross. This meant that after the necessary but obscenely expensive middlemen and the various bribery, transport, and money-laundering-related expenses, Gibson figured he was now staring at a minimum of one hundred and eighty million bucks, net-free, clear, and tax-free.
Two-forty sounded even better.
He dropped the lid and examined his watch. Lana was late, and while it was certainly possible that good ol’ Albert Einstein had caused her some difficulty, he was confident she could handle him, and instead attributed her delay to the mud that inevitably plagued the tunnel following a morning rain. Moving a golf cart holding a hundred-kiloton warhead through a quarter mile of mud, he thought, might just take their latest disposable laborers a little longer than usual.
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.