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.
57
When Deng’s twin torpedoes struck the hull of the PX-38 U.S. Navy reconnaissance launch boat, the vessel and its crew erupted in an explosion so overwhelming that within twenty-five seconds not a single scrap of shrapnel remained on the ocean’s surface. One moment the thirty-eight-foot sea-to-land attack craft had been skimming the Caribbean at thirty-five knots; in the next, there was a thud; the third marked an explosion that blasted the boat into a cloud of shrapnel mist.
Then the Caribbean returned to the state in which it had found itself prior to the boat’s arrival.
Deng was able to savor the destruction of the launch boat for two full seconds.
In the third, his War Room monitors told him two additional torpedoes had been released into the sea in fatally close proximity to his submarine lair. He knew immediately what this meant, and since he also knew there would be little time to do anything else, he simply set his jaw and stared with satisfaction as the last seconds of his life ticked off the countdown clock.
Now that he’d destroyed the reconnaissance boat, Deng knew the countdown would continue.
No one could stop it.
Eight seconds following the direct hit of Deng’s torpedoes against the launch boat, the Hampton’s modified Mk-48 nuclear-tipped torpedoes commenced a dual-stage explosion that resulted in the complete disintegration of three-quarters of Deng’s submarine.
The first Mk-48 detonated mid-hull on the starboard side of the sub, vaporizing most of the sub’s steel skin. This resulted in an implosion; the submarine folded partly in on itself, sucking over a million gallons of water into its cavities, a brief underwater black hole. On the ocean’s surface fifteen fathoms above, an oval-shaped area depressed by two inches.
Then the second Mk-48 struck; with so many of the sub’s cavities flooded, the detonation blasted outward in all directions. At sea level, the ocean shot suddenly skyward in a geyser of salt water and shrapnel.
Because they took place beginning at T-minus 00:13:39 on the Mobile War Room’s countdown clock, the twin Mk-48 explosions meant that Premier Deng Jiang would not live to witness the manifestation of Operation Blunt Fist.