Finally Gibson let go, and Cooper dropped like a dress on the body of a woman who’d just had her shoulder straps snipped. Gibson straightened, inclined his head, breathed deeply of the foul air of the cavern, and, vaguely satisfied, turned and retraced his route across the lava rock floor.
61
The pool of blood from Lana’s intestines seeped along the cargo cave’s floor, moving along the same downward slope that helped the electric cart propel itself into the pocket cavern. The blood, however, failed to make the full trip. Instead, it dripped into a crack in the floor, where it found a new slope to follow, and flowed into the lagoon.
Accustomed to the routine deposit of expired disposable laborers and totalitarian dictators here, a school of eleven tiger sharks-roaming the region independently, but linked by hunger and conditioning-knew that when blood was released into the water in a certain location beneath Mango Cay, a meal was in store. Thus, once Lana’s blood began to perfume the water-blooming outward from the crack in the floor where it emptied into the lagoon-the sharks arrived in short order beneath the belly of the Ukrainian sub. Soon, each shark, its nervous system confused at the lack of an available meal, began thrashing around and biting at random. The frantic pattern of cannibalistic abuse only worsened when the three lost warheads, splashing into the lagoon, proved inedible.
Prior experience, though, supported the possibility that more food was on the way, and so-driven by a primordial hope-the eleven sharks, each mildly confused and fully pissed off, remained within the confines of the lagoon.
Gibson vaulted from the dock to the nose of the sub and surveyed the damage. The collision between container and hull had put a wide dent in the side of the boat, but the dent was close enough to the waterline that it did not appear to have damaged the corrugated steel door he’d need to seal in order to keep the freight bay from springing a leak.
The container itself was lodged too low to drag or flip into the freight bay; it rested against the body of the submarine with its lid draped partially across the top of the sub, the main body of the container dangling nearly to the water. The good news for Gibson was that the fourth warhead occupied the slot closest to the sub, so that if he could get himself down to the main body of the container, it wouldn’t be difficult to grab hold of the bomb. Of course there was the issue of the warhead tipping the scales at just under four hundred pounds, but Gibson chose not to acknowledge this as a factor.
He climbed out of the open freight bay onto the bent container lid. Scaling down to the container’s main body, he lodged his left foot into the base of one of the empty warhead slots. Seizing the warhead’s harness, he disconnected then reconnected the various clips, buckles, and Velcro straps, securing the harness both to the warhead and around his shoulders and waist.
Thinking he could buy the leverage he needed by wedging his right foot against the skin of the submarine, Gibson planted himself, legs splayed, as a bridge between container and sub. He tested his footing with a bouncing motion. It held.
Tightening the straps, he sucked in a series of thick, heaving breaths, and lifted. The warhead began to inch from its slot, Gibson the bodybuilder doing a single squat rep under a 375-pound barbell. In fact, he just about had the rounded head of the warhead’s heavier side fully out of the foam padding when his right foot slipped on the wet steel of the submarine and he flipped sideways and splashed wildly into the water.
The warhead slunk back into its padded slot, so that the harness straps, affixed dually to Gibson and the warhead, prevented Gibson from dropping entirely beneath the surface. His right leg plunged into the lagoon, almost to the hip, but that was it. He flailed for one of the container’s latches with his right arm, but since it took him two attempts to grab hold, his escape from the water was accomplished a fraction of a second late.
Battling for position once the splash had alerted her to the possibility of food, one of the tiger sharks shot directly toward the source of this agitation and clamped down on the first flesh she found. When she locked her multiple rows of teeth around the muscled ligament and bone of Spike Gibson’s right shin, it took a few frenzied, thrashing jerks of her head to rip the bite off in her mouth, but, fiercely determined to eat, she succeeded in biting off a thick chunk, which she swallowed whole before spinning around to take another run at the offering.
Gibson screamed as his foot was torn from his leg midway up the shin, but when his ankle and foot separated from the rest of his leg, he popped high enough out of the water to grasp another, higher latch. Making a scrambling left-leg thrust into the padding, he pulled himself back onto the body of the container.
Seeing the stump where his right foot had previously been, Gibson first whimpered like a boy, then cursed at the top of his lungs, then screamed a level-toned roar of fury that echoed through the cargo cave.
Due partly to sheer brute strength borne of more than a decade of weight training, partly to unadulterated greed, and largely due to a freakishly large and instantaneous excretion of adrenaline into his bloodstream, Gibson, bearing down on his one good leg and pulling with bursting forearms from one latch to the next, somehow managed to uproot the W-76 warhead from its slot a second time and lift its immense weight fully out of the container.
Screaming and grunting in staccato bursts, every muscle popping with striated arteries, Gibson hefted the bomb across the six-foot gap spanning the container and the submarine’s freight bay. He set the warhead on the rim of the freight bay, threw himself over the edge, and, warhead still tottering on the rim, body half inside, Gibson snatched an exposed interior length of pipe and pulled on it until both he and the warhead rolled down and in.
Like a tug towing a barge, the falling weight of the warhead towed Gibson the eight long feet to the bottom of the freight bay, where his dual collision with the bomb and the floor crushed one of his shoulders. The arm and collarbone on either side of his shoulder snapped with a dull stereo-phonic crunch.
Otherwise, Gibson survived the tumble unscathed.
His heart pounding to the bursting point, Gibson nonetheless had the presence of mind to detach himself from the warhead harness, stand, and hop to the rusted hand crank controlling the bay’s retractable lid. One-armed and one-legged, he slowly turned the crank until he had the overhead door sealed shut. Taking an additional three minutes to tie off and wrap his stub leg with the shirt he wore, Gibson then ducked into the control room and executed the series of commands that would put the sub in gear.
A moment later, Spike Gibson, piloting his Ukrainian sub, dipped beneath the surface of the cargo cave’s underwater lagoon and vanished permanently from the island called Mango Cay.
62
Cooper had always been able to take a punch; back in the world now relegated to his nightmares, it was one of the ways he’d been able to lull his original captors into complacency too. This time, though, like a stupid iron-jawed fighter who’d stretched his career one fight too far, he had the feeling the beating he’d just taken would eventually leave him harebrained or dead. If he didn’t get himself to a very good hospital very soon, he’d be joining Marcel a little earlier than planned.