It wasn’t long before a crushing pain replaced the numbness in his head and shoulders. He came out of the beating with a headache made for an elephant, but between waves of agony and nausea he started to be able to see around the cavern again. He wiped the blood, sweat, and grime from the narrow slits once known as his eyes and saw Laramie there beside him, exactly where she’d been before. He could feel that his face had been torn open across his cheekbones and lips. He could taste the blood flowing as he moved; he tried to move his jaw, couldn’t, and decided it was broken. Feeling as though he weighed four thousand pounds, he performed a clumsy one-armed push-up and succeeded in pulling his good knee up under him. He shifted his weight from arm to leg and took a look around.
He could see-after another wiping of his eyes-that Spike Gibson, the fourth warhead, and the submarine were all gone. The lights in the cavern were failing, the black haze now so thick and low it reached almost to his face, crouched as he was on the cavern floor. He spotted movement through a doorway across the cavern, braced for another fight, then realized he was seeing the rear of the golf cart they’d pushed down the tunnel. The cart was bobbing against something that blocked its path.
He took about five minutes walking over to it, but once there, looked below the seats and unearthed what he remembered having seen on their journey through the tunneclass="underline" the maid had stowed their SLKs beneath the front seat. He slumped behind the steering wheel, solved the issue with the pinned accelerator, and drove back to Laramie. Once there, he opened one of the SLKs, found its first aid kit, and, through a remedy composed of strips of the shirt he was wearing, a portion of his body armor, and the contents of the first aid kit, did his best to stem the flow from Laramie’s wounds. He pulled from the same SLK the homing device Popeye had told them to use before the carriage turned back into a pumpkin, and pocketed it. Not that it mattered any longer, but he found himself wondering whether his camera was still inside his knapsack and, figuring Laramie would want to know, checked, and found it there.
Then he zipped both SLKs shut and strapped them on.
Small and light though she was, as Cooper lifted and loaded Laramie’s unconscious body onto the rear seat of the cart, he decided it was one of the most physically challenging tasks he’d ever endured-second only to his trek up the hill with Alphonse strapped to his waist. Still, he got Laramie aboard, fell into place again behind the steering wheel, and drove into the transport tunnel.
The mud made for slow going, but the lack of a warhead in the backseat helped. He found the side passage they’d passed on the way in, followed it for a while, eventually saw what appeared to be daylight, gunned the cart up a short slope, bounced through a rut, and shot suddenly into the blinding midday sunlight. He thought of the parable he’d heard about the man who saw only shadows on the wall of the cave in which he lived, until, years later, he turned around, discovering that the shadows had been caused by the sun he hadn’t known was there. He tried to remember where he’d heard this, or read it, but couldn’t.
Turning past the main building he’d noticed from their earlier visit with Gibson, he crossed the marble tiles of the poolside lounge and bounced onto the white sand beach. Reaching the beach’s trio of cedar deck chairs, he stomped the brake into place and, fighting a set of back spasms from the effort, lifted Laramie from the cart into one of the chairs. He pulled the homing beacon from his pocket, punched the red button protruding from one end of it, set the beacon on Laramie’s lap, and unloaded himself into the chair beside her.
It was as Cooper sat there, his swollen, pulpy head drooped, that the beach below him began to vibrate. From his limited perspective, staring down, he saw grains of sand tumble from the crests of the miniature hills built by the wind.
Then, against the sky behind him, a glorious explosion of white smoke and yellow flame burst from the peak of Mango Cay’s lone hill. The roar of an immense fire raged, Cooper feeling the heat of its flame against the back of his neck even from three-quarters of a mile away, and the first blunt-nosed C-4 Trident I missile blasted from its silo beneath the hill. The missile rose through the clouds of its own rocket fuel and the diesel exhaust until, as Cooper turned to watch, it cleared the smoke and sliced into the clear blue Caribbean sky. To Cooper the missile looked like a photograph of itself cut and pasted on a glossy, bluish purple background intended to represent the sky.
He blinked in the blinding yellow glare, turned away, and let his swollen head droop so low that his broken jaw almost touched his chest.
“Aw, crap,” he said.
When the first of Operation Blunt Fist’s missiles reached an elevation of five hundred feet above sea level, three simultaneous notifications were immediately transmitted by the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s primary computer system. The first notification went to the staff manning a room on the grounds of Peterson Air Force Base, NORAD’s headquarters near Colorado Springs. The second notification was sent by the equivalent of a multimedia instant messaging service to a series of government officials. Lou Ebbers, Alan Kircher, Carlos Muske, Secretary of Defense Wally Parke, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the vice president, and the president were among those receiving immediate notification.
The third missive triggered an instantaneous escalation of the U.S. military’s readiness status to DEFCON-1, known also as “maximum force readiness.” Civilian agencies were placed on EMERGCON alert.
Under DEFCON-1, the required approvals for a counterlaunch of American strategic nuclear assets could be granted, based on historical precedent from simulation exercises, no faster than seven minutes following the moment at which the president received notification that enemy missiles had got airborne. Transit time for the average U.S. ICBM to just about any worldwide target, including one in the Caribbean, involved a minimum of sixteen minutes, due to the ballistic trajectory of the weapons.
Thus, in all likelihood-if in fact it were ever ordered at all-at least twenty-three minutes would pass before any U.S. nuclear counterstrike could reach Mango Cay.
Sitting with his head slumped forward, staring blankly out at the lagoon, Cooper realized something.
Somebody had turned the float plane around.
It now faced the water, rather than the beach, and while this might ordinarily have held no particular meaning, with the fireworks show under way behind him, Cooper had been waging a brief internal skirmish.
It occurred to him that, depending on where the missiles were aimed, somebody was going to have to stop the launch before all forty-two caught air-and it didn’t currently seem as if Washington, Langley, or anybody else was making any progress toward shutting this thing down. Cooper also considered that if Washington were to do something, the way the response might happen didn’t bode well for anybody sitting on the cedar beach chairs along Mango Cay’s blue lagoon.
He wondered how the hell he had drawn the shortest straw-that of all the expert, capable people who might have been perfectly suited to stop the ignition of four rows of Trident missiles aimed God-knows-where, it was an irascible, emotionally scarred societal reject with a made-up name who was the only conscious one on-site, and therefore the only one with any shot at doing a goddamn thing about bin-Laden’s ultimate wet dream come true.
He wasn’t sure what the new orientation of the float plane meant, but he knew it meant something, so he dipped his head and closed his eyes. He watched the backs of his eyelids as thoughts of Spike Gibson, Deng Jiang, the bartender, the maid, and Popeye floated past; he listened to what he remembered each of them saying, saw what he’d seen each of them doing. He gathered the sum of the impressions, splashed them into a blender, and let whirl. Some of the concoction spilled from the cylinder-blends of images, sounds, sensations-until, at length, one particular dollop splashed across the frame of the picture-in-a-picture window and stuck. What he saw, and heard, was Spike Gibson barking orders to his maid inside the missile cavern.