Cooper opened the cage door of the silo elevator, stepped in, and flipped the lever. The cavern shook with another impact from a heavy blast and another, less resounding explosion, both originating somewhere above the cavern. With no idea as to the source or nature of these external detonations, Cooper understood only that these blasts were having zero effect on the launch sequence and pelting him with clumps of lava rock in the process. With the elevator rising, he could see he was about to slip into the dankest portion of the haze cloud; he sucked in a maxed-out breath of midlevel air and held it. When he reached the access panel he got to work prying it off. He could already feel his body losing its battle against the heat.
He got the panel off and it tumbled to the ground, banging back and forth between the missile and silo on its journey down. The cavern shook beneath him, the silo trembling, then weaving, and suddenly a wave of intense heat and deafening noise blasted him from all sides as the missile in silo 13 underwent primary ignition. Cooper had to stop working and cover his ears. The noise chattered his skull as the missile rose within the cavern, the blast of wind from its launch temporarily clearing the cavern of the poisonous haze; then the silo door in the roof of the cavern folded downward, revealing the sky above, and the missile shot upward, slow at first, but accelerating exponentially. As the base of the missile passed through the ceiling of the cavern, the intense heat, shrieking wind, and jet-fuel-scented exhaust filled the cavern completely.
Then the missile was gone.
Cooper’s hair was singed, his eyebrows burned completely off. Putting his free-diving lung capacity to use, he continued to hold the breath he’d taken on the way up, and ducked into the warhead bay. He secured Gibson’s bomb as best he could to the skin of what he figured for the nearest warhead, picking a spot where the warhead, if that’s what it was, appeared exposed. Then-lungs exploding, his skin on fire-Cooper jumped aboard the lift, pulled the lever, and waited with the increasing panic of a drowning man for the elevator to make its way down.
Alternating between passing out, vomiting, and crashing into the walls of the transport tunnel, he came awake for successive brief instants of the return trip, enough to recall where he was and mash his foot against the cart’s accelerator before passing out again until the next crash into the wall. With each burst in this circuit of his own private demolition derby, he got the cart another fifteen or twenty yards along the muddy uphill slope of the tunnel; as he got farther he was able to breathe cleanly again, pulling in massive heaves of air and smoke alike while he sucked down enough oxygen to keep him momentarily conscious.
Negotiating the last turn past the Greathouse, Cooper the zombie began to lose consciousness, his head dangling forward and banging against the steering wheel while the cart, lacking any human hand to pilot its wheel, careened downhill, building speed, wobbling, then roving up for an instant on two wheels, utterly out of control.
About forty feet from the pool, the cart’s velocity approached fifty miles an hour as, with no idea where or who he was or what was going on, Cooper whacked his head against the aluminum dashboard and slumped, unconscious, the world around him going black as his brain tuned out and shut down.
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.