Will Staeger - Painkiller

Cooper had pulled into traffic behind the guy’s sputtering Mitsubishi minivan and followed him home; a little later he followed him to a bar with an address on a particularly sleazy avenue called the Half Way Tree Road. Later still, Cooper followed ol’ Jim Beam-along with the dark-skinned girl he’d picked up at the bar-back to Jim’s house. The home was a two-bedroom job on a decent street, Jim doing all right for himself renting here-assuming he was renting, which Cooper figured he probably was.

Camped outside Jim’s place, Cooper’s knees were in danger of catching frostbite, so cold was the air-conditioning flow from the vents beneath the dash. The A/C was uneven, so that while his knees were turning blue, sweat ran in a constant stream down his neck, back, and ass. The subject of his stakeout didn’t emerge from the house for sixteen hours following the time he’d entered it with his dark-skinned date, though two events did occur during that time. Around 6 A.M., immediately following the Caribbean’s rapidly brightening dawn, a taxi crawled up the street, stopped in front of the albino’s house, and parked until the girl came out and got in. The cab drove off. Later, just after four, Cooper burning up the engine in the Taurus to keep the air-conditioning going, a young Jamaican arrived in a beat-up four-door Civic-the car reminding Cooper of Manny’s SJPD-issue detective mobile.

The visitor wore a shiny Adidas sweat suit, going with the full outfit even in the ninety-degree heat. He cool-walked it to the albino’s front door, and then they were pretty obvious about it: Jim answered the door, came out on the porch, handed the Jamaican some money, and the Jamaican handed Jim a bag of weed. Neither of them looked around or otherwise displayed any cause for concern, just standing out there on the porch doing a drug deal.

There, Cooper thought-that, in a nutshell, is what the Caribbean is all about.

The Jamaican cool-walked it back to his Honda and zipped off down the street. After dark, around nine, the albino started the circuit all over again, Cooper pulling out to follow the Mitsubishi minivan, actually moving some air through the Ford’s radiator for a change, following him to the bar, where the albino came out with the same dark-skinned girl and took her home with him again. Cooper took the opportunity to change clothes, procure more Blimpie sandwiches, relieve himself somewhere besides the tree at the end of the block, and refill the fluids in the Ford. He didn’t have too much faith in the car, its thermometer rising one notch closer to the red zone each day he spent in the afternoon heat.

For four days running, the albino followed this routine, almost to the minute. The lone deviation was that the dope supplier came every other day, which was still pretty frequent, given the hefty size of the Baggies the albino was buying from him.

Without some indication as to how the redheaded albino black worked, if at all, with Barry the Haitian witch doctor, Cooper didn’t know how long he could sit out on this fucking street watching some freak get off and get high. On the fifth day of his surveillance of Jim Beam’s home-presented with no sign of a break in the routine-Cooper gave up on his current angle and decided to try out one of the two leads he’d ingeniously unearthed from the seat of his rental car.

In the far eastern reaches of the Lesser Antilles lay one of the more exclusive resorts on earth. Built into a sloping hill on the leeward side of an island called Mango Cay, the resort grounds included the most luxurious rooms, a secluded private beach, and adjoining world-class coral reefs. For any traveler affluent enough to stay here during the high season, the nightly room rate might have run in excess of five thousand dollars-except for the fact that no rooms were ever rented to anyone.

There were poolside cabanas, all near the beach, all with sweeping ocean views. The furniture was imported from Europe, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the beach had been formed of the purest white sand, the water in the lagoon the clearest blue. Mango Cay was densely wooded and mountainous, a particularly lush volcanic isle. Many of the islands in the neighboring Antilles were volcanic in origin; many were lush.

But not like Mango Cay.

Fully half its land mass seemed eternally shrouded in mist, a thin, lingering fog that hung low over the steep, jagged cliffs of the windward side of the isle. A single, thick rain forest, painting the hills emerald green, squatted beneath the eternal mist. On the leeward side of the island was the horseshoe-shaped bay that held in its clutches the exclusive resort and its glassy lagoon, untouched by the mist.

There was an unwritten law in the Caribbean: if you were rich enough to buy one of these islands, you wouldn’t be bothered. Not by the local citizenry, not by the authorities. And so, as mysterious as this particular island happened to be, nobody paid any mind to Mango Cay. Outside of their receipt of the chunky quarterly property tax deposit from the isle’s proprietors, officials of the island’s governing territory-Martinique, controlled ultimately by France-simply ignored the place, unobtrusively providing Mango Cay with the privacy its clandestine proprietor sought.

Local rumor had it that the reclusive proprietor was a famous multibillionaire, a quiet captain of industry so rich he could afford to have the island meticulously kept year-round simply for the one or two weekends a year he and his family came to visit.

This, however, was not the case at all.

Once he had found the Chameleon, Deng positioned two teams of frogmen in the vicinity of the wreck on an indefinite basis. He was able to do this by building the small but exorbitantly expensive underwater equivalent of a space station, and by outfitting the frogmen with custom-designed deep-sea dive equipment capable of withstanding pressure in excess of 9,000 p.s.i.-depths of nearly four miles. He had the station built in dry dock and submarined in modules to its home south of the Bermuda Triangle; Deng designed it with underwater stealth technology, stolen, as usual, from a U.S. defense contractor.

Operating a set of limited-range salvage pods out of the underwater docking station, Deng’s teams took almost three years to penetrate the Chameleon’s skin, isolate its missile bays, and move, piecemeal, each of the submarine’s full inventory of twenty-four C-4 Trident I intercontinental ballistic missiles from the submarine to the station. The frogmen worked six-month shifts, Deng having them picked up or dropped off by a PLN submarine pass a few miles off. By September 1997, at the annual break his team was forced to take during hurricane season, Deng had disassembled and transferred to a nearby uninhabited island twelve complete Trident missiles, and-of equal importance in Deng’s long-range scheme-the Chameleon’s nuclear power cell.

To maintain secrecy over the life of his project, Deng was presented with various concerns, the first being where and how to secure, and then conceal, his astronomical budget. Had Deng used Chinese military or intelligence allocations to fund the operation, fellow State Council members would have found out about it. Deng knew that as surely as Mikhail Gorbachev had assassinated the Soviet Union, it was only a matter of time before some fellow council member coined his own term for glasnost, or, worse, perestroika-and were any one of the cowards now thinking up such words to stumble across Deng’s modest clandestine scheme, he wouldn’t be around to enjoy any weekly polo match: he’d be holed up in solitary in Inner Mongolia, freezing his ass off. And that was only if he were able to convince enough of his political allies to keep him away from the firing squad.