Will Staeger - Painkiller

The Zodiac approached the raft, and in fewer than five minutes, Cooper and Laramie were deposited on the deck of the nuclear attack submarine USS Hampton. Their raft was quickly deflated and hidden by the men as Cooper and Laramie were escorted through a hatch at the base of the conning tower.

Eight minutes following its arrival, the sub slipped silently beneath the surface, its new and unofficial cargo of two civilian passengers safely aboard.

Inside the Hampton, Cooper and Laramie were taken to a minuscule cabin equipped with two doors. There was little between the doors other than a pair of cots so small they appeared to have been designed for children. Their escorts left, closing and locking the door they’d entered through, leaving them alone inside the room.

After a moment the bolt shifted in the opposite door. The seal popped, and the door eased open an inch or two. Nobody appeared; nobody reached through. Cooper watched the door, waiting, but nothing else happened. Finally he reached out and opened it, revealing, when he peered through, a hallway that from all appearances matched the one through which they’d just arrived. Noticing an unmistakable, pungent scent, he took a step into the passageway and saw, maybe halfway down the hall, the back of a short, beefy man in a blue T-shirt and the lower half of a wetsuit. Cooper could see as the guy walked away that he possessed forearms the size of a running back’s thighs. A wisp of smoke lingered in the hall, leading in a curlicue contrail to its source: a joint, lodged in the man’s mouth, of a size falling somewhere between a Cuban cigar and the state of Texas.

About twenty paces off now, the man turned a corner and ducked through another doorway, massive left forearm extended above his head in a wave Cooper figured was meant for him. Laramie stepped into the hallway behind him.

“What have we got?” she asked.

“What we’ve got,” he said, “is some very good weed.”

U.S. Navy SEAL submarine-based diving platforms, or SEAL Holes, were technical operations rooms housed aboard every U.S. Navy nuclear attack submarine built after 1992. The two-room compartments were isolated from the rest of the host submarines, accessible only by way of a subsurface dive port and one interior entrance, an example of which Cooper had seen the thick-limbed SEAL turn into from the passageway inside the Hampton. None of the ordinary crew members could access the Hole without an encrypted code-key which, in most cases, was only provided to the SEALs working the Hole, along with the captain and executive officer of the boat.

The sole function of the Hole was mission control for clandestine operations. If so ordered, the captain and executive officer of the submarine would steer the boat according to the needs of a SEAL Hole operation; even in such cases, though, none of the submarine’s regular crew possessed any idea of the purpose behind the submarine’s change in course.

Just after 4:15 A.M., twenty-two miles east of the southern tip of Martinique, the USS Hampton inched along at a depth of four fathoms. She maintained a speed of six knots at a distance of approximately two thousand yards from the windward shoreline of Mango Cay. Along this shore, the island’s primary geographic feature was a sheer cliff face. With only a brief, scraggly pause to deposit a short, black sand beach, the cliffs plunged sharply below the ocean’s surface, creating a depth of many hundreds of feet of ocean in as short a horizontal distance as twelve feet from shore.

Inside the SEAL Hole, planted in a seat with his back to a wide control board, the man who had opened the hallway door for them sat smoking his cigar-size joint, alternately pulling in the reefer and taking in gulps of fresh air. He canted the joint to the side when he sought the fresh air between tokes, but otherwise kept it lodged between his teeth.

“Code name’s Popeye,” the man said, facing his audience of two. He’d just offered them a pair of stools. “I’ll call you Olive,” he said to Laramie, “and you Brutus. That’s who we’ll be for the duration.”

He sucked in a lungful of Colombia’s finest.

“Chief tells me I work for you the next eight hours. I take orders from you,” he said to Cooper, “not out of any disrespect to you, Olive, but simply because I work best with a direct chain of command, and it’s you, Brutus, I’m choosing.” He clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back, the cigar-size blunt curling smoke into the sub’s otherwise highly controlled atmosphere.

“Now what,” he said, “can I do you for?”

Cooper said, “We’re wondering if our friends running the resort up top have anything to hide. Specifically, we’re wondering if they’ve got a way of getting in and out-or off and on-from underwater. Maybe with a small submarine.”

“Good people, your friends?” Popeye said. “I ask ’cause I’m wondering if they mind us snooping around. In other words, how clandestine,” he said, drawing out the stine, “we need to be?”

Laramie said, “Pretty clandestine. Not to speak out of turn, of course.”

“You can assume they’ve got it all,” Cooper said. “Sonar, cameras, motion detection of one kind or another. I’m figuring a Hole run by a guy named Popeye, though, comes loaded with the latest devices engineered to circumvent such security systems.”

Joint between his teeth, Popeye said, “Correctamundo.”

“After looking around, we find anything interesting, we might need to get inside. You get us in and you’ve got an all-expenses-paid three-week vacation on a white sand beach a few miles from here. You name the time.”

Popeye looked at Cooper, then Laramie, then back at Cooper before pulling the joint from his mouth and rolling it around between his fingers. “I don’t know who you are or where you come from, Brutus,” he said, “but for you to get a free ride in my room, you must be one well-connected hombre. And come to think of it, I could use a little R & R next month. Maybe bring along the missus?”

“She’s invited and we’re paying for her too,” Cooper said.

Popeye jammed the thick joint back into the corner of his mouth.

“In that case,” he said, “lemme introduce you to my little friend.”

SEAL Hole data was fed to a segmented large-screen plasma monitor, so that images from the equivalent of eight television screens were visible at any given time on the single monitor. One segment, the largest, was dedicated to digital video playback, and in this portion of the screen Popeye had activated the moving image of a sheer face of underwater rock wall. Cast in a red hue symptomatic of the infrared lens capturing its images, the picture moved slowly from right to left on the screen. There was little to see besides rock, seaweed, uninteresting groupings of rock-based plant life, and the occasional small fish.

The video rolling across the monitor had been shot fifteen minutes prior by the Hole’s unmanned underwater vehicle, or UUV. Popeye had loaded up the drone with commands, sent it out to fulfill its data capture mission, and digitized its video to the Hole’s hard drive upon its return.

“UUV hung a left here,” Popeye said. He pronounced the acronym uve. “Puppy’s got artificial intelligence in its chip. Following the curve of the wall.” The sheer rock face on the monitor dropped out of sight, then appeared again as the camera made a sharp turn and the infrared spotlight affixed to the lens reilluminated the cliff. A number of times, the UUV had found its way into underwater caves, something that took Cooper about two minutes of surveillance to learn were a common geographic feature beneath Mango Cay. In one such cave, the images recorded by the UUV showed the flat surface of the water above the drone’s lens, but aside from an unusual preponderance of looming tiger sharks, the cave was featureless.