Will Staeger - Painkiller

Gibson jumped behind the wheel of his cart, looked at Cooper, and said, “See you around, Albert.”

Then he drove off.

Gun dangling from her shoulder, Lana positioned her own cart beside the nearest missile-38-and flipped the lever that summoned its silo elevator. She opened the cage door, returned to the cart, transferred a harness and rope to the elevator, and approached Cooper and Laramie.

Cooper could see that in addition to the assault pistol she now held a black rod.

“Get in,” she said, and poked Cooper with the cattle prod. He jumped-fucking thing hurt, stinging him with a bone-jarring jolt. He pushed Laramie into the elevator, looking for an opening as he did it, but the maid didn’t offer up any noticeable vulnerability.

Lana yelled to them from below as they rode the elevator up the length of the missile.

“Maintenant you open the bag! Listen and I tell you how to use!”

When they hit the twenty-foot mark, Lana flipped a switch at the base of the silo, and the elevator jerked to a stop. Cooper listened, sort of, as she rattled off a how-to guide on the removal of your average nuclear warhead from a Trident missile. He wasn’t sure whether she was through with the instructions when the chukka-chuk-chuk and ping-ping-peow of bullets from the MAC-10 whinging past him gave Cooper a rough indication she’d completed the tutorial.

“Vite! Allez-y!”

Cooper attempted both to interpret and remember what he’d been told-thick accent like hers, he thought, wasn’t exactly ideally suited for giving highly technical instructions. His time spent with Alphonse helped, but he still only understood about forty-five percent of what the well-muscled maid had to say.

Among the tools was a flashlight, which he handed to Laramie. As told, he installed a rubber plate to use as a shelf and set the other tools on it. Working quickly, he used a distant cousin of a Phillips-head screwdriver to remove the screws securing an access panel and opened the panel when he had the screws out. He grabbed two saws and a hammer and chisel and looked at Laramie.

“Do me a favor and keep as far back as you can,” he said. “Just point the flashlight.”

Laramie gave him a look, which he took for indecision on whether to be offended he thought he could handle the work and she couldn’t, or flattered that he refused to expose her to unshielded plutonium, or enriched uranium, or whatever it was the warhead contained.

Cooper got to work, thinking that this is where his decision to take possession of Roy’s body from the beach had proved a moderately bad call. Leading him here, inside a Trident missile, digging for radiation sickness at the order of a muscle-bound maid. Once he thought about this for a bit, he made the guess that somebody else had probably been doing this kind of work before him, and probably under the same exact threat. Gibson’s words had been clear enough: he does anything but break Hiram’s record…Hiram, he thought, being the supposed bartender he’d recently shot. Hiram must have had his own radiation diggers, and maybe some time back, one of them had drawn some similar radiation-exposure duty inside the nuclear power plant he and Laramie had used as a hiding place. Considering that the power plant appeared somewhat weathered and worn, he assumed it generated its energy with the less modern U-238/U-235 uranium fuel rods, and that an accident could easily have happened while the radiation digger was doing the work. Result: odd burn marks, severe pain, a hell-bent escape for daylight, and a few gunshots in the back from Gibson’s goons. Thanks, Marcel, for all your hard work.

And there you have it. With the help of my associate, the renegade entry-level analyst from Langley, the private-eye-for-the-dead has just solved the second murder of poor, sweet Simone’s zombified fiancé.

Hell, he thought, maybe I’ll give Marcel’s widowed fiancée a call and let her know everything’s turned out just fine. That there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for Marcel’s misfortune: exhumed following an overdose of coup poudre potion, he was brought back to the living with conconbre zombi serum and sold by your town wizard to a redheaded, serial-killing albino black named Jim Beam, who, in turn, sold him to somebody named Spike-short for Spencer-Gibson. But if it’s any solace to you, Simone, Marcel probably commanded a minimum of a couple thousand bucks on the open market, at least judging from the size of the bag of money Jim had taken in exchange for the wino from East Queen Street.

Breathing lead dust and soaking up radiation inside the access panel, Cooper gave some additional thought to Gibson. With the man out here running Deng Jiang’s missile factory, probably thinking after ten years of the assignment he could certainly get used to island life. Maybe even thinking he wouldn’t mind securing a ninety-nine-year lease of his own. Maybe Gibson does the math, he thought, figures out how to snake a few of the warheads, and determines he can get somewhere around that two hundred mill he was telling the maid about each time he pulls a nuke out of its ICBM.

He couldn’t see the whole docking bay from his cubby inside the missile, but it had looked to him, on the way up the elevator, that Deng’s submarine was no longer parked in the underwater lagoon. Maybe the bullets from his UR-14 hadn’t struck premier pay dirt, and the big fella had headed home. Cooper reached instinctively for his SLK, and the camera, homing device, and other goodies he had in it, but no such luck. Be good to find that camera with the pictures I took, now that they’d learned what they’d learned-Cooper figured even Peter M. Gates could put the pictures he’d taken of Premier Deng and his boys to use.

About an hour in, he gave the warhead-MIRV pairing one more whack with the hammer, and the twenty-fourth and final rivet fell from its anchor, pinging its way down the interior of the missile.

As instructed, he stepped out from the hole and signaled to the maid.

“The harness!” she screamed. “Maintenant!”

When Zeke Sampson, captain of the USS Hampton nuclear attack submarine that housed Popeye’s SEAL Hole, reported to Norfolk that his sonar man had spied a bogey in the waters near Martinique, he was ordered to track it. Sampson was also told to monitor and escort the arrival of the USS Scavenger, the navy destroyer assigned the investigation of Mango Cay. The captain’s crew had long ago marked the approaching destroyer, which had reached its drop point some fifteen minutes back and would release its reconnaissance launch momentarily.

Sampson found it odd that it was now-only seconds before the Scavenger’s launch boat was set to splash down-that the bogey detected by his sonar man had turned up on their system. In fact, the vessel, which was clearly a foreign submarine, had made its appearance only two thousand yards from the island the Scavenger had been sent to investigate. When Sampson received confirmation that the sub they were tracking was a Chinese nuke, he made a simple call: the sub’s presence was unacceptable.

Sampson did not view this as an exercise. For him, nothing was-he ran a tight sub, and, loose, tight, or otherwise, a U.S. Navy nuclear attack submarine always operated at wartime readiness.

He brought the Hampton to within seven hundred yards of the bogey.

In order to provide sufficient power to ignite forty-two Trident intercontinental missiles over a launch period of eighty-four minutes, Deng’s engineers had recommended a five-plant in-line generator grid that, while spearheaded by an accelerated use of the nuclear reactor, had little resemblance to the clandestine power-generation the reactor produced in the course of its routine duty.

Stage one of the power boost involved the automated sinking of six times the typical count of U-238/U-235 fuel rods into the pool within the reactor; stages two through five supplemented that energy glut with the ignition of four massive diesel generators. The diesels providing the power for these generators had been diverted from a Chinese strip-mining site in Mongolia; each engine’s twenty-four cylinders displaced 110 liters and burned nearly ten gallons of fuel per minute, belching an unfiltered cloud of soot.