Will Staeger - Painkiller

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.

Get in, bring me another two hundred mill, and get off the island, he’d said.

In addition to the value of the fourth warhead, the bodybuilding behemoth had been talking about something else: they had planned for the maid to leave the island on her own. Presumably, of course, only to meet up again with Gibson and collect her share-at least presumably for the maid. That, he suspected, was not what Spike Gibson presumed.

Cooper had met people like Gibson before-at least somewhat like him. In the world of such people, he knew, there existed no such conceits as comradeship, brotherhood, or marriage; accordingly, Cooper understood as well as if he’d known Gibson his whole life that there was no way in hell the man would allow a single member of his staff to survive Mango Cay, let alone share the take.

And yet the maid had been instructed to take the plane.

He thought about this for a moment, Cooper considering Gibson’s plan for the maid’s ill-fated escape in the context of the highly boring reading he’d done some three weeks back on the beach at Conch Bay. He decided that the idea that came to mind represented, at best, an idiotic long shot-but that, he mused, is why we highly trained, stupid goons exist.

To roll the dice on the idiotic long shots no one else is dumb enough to try.

He stood and limped down the beach to the float plane. As he approached the plane’s pontoons, a burst of artificial sunlight and billowing white smoke shot from the hill and another missile cleared its silo and tore into the sky. He checked his watch and placed the launches about two minutes apart.