Will Staeger - Painkiller

Thinking about how many two-minute sets it would take him to accomplish his aim, Cooper began a systematic search of the plane. He explored every cavity where Gibson might have hidden what he was looking for, knowing full well that Muscle-head would need to have stowed it in a place where the maid would not have been able to find it. This said a lot, considering the haggard-faced bitch had looked like a person with some pretty good ideas about how to keep people from killing her. There was a chance, however-Cooper trying to think things through the way Gibson might-that the maid’s search, had she lived long enough to conduct it, might only have been sufficient to convince herself that her boss hadn’t fucked her over.

He checked behind the engine block, beneath the seats, under the rug in the cargo hold, below the toilet seat in the lavatory apparently built for passengers the size of chimpanzees. He was forced to wipe the blood and exhaust grime from his swollen eyelids three or four times a minute just to see what he was doing, but in due course he found an access panel on the plane’s tail. In order to remove it, he had to retrieve a wrapped package of tools he’d discovered under the pilot’s seat; during the time it took him to get back and forth between the two sections of the plane, another missile rose into the sky from the hill.

Behind the panel he found a hydraulic assembly which he assumed controlled the plane’s rudder. He stabbed his head through the opening, peered through his eye slits, and discovered within-held against the plane’s interior skin with a series of suction cups and a stripe of Velcro-something that appeared to be a porcelain brick. Noting a barometric pressure gauge and a series of wires affixed to one edge, Cooper immediately knew what he was looking at, and it certainly wasn’t a porcelain brick.

Judging from its color, he figured the chunky cube for either PENO or Semtex plastic explosive compound.

Cooper also figured the barometric pressure gauge affixed to the bomb was designed to accomplish for Gibson-and his late, doomed maid-precisely what Cooper sought to accomplish via the harebrained scheme percolating in his bruised mind.

He unfastened the explosive brick from the interior of the float plane’s tail, tucked it under his good arm, and headed back up the beach. As he sped across the poolside marble and turned the corner past the Greathouse behind the wheel of the cart, another missile rocketed from its home and knifed into the sky.

Because of its proximity and the weapons it had on board, the destroyer USS Scavenger did not need to endure a sixteen-minute trajectory to apply its firepower against Mango Cay. Firing the Scavenger’s inventory of deadly weaponry, though, wasn’t as simple a task as it might have seemed. Martinique, for instance, was part of France, and since the launching of cruise missiles against a NATO ally wasn’t included on the crew’s list of preauthorized actions, a recommendation had to be submitted, and approval granted from the Pentagon, before counterattack even became a possibility.

Further, the missiles rocketing from Mango Cay were not automatically understood to be a threat to the United States. Accordingly, it wasn’t until twenty-two minutes following the first Trident’s clearing of the hill-eleven missiles in-that the Scavenger’s initial salvo came.

To kick things off, the Scavenger’s captain targeted a pair of Tomahawk cruise missiles at the island’s main heat source and sent four SN-3 “missile killers” after the two most recently launched ICBMs. At a distance of twelve miles from the launch point, the SN-3s had the deck stacked against them and went 0-for-4 in the first wave, narrowly missing missiles 8 and 9 as they climbed out of range. The Tomahawks reached their intended target, but without “bunker-busting” capabilities, merely succeeded in shearing eight feet of soil and surface rock from the crown of the island’s hill.

Jerking and crumbling, the missile cavern survived the first wave of Tomahawk missiles, and Operation Blunt Fist continued forth.

Cooper crashed into the wall of the transport tunnel. Once he cleared the debris that had fallen in his path he was able to get going again, but as he approached the missile cavern, the tunnel was becoming so thick with diesel smoke and rocket exhaust that if he weren’t able to cover his nose and mouth with some sort of filter, he was sure he’d suffocate, or simply die from the concentrated intake of too many toxins. He resorted to tearing off a piece of the pants he wore, which he tied over his face, a task made near impossible by the bullet lodged in his left shoulder blade.

He kept banging the cart into the walls of the tunnel, his course impossible to control as he steered through the field of rock shards dislodged by the Tomahawk strikes. Soon the toxic haze brightened a fraction, and in another twenty feet he was able to make out the shape of the doorway leading to the main cavern. Using the illuminated doorway as a target, he floored it, keeping the cart off the tunnel walls as best he could, and in another five seconds he shot from the tunnel and found himself immediately assaulted by a wall of heat.

The temperature in the missile cavern was pushing the mercury to a minimum of 165 degrees. In his condition Cooper knew he’d probably last about five minutes in this kind of heat, and with each successive launch-he’d heard three more while crashing his way down the tunnel-he felt sure the cavern would get another ten or fifteen degrees hotter.

He pulled Gibson’s altitude-triggered brick of plastic explosive and the bag of warhead-extraction tools from the cart. He had to hold the heavy block in his right hand with the tool bag folded under the same arm-Cooper the one-armed man, he thought, here to save the fucking day.

He would have to pick the right missile. If he chose the next missile in the launch sequence, he’d be killed as it blasted off; if he worked on the forty-second, forty-one Tridents would make it out. He limped from one row to the next until he found a suitable number, settling on 16. He could see through the toxic haze that missiles 1 through 12, all in the same row, were gone, their silos burned to pieces. Paint and excess fuel and whatever else had been at the base of 12 burned in pockets of flame.

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.