Over the course of the past eighty days, the daily increments amounted to just over nine hours of cumulative time, which proved plenty for Gibson’s team-Hiram, Lana, and the rotation of disposable laborers-to make significant headway toward his aim of pilfering four W-76 thermonuclear warheads from the Trident missiles in the cavern. The extraction involved a transfer of the warheads to the cargo cave-or in Deng’s parlance, the Lab-located three-quarters of a mile from the main missile hall.

The work had to be performed during the main transfer phase of the reboot session, since it was during this period that the cavern’s floodlights popped off and the cavern-based closed-circuit video cameras closed down to facilitate the daily archiving function. Had Gibson conducted his operation at any other point during the day, Deng could have seen what he was doing; the mainframe simulcast all data streams to an encrypted hard drive in whichever of Deng’s War Rooms the general planned to occupy next.

To date, Gibson had succeeded in extricating 2 of the cavern’s 168 warheads from their homes inside the Trident missiles.

On the afternoon of the second day of Julie Laramie’s interrogation, the daily reboot commenced on schedule at 3:52:38 P.M. A second later, the bank of floodlights lining the ceiling of the missile cavern doused. Pale yellow emergency lighting, emanating from bulbs built into poles lining the walls of the cavern, flickered to life.

Two seconds after the pale yellow darkness had consumed the cavern, a pair of figures emerged from the tunnel entrance through which Deng had brought his guided tour. While impossible to detect by the digital cameras’ dormant chips, the two figures were Hiram and the wino. Hiram drove one of the carts and kept a black rod draped across his lap. The wino carried a heavy black duffel bag.

As the duo approached missile 6, Hiram exited the cart and opened the cage door of the two-person platform secured to the outside of the missile’s external silo. When the wino didn’t walk into the lift unprompted, Hiram zapped him with the rod, the cattle prod doing the trick. Hiram retrieved a chunky harness, an apron, and a rope-and-pulley assembly from the cart-affixed, on one end, to a winch at the rear of the cart-and followed the wino aboard the lift. As the lift reached the twenty-foot mark, Hiram doffed the heavy apron, opened the lift, and gestured for the wino to get to work.

The wino hastily withdrew a rubber plate and series of tools from the duffel bag; he used the plate as a shelf, affixing it to a length of pipe and dumping the tools across it. It took him thirty seconds to unscrew and open an access panel on the side of the missile; with Hiram and his cattle prod lurking behind the metal skin of the access door, the wino conducted a meticulous, though not precise, series of tasks, on which Hiram had instructed him earlier.

Including the wino, a sequence of three slaves had been working for weeks at removing one of this missile’s four warheads, extricating the warhead rivet by rivet, seven minutes at a time, from the Mk-4 MIRV to which it was secured within the missile. Inside the access panel, the wino chewed through struts with saws, whacked at chunks of metal blocking the extraction path, and hammered and chiseled at rivets, all the while sucking down metal sawdust and soaking up enough radiation to peg a Geiger counter against its stop. The heroin Hiram had been injecting into the wino’s bloodstream did not appear to affect the performance of his assigned tasks.

Though Hiram could not see the re-entry vehicle from his protected vantage behind the access door, he knew the MIRV to resemble a cruise missile without the wings. Having logged nine cumulative hours of such extraction work, Hiram also knew each C-4 Trident I to contain four such MIRVs. This meant that each of the forty-two Tridents was therefore capable of delivering four one-hundred-kiloton nuclear detonations to four independently targeted locations of up to one thousand miles apart. On this particular W-76/Mk-4, Hiram’s slaves had logged two hours, thirty-one minutes, and forty-two seconds to date, leaving Hiram with what he estimated to be one minute and fifteen seconds before the wino got the last rivet out.

Hiram swung the rope over a strut and clipped the hook at its end to the harness. At the three-minute mark in the reboot sequence, the last extracted rivet made a ping against a sheet of metal somewhere inside the projectile; Hiram reached around the access door, handed the wino the harness, and took the lift down to the floor.

Nearly five minutes of the reboot had elapsed when the wino signaled as instructed that the harness was ready. Gloved now, and strapped to a portion of the scaffolding, Hiram used the rope to begin hauling the 375-pound warhead out of the missile and into the lift, aided by minimal guidance from the wino. With a minute thirty to go, Hiram swung the warhead into the rear of the golf cart. He let the rope go slack; the warhead, settling, sunk the vehicle against its axles. Hiram quickly unfastened the rope from the harness.

With Hiram’s foot to the floor, the cart inched back across the cavern, gaining enough momentum to make it into the transport tunnel just before the elapsing reboot sequence resulted in the closing and locking of the tunnel door. The wino ran, stumbled, then finally managed to fall into the passenger seat beside Hiram as the door slammed shut behind them, neither of them able to see the bank of floodlights pop, click, and flutter to life within the cavern on the other side of the door.

Hiram parked the cart and ordered the wino to follow him on foot out of the transport tunnel.

The naming of the supreme leader of the People’s Republic of China-who traditionally held the titles of both president and premier-generally occurred by two methods: first, and officially, by a vote of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the CPC; second, and more important, the ascendant to the throne must, unofficially, have been given the thumbs-up by both the sitting premier and the most revered of the elder CPC leaders. Historically, the former process had followed the latter like a rubber stamp.

While the man holding the offices of president and premier since Deng’s rise through the military was now only fifty-eight years old, it was common practice to tab either a single successor or a pair of competing candidates from the beginning of one’s tenure. In keeping with this tradition, the premier had identified two men with the potential to succeed him when the time came and had elevated each to vice premier. The first man, named Lu Azhau, oversaw all domestic law enforcement and served as the general secretary of the CPC; Deng was the other man, and while he had effectively navigated the maze of party politics to position himself as the leading contender, the general believed there to be a number of perfectly viable, and speedier, alternate means of succession.

Unfortunately, the critical first step of the means Deng had decided to employ was falling dangerously behind schedule. Five minutes behind, in fact-five minutes he wasn’t sure he could spare. He was sure that if another ten minutes passed and his motorcade continued along at its current route and pace, he would not survive to see the eleventh minute.

The convoy, composed of Deng’s bulletproof limousine with the old man at the wheel, two jeeps, one armored vehicle, and a police sedan, found itself two hours in on the three-hour trek from PLA headquarters in Beijing to the seaside village of Beidaihe. Deng couldn’t remember exactly when the decision had been made, but somewhere along the line, Beidaihe had become the permanent site of a number of annual governmental summits. The legislature convened in Beidaihe each summer; the CPC held a larger convention, inclusive of almost all party members, in the spring; the third summit, held in October, was considerably more exclusive. Each year on this weekend, the Standing Committee of the State Council came to town.