The admiral began immediately.

“Preoperational status: all systems go,” he said. “System mainframe and redundant processors active. No security system failures. Primary power cell currently running at ten percent of capacity, backup online generators one through four fueled to capacity. According to all hourly reports from security director, perimeter alarms have remained active and silent, with radar traffic normal, during the past forty-eight hours.”

Li’s mouth twitched-not, Deng saw, from the static of the transmission.

“What is it, Admiral?”

“Comrade Premier,” Li said, tendering a brief bow of submission, “I recognize the importance of this assignment to the revolution.”

Deng suppressed a chuckle-he knew this had been coming and was surprised it had taken the career soldier this long.

“Go on,” he said.

“Thank you, Comrade Premier. It is just that as an admiral in the People’s Navy I am compelled, at this time of national crisis, to serve in, forgive me, but I’m not sure how best to put this-”

“A more traditional role?”

“Yes.”

“There is no more critical mission to the fabric of our nation’s future than the assignment I have entrusted to you. I recognize your more…standard instincts, but we no longer inhabit a standard world. Stay the course, Admiral. I will see you for your next status report.”

Deng killed the connection. He sipped from a cup of tea he’d had delivered through the room’s food-dispensing window, savoring its flavor, prolonging the tingling sensation he felt in his belly. In fact he felt it even in his soul, though Deng didn’t believe particularly in souls.

This was a moment for which he had been waiting a very long time.

In the upper left-hand corner of Deng’s control board was a hinged Plexiglas cube. He flipped it open, revealing a keyhole. Removing from around his neck a thin chain resembling the kind affixed to dog tags, he seized the lone key affixed to the chain. He inserted the key in the hole the open cube had exposed and twisted.

A red light began flashing beside the lock. On two of the monitors on the War Board, a set of numbers blinked to life. For the first second of their display on the monitors, the numbers read:

72:00:00.

Then the numbers changed immediately to 71:59:59, 71:59:58, and so on.

A smug grin creasing the hard lines of his face, it was somewhere around T-minus 71:56:22 when a thought crystallized in General Deng’s mind-the rallying cry he’d instructed Li and Gibson to use in the recruitment of Operation Blunt Fist’s pool of Marxist-Leninist investors:

Long live the Revolution!

Then he gave the order for the PLN captain to retreat.

The submarine dipped beneath the swells.

Stabbing the fish with a barbed hook, the boy held it aloft and watched the tortured fish wriggle. Satisfied, he heaved the whole assembly over the side of the boat and paid out the line. Once the line was out where he wanted it, he used rubber bands to clip the filament to an outrigger.

Cooper hadn’t got the kid’s name and didn’t care. He squinted into the glare of the sun, its blinding rays banging off the sea as the boat rolled with the swells. The kid had three lines in the water for him, one a long way out, maybe a hundred yards behind the boat; one with no outrigger, forty, fifty yards out; and now this third line, which he’d positioned about one-fifty back. That also made three live bait fish. It had taken them an hour to hook that many, Cooper pulling them in while the boat made for the narrow band of sea where the captain knew the big game fish were biting this week.

The captain of the charter was a man so dark from the abuse of years of ocean sunshine he looked like a splash of high-gloss black enamel against the white fiberglass boat. He sat under a canopy in the crow’s nest, allowing the boat to drive itself while he smoked a Cuban cigar in the breezy ocean heat.

His name was Abe Worel.

Worel had once owned a single boat. Unable to afford any advertising outside of word-of-mouth, he scraped by on the inconsistent deep-sea bookings he got from the more adventuresome visitors who happened down the pier where he moored his boat. He knew the waters and could find the game fish better than anyone, but the chief problem Worel encountered was that right when he had begun to build some steady referral business, hurricane Hugo took his boat and turned it into kindling. Worel hadn’t even contemplated the notion of securing insurance, meaning he was left, following the unleashing of Hugo’s wrath, with nothing but a two-thousand-dollar debt on the loan he’d taken out to buy the boat.

A few months later, Worel had been ready to disconnect his phone and return to work as a first mate, humping for tips at forty-six years of age, when a baritone-voiced guy tracked him down on the phone and asked if he was available to head out and scare up some marlin. The man indicated he’d chartered from Worel once before.

Worel remembered him, a gruff son of a bitch, nothing like the usual tourist. The man hadn’t said a word in the eight hours they’d spent on the water when he’d chartered the now-defunct boat that first time out.

“Been running that boat for twenty goddamn years,” Worel said to him over the phone.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, mon,” Worel said. “Too bad some bastard name of Hugo take it away. There ain’t a single plank o’ wood remainin’.”

The man told Worel thanks anyway and that he was sorry about the boat. A moment of silence played out, neither of them hanging up. Then Cooper said, “You make a living, running a deep-sea charter?”

“Sure you do, mon. Way that happen is, you buy four, five boats, give the fat cats what they really want for the bulk of your business-cushion under their big ass, cooler full of rum and beer. Take ’em out on tours, catch a couple tuna for kicks, and save the deep-sea game for the fellas come down here to do it for real. Keep the boats in different places-that way there ain’t no goddamn storm-ain’t nobody-gonna take all them boats from you. And there somethin’ else too, mon: make sure when you buy them boats, you get yourself an insurance policy. Do that, or do nothin’ at all.”

When Cooper didn’t say anything in response, Worel said, “Yeah, shit, mon, that fucking Hugo,” and hung up the phone.

Two days later, Worel was stepping off the boat of a friend who’d given him a day of first-mate work when he found himself confronted by a short man wearing a navy blue business suit.

“Pardon me,” the man asked, “but would you be Mr. Worel?”

Worel asked him who wanted to know.

“Jacob Bartleby,” said the man.

“Can’t say the name mean anything to me, mon.”

Bartleby nodded his understanding. “Mr. Worel, I’m an attorney representing a Cayman Islands investment firm specializing in resort and recreational properties.”

He handed Worel a slip of paper, which Worel took, examined, and discovered to be a cashier’s check, made out to cash, in the sum of $250,000. Bartleby asked Worel if he would be able to procure four boats for that amount, assuming the inventory of four vessels included both pleasure yachts and deep-sea fishing vessels.

“What the hell you talkin’ ’bout, mon?”

Bartleby said, “Well, I ask because if so, my clients are looking to take a forty-nine percent interest in the boats.”

Worel narrowed his eyes and reached out to return the cashier’s check.

“Seem to me,” he said, “that if them clients can afford to buy ’em, they’d be best served takin’ a hundred percent stake. Also, for that price you probably get five, you know who to call.”

Bartleby explained to Worel that in exchange for the check he’d handed him, his clients would receive a forty-nine percent stake in the fleet of charter boats Worel would procure and manage with the investment capital represented by the amount of the check. He told Worel that he would remain the controlling partner, retaining a fifty-one percent ownership interest in the fleet. Without another word, Worel walked directly across the street to the local savings and loan. Upon hearing that the bank had cleared the check, he hired the best boat builder in the Caribbean to make him five thirty-four-foot boats for $200,000 cash. He used the rest to set up an office with a fax machine, two phone lines, and a voice mail service, and to outfit the pleasure yachts with all the amenities and a killer insurance policy. He even got himself a sonar unit, a fish-finding secret weapon, for the boat he’d use purely as the deep-sea fishing charter.