“No problem, sir.” Miller nodded at Laramie. “Ma’am.” He reached back, slammed the side door closed, secured its latch, and returned to his seat.

When the pilot saw that Miller had buckled himself in, he applied some fuel to the turbines and left a white sandstorm in their wake as the Huey rose out of the marina and vanished upward into the downpour.

At the drop point, the pilot let the Huey nose up and hover in a lazy circle. Laramie forcibly swallowed a few waves of nausea as the chopper settled into a stationary position thirty feet above a patch of dark sea.

Miller flipped a switch, and the interior of the cabin lit up with a pair of dull red bulbs, one on either side of them. In a flurry, Miller hauled open the Huey’s side door, released a pair of nylon safety handles, removed a yellow cube from a storage container, grasped and pulled a red tab on the yellow cube, and tossed the cube through the open door. The cube self-inflated wildly, bursting into a circular life raft six feet in diameter and floating through the thirty feet of altitude like a glow-in-the-dark parachute until it flopped lazily onto the ocean’s surface. Through the open door, Cooper saw the hard Caribbean rain popping off of the ocean’s surface in a hundred thousand pinpricks of white foam. The water’s surface was otherwise flat.

Miller hand-cranked six feet of slack from a cable system behind a small door built into the cabin, found a pair of knapsacks in a square of netting, opened them, withdrew a slicker and a harness from the first knapsack, and flipped them to Cooper. The slicker and harness landed on Cooper’s lap.

“You first, sir,” Miller said over his headset. He looked at Laramie with what was intended, and which Cooper figured she regarded, as a respectful nod. “Ma’am, rule of this procedure is the reverse of a rescue operation: women and children last. We don’t want you landing alone on that raft.”

Miller looked outside. “Looks like you’ll get a little wet on the way down, sir,” he said.

Cooper slipped into the harness. Miller snagged it with a hook affixed to the cable he’d paid out, set a hand on Cooper’s shoulder, and gave the hook a short, violent tug. Satisfied, he guided Cooper to one of the safety handles dangling from the open doorway. He laid out a brief set of instructions before taking back Cooper’s headset.

Cooper leaned backward into the rain and sunk out of sight.

A rumbling rush of water sounded out in the blackness, giving the impression of approaching bulk. A tremor passed through the raft beneath them; a large swell followed, with smaller, choppier waves behind it, and then the sea returned to its prior peaceful state. The raindrops had become fewer and less bulky in the past fifteen minutes.

Cooper looked at his watch. Three-thirty.

A spotlight hit them with hot white light, then doused. Another light popped on fifty yards off, this one more faint, a yellow floodlight bathing a section of the black sea with incandescence. It offered sufficient illumination for Cooper and Laramie to notice a small group of men approaching in a Zodiac. The light, Cooper saw, was affixed to a stationary black column featuring a small deck, a series of antennae, and a white number painted on its side. Beneath the column, just protruding from the water, a swath of black steel stretched far enough in each direction to be lost in the darkness before it ended.

The Zodiac approached the raft, and in fewer than five minutes, Cooper and Laramie were deposited on the deck of the nuclear attack submarine USS Hampton. Their raft was quickly deflated and hidden by the men as Cooper and Laramie were escorted through a hatch at the base of the conning tower.

Eight minutes following its arrival, the sub slipped silently beneath the surface, its new and unofficial cargo of two civilian passengers safely aboard.

Inside the Hampton, Cooper and Laramie were taken to a minuscule cabin equipped with two doors. There was little between the doors other than a pair of cots so small they appeared to have been designed for children. Their escorts left, closing and locking the door they’d entered through, leaving them alone inside the room.

After a moment the bolt shifted in the opposite door. The seal popped, and the door eased open an inch or two. Nobody appeared; nobody reached through. Cooper watched the door, waiting, but nothing else happened. Finally he reached out and opened it, revealing, when he peered through, a hallway that from all appearances matched the one through which they’d just arrived. Noticing an unmistakable, pungent scent, he took a step into the passageway and saw, maybe halfway down the hall, the back of a short, beefy man in a blue T-shirt and the lower half of a wetsuit. Cooper could see as the guy walked away that he possessed forearms the size of a running back’s thighs. A wisp of smoke lingered in the hall, leading in a curlicue contrail to its source: a joint, lodged in the man’s mouth, of a size falling somewhere between a Cuban cigar and the state of Texas.

About twenty paces off now, the man turned a corner and ducked through another doorway, massive left forearm extended above his head in a wave Cooper figured was meant for him. Laramie stepped into the hallway behind him.

“What have we got?” she asked.

“What we’ve got,” he said, “is some very good weed.”

U.S. Navy SEAL submarine-based diving platforms, or SEAL Holes, were technical operations rooms housed aboard every U.S. Navy nuclear attack submarine built after 1992. The two-room compartments were isolated from the rest of the host submarines, accessible only by way of a subsurface dive port and one interior entrance, an example of which Cooper had seen the thick-limbed SEAL turn into from the passageway inside the Hampton. None of the ordinary crew members could access the Hole without an encrypted code-key which, in most cases, was only provided to the SEALs working the Hole, along with the captain and executive officer of the boat.

The sole function of the Hole was mission control for clandestine operations. If so ordered, the captain and executive officer of the submarine would steer the boat according to the needs of a SEAL Hole operation; even in such cases, though, none of the submarine’s regular crew possessed any idea of the purpose behind the submarine’s change in course.

Just after 4:15 A.M., twenty-two miles east of the southern tip of Martinique, the USS Hampton inched along at a depth of four fathoms. She maintained a speed of six knots at a distance of approximately two thousand yards from the windward shoreline of Mango Cay. Along this shore, the island’s primary geographic feature was a sheer cliff face. With only a brief, scraggly pause to deposit a short, black sand beach, the cliffs plunged sharply below the ocean’s surface, creating a depth of many hundreds of feet of ocean in as short a horizontal distance as twelve feet from shore.

Inside the SEAL Hole, planted in a seat with his back to a wide control board, the man who had opened the hallway door for them sat smoking his cigar-size joint, alternately pulling in the reefer and taking in gulps of fresh air. He canted the joint to the side when he sought the fresh air between tokes, but otherwise kept it lodged between his teeth.

“Code name’s Popeye,” the man said, facing his audience of two. He’d just offered them a pair of stools. “I’ll call you Olive,” he said to Laramie, “and you Brutus. That’s who we’ll be for the duration.”

He sucked in a lungful of Colombia’s finest.

“Chief tells me I work for you the next eight hours. I take orders from you,” he said to Cooper, “not out of any disrespect to you, Olive, but simply because I work best with a direct chain of command, and it’s you, Brutus, I’m choosing.” He clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back, the cigar-size blunt curling smoke into the sub’s otherwise highly controlled atmosphere.