“Now what,” he said, “can I do you for?”

Cooper said, “We’re wondering if our friends running the resort up top have anything to hide. Specifically, we’re wondering if they’ve got a way of getting in and out-or off and on-from underwater. Maybe with a small submarine.”

“Good people, your friends?” Popeye said. “I ask ’cause I’m wondering if they mind us snooping around. In other words, how clandestine,” he said, drawing out the stine, “we need to be?”

Laramie said, “Pretty clandestine. Not to speak out of turn, of course.”

“You can assume they’ve got it all,” Cooper said. “Sonar, cameras, motion detection of one kind or another. I’m figuring a Hole run by a guy named Popeye, though, comes loaded with the latest devices engineered to circumvent such security systems.”

Joint between his teeth, Popeye said, “Correctamundo.”

“After looking around, we find anything interesting, we might need to get inside. You get us in and you’ve got an all-expenses-paid three-week vacation on a white sand beach a few miles from here. You name the time.”

Popeye looked at Cooper, then Laramie, then back at Cooper before pulling the joint from his mouth and rolling it around between his fingers. “I don’t know who you are or where you come from, Brutus,” he said, “but for you to get a free ride in my room, you must be one well-connected hombre. And come to think of it, I could use a little R & R next month. Maybe bring along the missus?”

“She’s invited and we’re paying for her too,” Cooper said.

Popeye jammed the thick joint back into the corner of his mouth.

“In that case,” he said, “lemme introduce you to my little friend.”

SEAL Hole data was fed to a segmented large-screen plasma monitor, so that images from the equivalent of eight television screens were visible at any given time on the single monitor. One segment, the largest, was dedicated to digital video playback, and in this portion of the screen Popeye had activated the moving image of a sheer face of underwater rock wall. Cast in a red hue symptomatic of the infrared lens capturing its images, the picture moved slowly from right to left on the screen. There was little to see besides rock, seaweed, uninteresting groupings of rock-based plant life, and the occasional small fish.

The video rolling across the monitor had been shot fifteen minutes prior by the Hole’s unmanned underwater vehicle, or UUV. Popeye had loaded up the drone with commands, sent it out to fulfill its data capture mission, and digitized its video to the Hole’s hard drive upon its return.

“UUV hung a left here,” Popeye said. He pronounced the acronym uve. “Puppy’s got artificial intelligence in its chip. Following the curve of the wall.” The sheer rock face on the monitor dropped out of sight, then appeared again as the camera made a sharp turn and the infrared spotlight affixed to the lens reilluminated the cliff. A number of times, the UUV had found its way into underwater caves, something that took Cooper about two minutes of surveillance to learn were a common geographic feature beneath Mango Cay. In one such cave, the images recorded by the UUV showed the flat surface of the water above the drone’s lens, but aside from an unusual preponderance of looming tiger sharks, the cave was featureless.

It was another three-quarters of a mile along the rim of the island’s submarine strata where a more interesting feature presented itself on the monitor.

“More fish here,” Cooper said.

Schools of small fish, gray in the infrared video image, surged in and out of sight of the camera’s eye.

Cooper watched the monitor as the image progressed from blank rock wall and three fish, to a dozen fish, then a hundred, and then suddenly the screen was filled with thousands of fish of all kinds-Cooper seeing the same set he got in the Conch Bay coral beds, wrasse and damselfish, a few sergeant majors, the bigger bar jack, yellowtail snapper, even barracuda. The rock wall became difficult to see behind the teeming mass of sea life.

Once he was able to catch a glimpse of the wall again, Cooper pointed at the monitor.

“More seaweed too,” he said.

Popeye said, “Water temperature’s kicked up about ten degrees.” He pointed to one of the data segments on the monitor.

“How deep is the drone?” Laramie asked.

“No change in depth.” Popeye eyed another segment on the screen. “Four fathoms.”

As the drone turned back to the right-knifing between what Cooper thought might have been a million fish-the video image revealed a massive hole in the face of the rock wall. The opening was entirely natural in its contour, but it was the glow emanating from the rear of the cave-brightening as the UUV entered the cavern-that they could see wasn’t the least bit natural. In fact, it was quite obviously man-made.

“Aye, aye,” Popeye said when he saw the bright cone of light.

Cooper’s first impression was that they’d found an underwater ballpark, that glow you got when you saw a distant baseball diamond at night. Or, he thought, an underground cave housing an illicit nuclear power plant. As the video image relayed the UUV’s continued trek along the shoreline, the diffuse white light moved to the left, faded, then vanished. Popeye banged out a series of commands on his keyboard and the image of the underwater cliff popped off the monitor. The squat man turned to look at them.

“I’m guessing,” he said, “you’d like our friend the uve to take a deeper recon tour inside that cave.”

Laramie nodded.

“Correctamundo,” she said.

In surveying Mango Cay for the location of the operation’s nuclear power plant, Deng’s civil engineering team had pinpointed the island’s largest cavern as the ideal clandestine depository for contaminated runoff, primarily due to its considerable underground lagoon. Surviving intact from its days as the power cell aboard the USS Chameleon, the nuclear plant generated power in sufficient quantity to run the facility’s day-to-day operations, but also generated a hundred thousand gallons a day of scalding, highly radioactive runoff, plus a steady seep of mildly radioactive steam.

Due to the resulting swath of irregularly warm water, there was, outside Mango Cay’s underwater docking facility, a splash of sea life more concentrated than that inhabiting the most photographed coral reef in the hemisphere-a preponderance of creatures that ultimately punched a hole in Deng’s otherwise bulletproof security blanket.

The underwater docking station within the missile cavern was canvassed by both closed-circuit video surveillance and sonar-based motion sensors. By their nature, the closed-circuit cameras positioned at the entrance to the underwater cavern were basically useless, since the images fed to the mainframe’s software were composed of nothing but wall-to-wall fish. The routine presence of sharks and other predators required the sensitivity of the sonar package be set to near infinity in order to avoid hundreds of false alarms daily.

This meant that the methodical, preprogrammed second voyage through the cavern by the Hampton’s UUV went undetected outside of the shiver of fear it inspired in countless fish. Despite this, it appeared there wasn’t much to see: the cove contained what appeared to be some sort of dock, a thick pipe that opened into the cove, a series of other, smaller pipes, and little else. The cove itself, Cooper could see on the display, was huge.

Laramie watched Popeye as he studied a data window alongside the video playback.

“Water coming out of that pipe,” he said, “is just under two hundred degrees Fahrenheit.” He clicked the mouselike tool that allowed him full control of the console, checking another readout. “It’s also highly radioactive.”

The video images concluded their playback on the monitor. Popeye reclined in his seat and eyed the instruments. He was still smoking. Laramie looked at Cooper.