Coming inside the bigger internal cavern, Cooper stood still for an instant, gawking at the sight of the cavern and its contents. He nudged Laramie along the wall opposite the doorway; they ducked behind a section of piping wide enough to obscure them. Cooper could feel the heat popping off the pipe from a few feet away. From this hiding place, they could see the forest of white-and-black missiles in its full glory; there was also an odd, hourglass-shaped structure of ceramic, somewhere around twenty-five feet high, connected to the pipe beside them.

Seeing these things, Cooper considered that Julie Laramie had turned out to be one of three things: either she was the best SATINT analyst ever to set foot in the Langley headquarters building, the world’s greatest organic lie detector machine, or simply psychic.

“Forty-two,” he heard her say.

“I’d like to take back what I said before,” Cooper said. “Your theory was ludicrous after all. Correct, but ludicrous.”

“They’re Tridents, by the way. They’re supposed to be found in U.S. Navy Ohio-class and Los Angeles-class submarines.”

Cooper looked around at the towering missiles, each touting an eight-digit identification code painted beneath a checkerboard stripe and an American flag about two-thirds of the way up its bulk.

“I’m no professor,” he said, “but I’ll hazard a layman’s guess these particular Trident missiles weren’t put here by the navy.”

“At least not the American one.”

Deng came to the base of the missile with the numeral 6 painted on the cavern floor beside it. The rest of the group gathered behind him in a loose semicircle, the mercenaries distributing themselves in a way that allowed them to keep an eye on Li, Deng, and Dr. Chu. By Chu’s order, Hiram had gathered two boxes of tools from a maintenance cubicle.

Standing beside Deng, Gibson watched the leader of the most populous nation on earth examine the painted 6 on the ground beneath them and incline his head to take in the sight of the missile above. This, Gibson knew, was where Hiram and his just-keeled slave had most recently pillaged a W-76 warhead.

Deng lowered his gaze until it settled on Gibson. The premier eyed him in the same manner as when he’d asked the question, pre-tour, out by the pool, about Gibson’s other projects.

Then Deng thrust his arm past Gibson’s shoulder to point at a missile in the next row of silos.

“That one,” he said to Chu. “We’ll start there. Missile twelve.”

Chu barked a series of orders; Hiram, following the commands, got to work unloading his dolly-bound equipment so the inspection of missile 12 could begin.

Considering that Deng was fucking with him, and doing it in so blatant a fashion, it had become evident to Gibson that Deng had been fucking with him for some time. Looking at the situation from this new perspective, it didn’t take Gibson long to figure out the parts he hadn’t already. At least not until now.

Strolling over to missile 12, he assembled the missing pieces of the puzzle and decided that he’d pretty much put it together.

All of it.

Cooper’s instinct had been to do it the minute he saw all of them together on the dock. He’d suppressed it then, deciding to give current events a little breathing room-by seeing what went down, maybe he’d come to understand things a little better-but as the seconds ticked past, the two of them crouching halfway out on the open floor, he decided there wasn’t much more to learn.

Sure, he thought, I’ve got a few questions I could ask these guys-maybe probe the topic of what it is, exactly, that Muscle-head does with the zombies once he brings them in here-but he was starting to feel exposed. It began to occur to him that even in his prime-presuming he’d ever had a prime-that he hadn’t exactly been a crackerjack military strategist anyway. Back then, he thought, all you were was a goon: a highly trained, stupid goon, taking orders from people any idiot could have told you not to trust. And now? Now you’re a flaccid, drunken beach bum, who ought to be out riding a wave, or taking a look at a starfish, or an anemone, or maybe some octopus hiding somewhere inside a shallow coral reef. You have no business tangling with these motherfuckers, and no intelligent reason to be doing it either.

Thinking that the opportunity for surprise rarely came around at all, he figured that once it had, maybe what was needed was a goon such as himself, stupid enough to be willing to seize the moment. He checked the clip on the UR-14, and, finding it to be in working order, leaned over until his lips brushed against Laramie’s ear.

“The way I see it,” he said, “right about now, we’ve got three options.”

“Okay,” she said.

Considering the look he saw in her eyes, peering past the pipe at Deng and his team, Cooper suspected Laramie was thinking the same thing he was, but he took her through it anyway.

“Option one,” he said, “we do nothing and get caught.”

She nodded. “Hang around another five minutes and we may as well just pick that one. How about two and three?”

“Use Popeye’s homing beacon to bring him back, and, pictures in hand, get the hell out of here.”

“If he can make it back.”

“Yes-if.”

“And if he does, it would probably take, well-at least five minutes of hanging around, wouldn’t it?”

“I’d say longer,” he said.

“How about door number three?”

“For the moment at least, we possess both the element of surprise and a pair of automatic weapons.”

“We could look to hide out,” she said. “You know-avoid option one for as long as we can while we figure out what to do.”

“We could.”

“My lie-detecting talents lead me to surmise that, if given your druthers, you would choose option three.”

“Yes.”

She looked at him. “I can’t say that I’ve ever shot anybody. I can say that I’ve never killed anybody.”

“Get on the floor.”

“What do you mean, ‘Get on the floor’?”

“I have.”

“You-um,” she said. “Both?”

“Get on the floor.”

He moved across the phalanx of Gibson’s rented soldiers, a staccato-firecracker echo caroming through the cavern as he went. Hiram popped up next in the shooting gallery-dropping his grip on the dolly he’d been wheeling along, Hiram stepped away from it and squeezed the trigger of his Uzi before the dolly hit the cavern floor, but only one of the shots he popped off came close before the last three shells from Cooper’s first clip pierced the former bartender’s neck, shoulder, and heart, and Hiram’s body leaned sideways and draped itself lifelessly over the fallen dolly.

Having dispensed with the bodyguard contingent, Cooper ejected his spent clip, popped in another, and drifted out from his hiding place to seek a better angle on the principals. He continued firing as he moved; each of the others had found his way behind some obstruction or other, but as he rotated, pulling the UR-14’s trigger, Cooper could see a few of his bullets landing. As he emptied the second clip, he saw a partially hidden body bounce from the impact of his shells, flopping sideways to the cavern floor. He couldn’t tell who it had been.

He was in the process of ratcheting load number three into the gun when his unprovoked assault on the denizens of Mango Cay came to an abrupt end.

Gibson spun to the cavern floor, reaching out as he spun, slapping Deng to the ground with an open palm to the side of the premier’s head-the effect, due to Gibson’s arm strength, that of a grizzly knocking a spawning salmon off its intended trajectory up a waterfall. Deng bounced across the cavern floor and tumbled out of sight into the hole beneath missile 36.

Gibson himself landed behind a transformer, which approximately forty percent of the bullets from Cooper’s second clip proceeded to riddle. The transformer sparked, whinged, thwacked, and burst into flame, a narrow stream of black smoke curling roofward from its louvered vents. A bank of lights overhead doused, and half the cavern went dark.