Breathing lead dust and soaking up radiation inside the access panel, Cooper gave some additional thought to Gibson. With the man out here running Deng Jiang’s missile factory, probably thinking after ten years of the assignment he could certainly get used to island life. Maybe even thinking he wouldn’t mind securing a ninety-nine-year lease of his own. Maybe Gibson does the math, he thought, figures out how to snake a few of the warheads, and determines he can get somewhere around that two hundred mill he was telling the maid about each time he pulls a nuke out of its ICBM.

He couldn’t see the whole docking bay from his cubby inside the missile, but it had looked to him, on the way up the elevator, that Deng’s submarine was no longer parked in the underwater lagoon. Maybe the bullets from his UR-14 hadn’t struck premier pay dirt, and the big fella had headed home. Cooper reached instinctively for his SLK, and the camera, homing device, and other goodies he had in it, but no such luck. Be good to find that camera with the pictures I took, now that they’d learned what they’d learned-Cooper figured even Peter M. Gates could put the pictures he’d taken of Premier Deng and his boys to use.

About an hour in, he gave the warhead-MIRV pairing one more whack with the hammer, and the twenty-fourth and final rivet fell from its anchor, pinging its way down the interior of the missile.

As instructed, he stepped out from the hole and signaled to the maid.

“The harness!” she screamed. “Maintenant!”

When Zeke Sampson, captain of the USS Hampton nuclear attack submarine that housed Popeye’s SEAL Hole, reported to Norfolk that his sonar man had spied a bogey in the waters near Martinique, he was ordered to track it. Sampson was also told to monitor and escort the arrival of the USS Scavenger, the navy destroyer assigned the investigation of Mango Cay. The captain’s crew had long ago marked the approaching destroyer, which had reached its drop point some fifteen minutes back and would release its reconnaissance launch momentarily.

Sampson found it odd that it was now-only seconds before the Scavenger’s launch boat was set to splash down-that the bogey detected by his sonar man had turned up on their system. In fact, the vessel, which was clearly a foreign submarine, had made its appearance only two thousand yards from the island the Scavenger had been sent to investigate. When Sampson received confirmation that the sub they were tracking was a Chinese nuke, he made a simple call: the sub’s presence was unacceptable.

Sampson did not view this as an exercise. For him, nothing was-he ran a tight sub, and, loose, tight, or otherwise, a U.S. Navy nuclear attack submarine always operated at wartime readiness.

He brought the Hampton to within seven hundred yards of the bogey.

In order to provide sufficient power to ignite forty-two Trident intercontinental missiles over a launch period of eighty-four minutes, Deng’s engineers had recommended a five-plant in-line generator grid that, while spearheaded by an accelerated use of the nuclear reactor, had little resemblance to the clandestine power-generation the reactor produced in the course of its routine duty.

Stage one of the power boost involved the automated sinking of six times the typical count of U-238/U-235 fuel rods into the pool within the reactor; stages two through five supplemented that energy glut with the ignition of four massive diesel generators. The diesels providing the power for these generators had been diverted from a Chinese strip-mining site in Mongolia; each engine’s twenty-four cylinders displaced 110 liters and burned nearly ten gallons of fuel per minute, belching an unfiltered cloud of soot.

Once the generators ramped up to the specified 4,000 rpm, the power grid feeding the missile-launch system contained sufficient juice to light the rocket engine propellant within a missile forty-two times in rapid succession, at least by aerospace standards. This process began thirty minutes ahead of Deng’s revised launch time of noon and would hit full wattage nine minutes before the first missile was set to enter the history books.

In the meantime, with the reactor accelerated and the diesels kicking on in sequence, Mango Cay was subjected to the kind of uproar normally associated with cataclysmic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

One of the fastest items to move off the shelf when the Soviet Union disbanded was a set of fourteen diesel-powered midget submarines that had operated out of Ukraine’s Sevastopol harbor in the Black Sea. Upon dissolution of the empire, primary authority over Soviet matériel housed in the former republics was ceded to the newly independent republics-meaning, among other things, that various superpower-grade implements of destruction were placed in the hands of nations so poor and corrupt that nearly everything of value was sold within minutes, and the midget subs were no exception.

Sporting only a fraction of the beam of a typical nuclear sub at eighty-five feet, the subs had been built in the late 1970s as the Soviet precursor to SEAL Holes. They were designed as two-man vehicles, with a freight capacity similar to that of a forty-eight-foot shipping container. Twelve of the fourteen subs had been sold on the open market between 1991 and 1996 to various tourism companies; the thirteenth sub had been decommissioned and sold as scrap metal due to a series of accidents that occurred during its time of service.

The fourteenth had been purchased by Spike Gibson.

He used it sparingly, since he’d procured the sub primarily to get the hell off the island when the shit hit the fan-such as a time like the present-but he had applied its services from time to time. One use had been as a handy-dandy disposable laborer-retriever.

Gibson drove into the cargo cave and ditched his cart. Moving past the yellow crane, he ambled through a doorway that was normally locked, but which he’d opened along with all the island’s other doors once Deng hit the road. He flipped a switch, and the pocket cavern housing his Ukrainian sub revealed itself under the lights.

He leaped aboard the sub’s deck, scaled its six-foot conning tower, and boarded through the main hatch. When he started it up, the old contraption belched a cloud of black smoke but soon settled into a mellow purr. Gibson sealed the hatch, worked the crude controls, and navigated beneath the underwater ledge separating the pocket cavern from the cargo cave’s main lagoon. He parked it against the dock before spending a laborious few minutes opening the sub’s corrugated roof, a task accomplished by means of an ill-greased hand crank. When he had the roof open, he climbed out directly from the freight bay, stalked across the floor of the cave to the yellow crane, took the control seat, and started her up.

He maneuvered the crane on the tracks until its arm was positioned above the warhead storage container at the back of the cavern. There was a six-inch eye bolted to the top of the container; Gibson worked the crane’s arm, causing the hook end of its cable to swing like an upside-down metronome, and jammed the left-hand lever forward and took a shot at the eyebolt with the hook. It clanged off the hole on the first couple of attempts, but he nailed it on the fourth. As the hook slipped through the hole, Gibson pulled back on the right-hand lever, elevating the arm. The cable tautened.

He gunned the engine and lifted the box, the rear of the crane creaking under the strain of the weight. When he had the container a few feet off the cavern floor, he steered his way backward and to the left, swinging the container across the stacks of equipment and debris until he had it hanging above the open cavern floor. Easing the container to the floor, he slackened the cable another notch and locked the crane in place.