Sampson immediately ordered a dual-salvo torpedo attack. Seconds after he gave the order, another call the crew had previously made only during war games came back up the radio grapevine:

“Shark out of the cage! Two! Two sharks out!”

Catchphrase delivered, the crew members aboard the Hampton braced for the concussion they knew would come almost instantaneously with the detonation of two nuclear-tipped torpedoes in fifteen fathoms of water at a distance of only seven hundred yards.

When Deng’s twin torpedoes struck the hull of the PX-38 U.S. Navy reconnaissance launch boat, the vessel and its crew erupted in an explosion so overwhelming that within twenty-five seconds not a single scrap of shrapnel remained on the ocean’s surface. One moment the thirty-eight-foot sea-to-land attack craft had been skimming the Caribbean at thirty-five knots; in the next, there was a thud; the third marked an explosion that blasted the boat into a cloud of shrapnel mist.

Then the Caribbean returned to the state in which it had found itself prior to the boat’s arrival.

Deng was able to savor the destruction of the launch boat for two full seconds.

In the third, his War Room monitors told him two additional torpedoes had been released into the sea in fatally close proximity to his submarine lair. He knew immediately what this meant, and since he also knew there would be little time to do anything else, he simply set his jaw and stared with satisfaction as the last seconds of his life ticked off the countdown clock.

Now that he’d destroyed the reconnaissance boat, Deng knew the countdown would continue.

No one could stop it.

Eight seconds following the direct hit of Deng’s torpedoes against the launch boat, the Hampton’s modified Mk-48 nuclear-tipped torpedoes commenced a dual-stage explosion that resulted in the complete disintegration of three-quarters of Deng’s submarine.

The first Mk-48 detonated mid-hull on the starboard side of the sub, vaporizing most of the sub’s steel skin. This resulted in an implosion; the submarine folded partly in on itself, sucking over a million gallons of water into its cavities, a brief underwater black hole. On the ocean’s surface fifteen fathoms above, an oval-shaped area depressed by two inches.

Then the second Mk-48 struck; with so many of the sub’s cavities flooded, the detonation blasted outward in all directions. At sea level, the ocean shot suddenly skyward in a geyser of salt water and shrapnel.

Because they took place beginning at T-minus 00:13:39 on the Mobile War Room’s countdown clock, the twin Mk-48 explosions meant that Premier Deng Jiang would not live to witness the manifestation of Operation Blunt Fist.

Lana had no need to cock her weapon, nor pull back its hammer. The gun was already trained on Cooper’s chest, a bullet positioned in its chamber, so all that remained for her to accomplish in order to dispose of Cooper and Laramie was the transmission of a signal from brain to index finger.

At the instant the cart nosed beneath the doorway to the cargo cave, her brain relayed this intention and her index finger flexed. The finger pulled the trigger of the MAC-10, and the inevitable followed.

At the instant Cooper felt the overburdened golf cart dip into a rut-the same instant in which Lana tugged the trigger of her MAC-10-reality adjusted itself within Cooper’s being. The culmination of his picture-in-a-picture images, the images that came to him blurred, then eliminated what little remained of the line dividing the existence of his own being and that of the twice-dead Marcel S.

Over the course of a ten-millisecond span of time, an unimaginably long sequence of visions played out in the mind of the temporarily insane Cooper. He saw, in a continual, fast-forward band of muted colors, his torture in the Central American prison; his machete-fueled counterattack on his captors, followed by his flight; the usual content of his third dream-lost sections of his life afterward, the time spent in gutters, sewer pipes, drainage culverts and hospices; and, blended with the rapid-fire images from his dreams, there came images of a flight he had never known. Jagged leaves, black in the wet night, whipped his cheeks as he ran; sores bled beneath a torn jersey. A gust of wind knocked him off balance and he slipped, fell, and rose again, only to flee, stumbling, over the edge of a cliff in the howling winds and rain of a hurricane. He smashed against the rocks below, felt bullets pummel him from above, and clawed his way across a thrashing dock to the tiny wooden rowboat lashed to its end.

In this ten-millisecond instant, Cooper was not present on Mango Cay, but instead became lodged in an endless nightmare from which it seemed he would never awake or emerge, and in this endless instant he realized there was no other explanation except to admit that he and Marcel, both dead, had become enjoined, then arrived in hell, where Cooper had no doubt they would remain for eternity. Assuming it was his fault, not Marcel’s, that hell was the prison to which they’d been sentenced, Cooper’s mind burned through a thousand-year loop, a trap, an inescapable sentence stretching into a hideous, burning eternity, and then, in stubborn objection to this impossibility of instantaneously occurring eternal damnation, his physical being generated a counter-eternity of opposing energy.

His rage at the absurdity rose up against the images confronting his mind-the equivalent of the jerking twitches made by a sleeping man in his attempt to awaken from a frightening dream-and Cooper’s body, starkly aware of the importance of this single moment of eternity, channeled its counter-energy back into and out through the same instant of real time through which the altered-reality vision of hell had come.

In a flash of bloodred blindness, Cooper burst from his nightmare with the propulsion of a shell launched from a firearm, and he made, at least for the moment, an escape from damnation. In the eleventh millisecond following the golf cart’s dip in the rut, Cooper’s body shot forward, flying, more catlike than human, across the three and one half feet separating him from Lana. His body covered the distance in so short a time that, for Lana, time did not pass between her depression of the trigger and the impact of two-hundred-plus pounds of conch-fritter-filled human projectile against her solar plexus.

Cooper’s leap was not quick enough to escape the pummeling strike of the first two bullets. As he got himself airborne, one struck the edge of the sheath-thin SLK-issue body armor; partially ricocheting, it plunged into the flesh of his shoulder but delivered no permanent damage. The other succeeded in burrowing into the meat of his upper thigh.

A pair of Lana’s ribs snapped on impact and her body flew backward over the cart’s steering wheel. Landing on the floor of the cavern, her head bashed against the unforgiving lava rock. The injuries would not have kept a soldier of Lana’s constitution from fulfilling her intent to kill were it not for the speed with which Cooper then got his hand around Lana’s fingers, spun the MAC-10 into her bosom, and put thirteen shells into her broken rib cage, thereby extinguishing the light that had, until now, burned within the muscle-bound maid.

At that point Cooper collapsed, landing facefirst beside Lana’s body on the damp stone floor beside the doorway to the cargo cave.