Held into the foam by the added width of the harness Gibson had left wrapped around it, the fourth bomb remained wedged in its slot.

Cooper stayed at it with the MAC-10, hammering another half-dozen bullets into the body of the crane in hopes it would blow, or maybe tilt over and fall on Muscle-head. Bullet holes cut into the crane’s yellow skin; a rubber gasket snapped, releasing a geyser of hydraulic fluid; sparks flew, and a wisp of smoke rose from the crane’s engine block. Finally, the engine sputtered, then died.

The instant Cooper paused, opting to save the remaining bullets in his clip, Gibson reached around the side of the crane with his Glock and took a pair of potshots. He missed by a few feet, and Cooper got off a couple more-realizing as the bullets whinged off the crane and pocked off the lava wall that he’d fired the last of the shells from his clip. He dropped, making sure to turn away from the place where Laramie lay, and ducked back into the tunnel. As he moved, he heard a series of shots fired by Gibson, one of the bullets clipping the SEAL-issue cross-terrain disposable boot on Cooper’s right foot but otherwise coming up empty.

Gibson’s next pull on the trigger, Cooper heard, resulted in a dry click.

The thrum of the four diesel generators groaned on outside the cavern, and the third of the W-76 warheads, tail dipping deeper from its slot in the container, finally slid, like a fish from a dock, into the water of the lagoon.

Given the relative silence, Cooper guessed that Gibson was doing something smarter than he was-maybe sneaking around behind him, for instance. Stumbling forward, Cooper folded the MAC-10 between his good elbow and his waist, and, grimacing, fumbled through the mess of blood, guts, and canvas jersey formerly composing the maid’s stomach in search of another clip. He snagged nothing but muck until he heard the sound of metal against rock, and then it was heavy in his hand-full, loaded with all thirty-two bullets, and just about enough, Cooper thought, to remove Spike Gibson from cavern and earth.

He yanked the clip out of the mess of gore and struggled to get it into the gun.

Gibson came out from his hiding place and strode across the cargo cave.

As Cooper took his best shot at jamming the slippery clip into its slot, he was faced with the realization that he was completely fucked.

No way would he get the clip loaded in time.

Gibson stepped over Lana’s body and grinned.

“Albert!” he exclaimed. “How are you, buddy?”

Cooper resorted to a pathetic surprise attack, ferociously whacking at Gibson’s face with the butt of the MAC-10, a distraction that bought him about two seconds. Cooper felt the gun land on the hard bone of Gibson’s left cheek at least once, but the bodybuilder soon threw his heavy forearm in the way of Cooper’s thrashing blows and swatted the gun from his hands.

Then Gibson proceeded to unload on him.

Releasing the raw, sinewy power he’d stored in bulk form across years of exercise, Gibson pummeled Cooper with successive blows. Even with the bullet that had pierced his right lat, Gibson had both arms to work with, and Cooper’s one-armed defensive maneuvers did nothing to stop the creatine-boosted onslaught. He tore open the skin on Cooper’s face with the blows, loosened teeth with elbow shots, broke Cooper’s nose for maybe the twenty-seventh time in Cooper’s life with a succession of head butts. When Cooper could no longer stand, Gibson held him upright, grasping the collar of Cooper’s body armor with his left fist while bashing Cooper’s face with his right.

Finally Gibson let go, and Cooper dropped like a dress on the body of a woman who’d just had her shoulder straps snipped. Gibson straightened, inclined his head, breathed deeply of the foul air of the cavern, and, vaguely satisfied, turned and retraced his route across the lava rock floor.

The pool of blood from Lana’s intestines seeped along the cargo cave’s floor, moving along the same downward slope that helped the electric cart propel itself into the pocket cavern. The blood, however, failed to make the full trip. Instead, it dripped into a crack in the floor, where it found a new slope to follow, and flowed into the lagoon.

Accustomed to the routine deposit of expired disposable laborers and totalitarian dictators here, a school of eleven tiger sharks-roaming the region independently, but linked by hunger and conditioning-knew that when blood was released into the water in a certain location beneath Mango Cay, a meal was in store. Thus, once Lana’s blood began to perfume the water-blooming outward from the crack in the floor where it emptied into the lagoon-the sharks arrived in short order beneath the belly of the Ukrainian sub. Soon, each shark, its nervous system confused at the lack of an available meal, began thrashing around and biting at random. The frantic pattern of cannibalistic abuse only worsened when the three lost warheads, splashing into the lagoon, proved inedible.

Prior experience, though, supported the possibility that more food was on the way, and so-driven by a primordial hope-the eleven sharks, each mildly confused and fully pissed off, remained within the confines of the lagoon.

Gibson vaulted from the dock to the nose of the sub and surveyed the damage. The collision between container and hull had put a wide dent in the side of the boat, but the dent was close enough to the waterline that it did not appear to have damaged the corrugated steel door he’d need to seal in order to keep the freight bay from springing a leak.

The container itself was lodged too low to drag or flip into the freight bay; it rested against the body of the submarine with its lid draped partially across the top of the sub, the main body of the container dangling nearly to the water. The good news for Gibson was that the fourth warhead occupied the slot closest to the sub, so that if he could get himself down to the main body of the container, it wouldn’t be difficult to grab hold of the bomb. Of course there was the issue of the warhead tipping the scales at just under four hundred pounds, but Gibson chose not to acknowledge this as a factor.

He climbed out of the open freight bay onto the bent container lid. Scaling down to the container’s main body, he lodged his left foot into the base of one of the empty warhead slots. Seizing the warhead’s harness, he disconnected then reconnected the various clips, buckles, and Velcro straps, securing the harness both to the warhead and around his shoulders and waist.

Thinking he could buy the leverage he needed by wedging his right foot against the skin of the submarine, Gibson planted himself, legs splayed, as a bridge between container and sub. He tested his footing with a bouncing motion. It held.

Tightening the straps, he sucked in a series of thick, heaving breaths, and lifted. The warhead began to inch from its slot, Gibson the bodybuilder doing a single squat rep under a 375-pound barbell. In fact, he just about had the rounded head of the warhead’s heavier side fully out of the foam padding when his right foot slipped on the wet steel of the submarine and he flipped sideways and splashed wildly into the water.

The warhead slunk back into its padded slot, so that the harness straps, affixed dually to Gibson and the warhead, prevented Gibson from dropping entirely beneath the surface. His right leg plunged into the lagoon, almost to the hip, but that was it. He flailed for one of the container’s latches with his right arm, but since it took him two attempts to grab hold, his escape from the water was accomplished a fraction of a second late.

Battling for position once the splash had alerted her to the possibility of food, one of the tiger sharks shot directly toward the source of this agitation and clamped down on the first flesh she found. When she locked her multiple rows of teeth around the muscled ligament and bone of Spike Gibson’s right shin, it took a few frenzied, thrashing jerks of her head to rip the bite off in her mouth, but, fiercely determined to eat, she succeeded in biting off a thick chunk, which she swallowed whole before spinning around to take another run at the offering.