Gibson screamed as his foot was torn from his leg midway up the shin, but when his ankle and foot separated from the rest of his leg, he popped high enough out of the water to grasp another, higher latch. Making a scrambling left-leg thrust into the padding, he pulled himself back onto the body of the container.

Seeing the stump where his right foot had previously been, Gibson first whimpered like a boy, then cursed at the top of his lungs, then screamed a level-toned roar of fury that echoed through the cargo cave.

Due partly to sheer brute strength borne of more than a decade of weight training, partly to unadulterated greed, and largely due to a freakishly large and instantaneous excretion of adrenaline into his bloodstream, Gibson, bearing down on his one good leg and pulling with bursting forearms from one latch to the next, somehow managed to uproot the W-76 warhead from its slot a second time and lift its immense weight fully out of the container.

Screaming and grunting in staccato bursts, every muscle popping with striated arteries, Gibson hefted the bomb across the six-foot gap spanning the container and the submarine’s freight bay. He set the warhead on the rim of the freight bay, threw himself over the edge, and, warhead still tottering on the rim, body half inside, Gibson snatched an exposed interior length of pipe and pulled on it until both he and the warhead rolled down and in.

Like a tug towing a barge, the falling weight of the warhead towed Gibson the eight long feet to the bottom of the freight bay, where his dual collision with the bomb and the floor crushed one of his shoulders. The arm and collarbone on either side of his shoulder snapped with a dull stereo-phonic crunch.

Otherwise, Gibson survived the tumble unscathed.

His heart pounding to the bursting point, Gibson nonetheless had the presence of mind to detach himself from the warhead harness, stand, and hop to the rusted hand crank controlling the bay’s retractable lid. One-armed and one-legged, he slowly turned the crank until he had the overhead door sealed shut. Taking an additional three minutes to tie off and wrap his stub leg with the shirt he wore, Gibson then ducked into the control room and executed the series of commands that would put the sub in gear.

A moment later, Spike Gibson, piloting his Ukrainian sub, dipped beneath the surface of the cargo cave’s underwater lagoon and vanished permanently from the island called Mango Cay.

Cooper had always been able to take a punch; back in the world now relegated to his nightmares, it was one of the ways he’d been able to lull his original captors into complacency too. This time, though, like a stupid iron-jawed fighter who’d stretched his career one fight too far, he had the feeling the beating he’d just taken would eventually leave him harebrained or dead. If he didn’t get himself to a very good hospital very soon, he’d be joining Marcel a little earlier than planned.

It wasn’t long before a crushing pain replaced the numbness in his head and shoulders. He came out of the beating with a headache made for an elephant, but between waves of agony and nausea he started to be able to see around the cavern again. He wiped the blood, sweat, and grime from the narrow slits once known as his eyes and saw Laramie there beside him, exactly where she’d been before. He could feel that his face had been torn open across his cheekbones and lips. He could taste the blood flowing as he moved; he tried to move his jaw, couldn’t, and decided it was broken. Feeling as though he weighed four thousand pounds, he performed a clumsy one-armed push-up and succeeded in pulling his good knee up under him. He shifted his weight from arm to leg and took a look around.

He could see-after another wiping of his eyes-that Spike Gibson, the fourth warhead, and the submarine were all gone. The lights in the cavern were failing, the black haze now so thick and low it reached almost to his face, crouched as he was on the cavern floor. He spotted movement through a doorway across the cavern, braced for another fight, then realized he was seeing the rear of the golf cart they’d pushed down the tunnel. The cart was bobbing against something that blocked its path.

He took about five minutes walking over to it, but once there, looked below the seats and unearthed what he remembered having seen on their journey through the tunnel: the maid had stowed their SLKs beneath the front seat. He slumped behind the steering wheel, solved the issue with the pinned accelerator, and drove back to Laramie. Once there, he opened one of the SLKs, found its first aid kit, and, through a remedy composed of strips of the shirt he was wearing, a portion of his body armor, and the contents of the first aid kit, did his best to stem the flow from Laramie’s wounds. He pulled from the same SLK the homing device Popeye had told them to use before the carriage turned back into a pumpkin, and pocketed it. Not that it mattered any longer, but he found himself wondering whether his camera was still inside his knapsack and, figuring Laramie would want to know, checked, and found it there.

Then he zipped both SLKs shut and strapped them on.

Small and light though she was, as Cooper lifted and loaded Laramie’s unconscious body onto the rear seat of the cart, he decided it was one of the most physically challenging tasks he’d ever endured-second only to his trek up the hill with Alphonse strapped to his waist. Still, he got Laramie aboard, fell into place again behind the steering wheel, and drove into the transport tunnel.

The mud made for slow going, but the lack of a warhead in the backseat helped. He found the side passage they’d passed on the way in, followed it for a while, eventually saw what appeared to be daylight, gunned the cart up a short slope, bounced through a rut, and shot suddenly into the blinding midday sunlight. He thought of the parable he’d heard about the man who saw only shadows on the wall of the cave in which he lived, until, years later, he turned around, discovering that the shadows had been caused by the sun he hadn’t known was there. He tried to remember where he’d heard this, or read it, but couldn’t.

Turning past the main building he’d noticed from their earlier visit with Gibson, he crossed the marble tiles of the poolside lounge and bounced onto the white sand beach. Reaching the beach’s trio of cedar deck chairs, he stomped the brake into place and, fighting a set of back spasms from the effort, lifted Laramie from the cart into one of the chairs. He pulled the homing beacon from his pocket, punched the red button protruding from one end of it, set the beacon on Laramie’s lap, and unloaded himself into the chair beside her.

It was as Cooper sat there, his swollen, pulpy head drooped, that the beach below him began to vibrate. From his limited perspective, staring down, he saw grains of sand tumble from the crests of the miniature hills built by the wind.

Then, against the sky behind him, a glorious explosion of white smoke and yellow flame burst from the peak of Mango Cay’s lone hill. The roar of an immense fire raged, Cooper feeling the heat of its flame against the back of his neck even from three-quarters of a mile away, and the first blunt-nosed C-4 Trident I missile blasted from its silo beneath the hill. The missile rose through the clouds of its own rocket fuel and the diesel exhaust until, as Cooper turned to watch, it cleared the smoke and sliced into the clear blue Caribbean sky. To Cooper the missile looked like a photograph of itself cut and pasted on a glossy, bluish purple background intended to represent the sky.

He blinked in the blinding yellow glare, turned away, and let his swollen head droop so low that his broken jaw almost touched his chest.