“Aw, crap,” he said.

When the first of Operation Blunt Fist’s missiles reached an elevation of five hundred feet above sea level, three simultaneous notifications were immediately transmitted by the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s primary computer system. The first notification went to the staff manning a room on the grounds of Peterson Air Force Base, NORAD’s headquarters near Colorado Springs. The second notification was sent by the equivalent of a multimedia instant messaging service to a series of government officials. Lou Ebbers, Alan Kircher, Carlos Muske, Secretary of Defense Wally Parke, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the vice president, and the president were among those receiving immediate notification.

The third missive triggered an instantaneous escalation of the U.S. military’s readiness status to DEFCON-1, known also as “maximum force readiness.” Civilian agencies were placed on EMERGCON alert.

Under DEFCON-1, the required approvals for a counterlaunch of American strategic nuclear assets could be granted, based on historical precedent from simulation exercises, no faster than seven minutes following the moment at which the president received notification that enemy missiles had got airborne. Transit time for the average U.S. ICBM to just about any worldwide target, including one in the Caribbean, involved a minimum of sixteen minutes, due to the ballistic trajectory of the weapons.

Thus, in all likelihood-if in fact it were ever ordered at all-at least twenty-three minutes would pass before any U.S. nuclear counterstrike could reach Mango Cay.

Sitting with his head slumped forward, staring blankly out at the lagoon, Cooper realized something.

Somebody had turned the float plane around.

It now faced the water, rather than the beach, and while this might ordinarily have held no particular meaning, with the fireworks show under way behind him, Cooper had been waging a brief internal skirmish.

It occurred to him that, depending on where the missiles were aimed, somebody was going to have to stop the launch before all forty-two caught air-and it didn’t currently seem as if Washington, Langley, or anybody else was making any progress toward shutting this thing down. Cooper also considered that if Washington were to do something, the way the response might happen didn’t bode well for anybody sitting on the cedar beach chairs along Mango Cay’s blue lagoon.

He wondered how the hell he had drawn the shortest straw-that of all the expert, capable people who might have been perfectly suited to stop the ignition of four rows of Trident missiles aimed God-knows-where, it was an irascible, emotionally scarred societal reject with a made-up name who was the only conscious one on-site, and therefore the only one with any shot at doing a goddamn thing about bin-Laden’s ultimate wet dream come true.

He wasn’t sure what the new orientation of the float plane meant, but he knew it meant something, so he dipped his head and closed his eyes. He watched the backs of his eyelids as thoughts of Spike Gibson, Deng Jiang, the bartender, the maid, and Popeye floated past; he listened to what he remembered each of them saying, saw what he’d seen each of them doing. He gathered the sum of the impressions, splashed them into a blender, and let whirl. Some of the concoction spilled from the cylinder-blends of images, sounds, sensations-until, at length, one particular dollop splashed across the frame of the picture-in-a-picture window and stuck. What he saw, and heard, was Spike Gibson barking orders to his maid inside the missile cavern.

Get in, bring me another two hundred mill, and get off the island, he’d said.

In addition to the value of the fourth warhead, the bodybuilding behemoth had been talking about something else: they had planned for the maid to leave the island on her own. Presumably, of course, only to meet up again with Gibson and collect her share-at least presumably for the maid. That, he suspected, was not what Spike Gibson presumed.

Cooper had met people like Gibson before-at least somewhat like him. In the world of such people, he knew, there existed no such conceits as comradeship, brotherhood, or marriage; accordingly, Cooper understood as well as if he’d known Gibson his whole life that there was no way in hell the man would allow a single member of his staff to survive Mango Cay, let alone share the take.

And yet the maid had been instructed to take the plane.

He thought about this for a moment, Cooper considering Gibson’s plan for the maid’s ill-fated escape in the context of the highly boring reading he’d done some three weeks back on the beach at Conch Bay. He decided that the idea that came to mind represented, at best, an idiotic long shot-but that, he mused, is why we highly trained, stupid goons exist.

To roll the dice on the idiotic long shots no one else is dumb enough to try.

He stood and limped down the beach to the float plane. As he approached the plane’s pontoons, a burst of artificial sunlight and billowing white smoke shot from the hill and another missile cleared its silo and tore into the sky. He checked his watch and placed the launches about two minutes apart.

Thinking about how many two-minute sets it would take him to accomplish his aim, Cooper began a systematic search of the plane. He explored every cavity where Gibson might have hidden what he was looking for, knowing full well that Muscle-head would need to have stowed it in a place where the maid would not have been able to find it. This said a lot, considering the haggard-faced bitch had looked like a person with some pretty good ideas about how to keep people from killing her. There was a chance, however-Cooper trying to think things through the way Gibson might-that the maid’s search, had she lived long enough to conduct it, might only have been sufficient to convince herself that her boss hadn’t fucked her over.

He checked behind the engine block, beneath the seats, under the rug in the cargo hold, below the toilet seat in the lavatory apparently built for passengers the size of chimpanzees. He was forced to wipe the blood and exhaust grime from his swollen eyelids three or four times a minute just to see what he was doing, but in due course he found an access panel on the plane’s tail. In order to remove it, he had to retrieve a wrapped package of tools he’d discovered under the pilot’s seat; during the time it took him to get back and forth between the two sections of the plane, another missile rose into the sky from the hill.

Behind the panel he found a hydraulic assembly which he assumed controlled the plane’s rudder. He stabbed his head through the opening, peered through his eye slits, and discovered within-held against the plane’s interior skin with a series of suction cups and a stripe of Velcro-something that appeared to be a porcelain brick. Noting a barometric pressure gauge and a series of wires affixed to one edge, Cooper immediately knew what he was looking at, and it certainly wasn’t a porcelain brick.

Judging from its color, he figured the chunky cube for either PENO or Semtex plastic explosive compound.

Cooper also figured the barometric pressure gauge affixed to the bomb was designed to accomplish for Gibson-and his late, doomed maid-precisely what Cooper sought to accomplish via the harebrained scheme percolating in his bruised mind.

He unfastened the explosive brick from the interior of the float plane’s tail, tucked it under his good arm, and headed back up the beach. As he sped across the poolside marble and turned the corner past the Greathouse behind the wheel of the cart, another missile rocketed from its home and knifed into the sky.