Then the two of them were back inside the boat, Jim was behind the wheel of the minivan, and everybody left.
Cooper stayed where he was for a moment, not really sure whether he wanted to get up at all. He thought about what this meant, presuming he could extrapolate-or whatever it’s called, he thought, when it’s the opposite of extrapolation-and apply this odd turn of events to recent history. If he could, then perhaps Marcel S., once-dead and then exhumed and revived, had been delivered somehow to Jim, who then passed him on, as with the wino, in exchange for whatever was in the canvas bag. Maybe to the same pair of white guys in the Chris-Craft; maybe not. It seemed unlikely-and, given the rest of Cap’n Roy’s mystery ride, too easy-for the owners of the boat he’d just seen here at Cannery Row to have procured both the wino and Marcel from ol’ Jimbo, but it was certainly possible. This logic therefore made it worth his while to make a call he’d been thinking about making for one hell of a long time anyway.
In the meantime, though, there was something he needed to do.
He caught up to the minivan just shy of the highway on-ramp, using some good old-fashioned American horsepower to overtake it. Once he had, Cooper cut in front of the van and stood on the brake pedal, giving Jim a choice: lock his own brakes or ram headlong into the Taurus. Jim hit the brakes.
Cooper, who was already out of the Taurus, was able to get over to the driver’s-side door of the minivan before Jim had figured out what was going on. When he got there, he smashed his fist through the window, grabbed Jim by the neck, and slammed his head against the steering wheel. Jimbo’s eyes rolled back in his head, pretty much the way Cooper had seen albacores’ eyes do when you whacked the suckers with the deep-sea charter-issue kill-stick. Cooper then opened the door, reached over, unbuckled Jim’s seat belt, got hold of the back of Jim’s sweat suit top, and pile-drove him through the front windshield. He pulled Jim’s head back inside, raking his face through the jagged glass, then bashed Jimbo’s forehead against the steering wheel until his arm hurt, Cooper losing count of the number of times Jim’s bleeding face hit the hard plastic of the wheel after maybe twenty whacks.
Winded, he hoisted Jim, long since comatose, out of the minivan and over his shoulder, then loaded him into the trunk of the Taurus. He crawled inside the van and found the duct tape, came back, and mummified Jim about the way Jim had done with the wino.
Consulting the map provided by the rental agency, Cooper took the Taurus to the front entrance of the U.S. embassy on Oxford Road. He pulled up to the barricade blocking car bombers from direct access to the front stairs, rolled down his window, and showed the stone-faced M.P. standing there his fraudulent DEA identification card. He told the M.P. there was a man tied up in his trunk who’d gone AWOL and was wanted on fifteen counts of first-degree murder, requested that the guard return his car to Hertz when he had a chance, then got out of the Taurus and walked away.
The M.P. shouted after him a few times but decided he ought to check to see whether the DEA man was telling the truth before giving chase. By the time he looked up from the bound, bloody, unconscious, odd-looking sight of Travis James Malloy, the M.P. couldn’t see Cooper anywhere on the road. Even after he’d summoned additional marines for the search, the M.P. quickly developed the sense, which turned out to be correct, that he’d seen the last of the driver of the Ford Taurus claiming to work for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
28
Eleven revolutionary leaders stood behind the resort on Mango Cay in freshly pressed hiking gear.
Arriving here over the course of two days, the dignitaries had traveled through four different regional hubs-San Juan, Kingston, St. Lucia, and, for some of the higher-profile leaders, Havana. From these hubs, arrangements had been made for clandestine transportation to six different Antilles harbors, where private float planes, free of all customs inspection or other unwelcome review, completed the trip to the resort. Each man’s personal security detail, if any, was disallowed for this last leg of the journey, as had been agreed.
On the third morning of their visit to the resort, the leaders were told to meet at 8 A.M. sharp in front of the Greathouse. The men were told to wear clothes suitable for a hike in the woods, such clothes having been set out for each man in his private cabana.
Not accustomed to being made to wait, the men lingered uncomfortably until the sound of thrumming motors approached from the woods. It was then that Spike Gibson and a man the leaders had come to know as the resort’s bartender appeared from a trailhead at the base of the island’s lone hill. Each drove his own stretch golf cart, three rows of seats per cart, outfitted with all-weather tires and raised suspensions. Gibson and the bartender, whose name was Hiram, pulled the carts to either side of the trail.
Gibson made small talk with some of the men, speaking to several in their native languages. Then, at five past eight, General Deng and Admiral Li arrived on a smaller-though equally equipped-cart. Deng and Li wore hiking gear too, and when they exited the smaller cart, Hiram and Gibson boarded it and drove off, disappearing around a corner on their way up the island’s rainforest hill.
Deng invited the men to board the limo carts and took the wheel of one; Li took the other. With Li following directly behind, Deng led the two-cart procession along the same route taken by Gibson and Hiram.
This was the first time the brethren had seen their mentor, and Deng knew one or two of them would still be wondering who he was, while others must have been bursting at the seams with surprise, even awe. China! he figured much of the brethren to be thinking. And not just a midlevel officer, acting alone, but a vice premier, overseeing the entire military of the greatest revolutionary nation on earth!
He began a disjointed narration as they drove, his speech aided by a wireless translation system, its software rendering his Mandarin into Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, and a pair of African dialects. The system required his guests to wear earpieces and receivers resembling iPods; running on a three-second delay, Deng’s words were delivered into the ears of his guests in their native tongues.
Deng told the men about the salvage operation. He told them how he had shown patience where the Americans had not. How he had taken one of the C-4 Trident I missiles and shipped it in pieces to a laboratory in Hangzhou, where a team of military scientists created an exact, working replica. How he had shipped the replica to another lab, where a second team of scientists assembled another dozen replicas based on the prototype. The circuit was repeated until, in addition to the full complement of twenty-four missiles he’d ultimately recovered from the USS Chameleon, Deng had another twenty-four replicas on his hands. He told the guests that each of the forty-eight missiles was, in theory, fully functional, with each C-4 ICBM loaded with four 100-kiloton W-76 thermonuclear warheads and Mk-4 MIRV re-entry vehicles. Six of the forty-eight missiles-all six part of the inventory of originals pilfered from the Chameleon-had been partially damaged from the American submarine’s sinking, he reported, and were being repaired in a secondary cave.
One of four African revolutionary leaders in the procession inquired as to how Deng had kept the work quiet. Deng answered through the translation headsets.
“We keep the work quiet,” he said, “with something our security director prefers to call ‘disposable labor.’ ”