She tried to make a phone call and got nothing in the way of a dial tone. She tried her cell phone, and got a message saying her service had been temporarily interrupted. She nodded, assuming they’d realized she could make calls with it once the pizza boy showed. Unfazed, she booted up the Dell desktop she kept in an alcove between the kitchen and living room, took a shot at checking for any e-mails, and failed to get an Internet connection. The Explorer status bar explained itself by saying, CANNOT LOCATE SERVER.
She changed into her nightshirt and looked in vain for a bottle of wine until she stumbled upon the jackpot of an unopened bottle of champagne in the back of the fridge. She shot the cork at the ceiling, kicked the lid off the pizza box, and never quite got around to turning on the television set while she sat on the couch and polished off all the Dom and seven-eighths of the pie.
She was thinking something to the effect that both Cooper and her father, when he’d been around, really had something with that alcoholism bit as she leaned her head back into the cushions and passed out for the night.
36
The hardware behind Spike Gibson’s perimeter security system required so much processing capacity that Gibson had been forced to invent a daisy-chained combination of servers to support it. He initially bought Crays, then later switched to Apple/IBM dual-G5 processor-based CPUs; he acquired the equipment through a ladder of American shell corporations, none traceable to the next.
His software oversaw a vast web of data capture, including military-grade radar and sonar systems, surface and submarine motion sensors, closed-circuit digital video feeds, and online control of a private satellite outfitted with spy cameras. The complexities of the system were such that during each twenty-four-hour period, the system required a short period of time-seven minutes and twenty-two seconds, to be exact-to reboot.
During the reboot window, the system’s data-capture inventory was tested in its entirety; all hardware, including processors and memory, were examined and updated; and all data collected during the prior twenty-four-hour period was digitally archived. Emergency power capacity for the island was tested-the power grid fed by the nuclear power cell in the main cavern was switched for five minutes to a gasoline-powered generator, then for another two minutes to a battery cell. In order for the system to work without any error whatsoever over the course of more than a decade, the daily reboot was a necessary evil, which Gibson attempted to minimize but still found imperative.
At least that was how he had explained matters to General Deng.
Gibson thought it more effective to spare General Deng the details, and thus had informed him of the daily reboot as a side note. Deng had never asked for clarification, and his apparent indifference to this minor nuisance worked particularly well for Gibson, who had, due to the window of darkness offered by the preposterously redundant daily reboot, conducted a highly regimented salvage operation of his own.
Over the course of the past eighty days, the daily increments amounted to just over nine hours of cumulative time, which proved plenty for Gibson’s team-Hiram, Lana, and the rotation of disposable laborers-to make significant headway toward his aim of pilfering four W-76 thermonuclear warheads from the Trident missiles in the cavern. The extraction involved a transfer of the warheads to the cargo cave-or in Deng’s parlance, the Lab-located three-quarters of a mile from the main missile hall.
The work had to be performed during the main transfer phase of the reboot session, since it was during this period that the cavern’s floodlights popped off and the cavern-based closed-circuit video cameras closed down to facilitate the daily archiving function. Had Gibson conducted his operation at any other point during the day, Deng could have seen what he was doing; the mainframe simulcast all data streams to an encrypted hard drive in whichever of Deng’s War Rooms the general planned to occupy next.
To date, Gibson had succeeded in extricating 2 of the cavern’s 168 warheads from their homes inside the Trident missiles.
On the afternoon of the second day of Julie Laramie’s interrogation, the daily reboot commenced on schedule at 3:52:38 P.M. A second later, the bank of floodlights lining the ceiling of the missile cavern doused. Pale yellow emergency lighting, emanating from bulbs built into poles lining the walls of the cavern, flickered to life.
Two seconds after the pale yellow darkness had consumed the cavern, a pair of figures emerged from the tunnel entrance through which Deng had brought his guided tour. While impossible to detect by the digital cameras’ dormant chips, the two figures were Hiram and the wino. Hiram drove one of the carts and kept a black rod draped across his lap. The wino carried a heavy black duffel bag.
As the duo approached missile 6, Hiram exited the cart and opened the cage door of the two-person platform secured to the outside of the missile’s external silo. When the wino didn’t walk into the lift unprompted, Hiram zapped him with the rod, the cattle prod doing the trick. Hiram retrieved a chunky harness, an apron, and a rope-and-pulley assembly from the cart-affixed, on one end, to a winch at the rear of the cart-and followed the wino aboard the lift. As the lift reached the twenty-foot mark, Hiram doffed the heavy apron, opened the lift, and gestured for the wino to get to work.
The wino hastily withdrew a rubber plate and series of tools from the duffel bag; he used the plate as a shelf, affixing it to a length of pipe and dumping the tools across it. It took him thirty seconds to unscrew and open an access panel on the side of the missile; with Hiram and his cattle prod lurking behind the metal skin of the access door, the wino conducted a meticulous, though not precise, series of tasks, on which Hiram had instructed him earlier.
Including the wino, a sequence of three slaves had been working for weeks at removing one of this missile’s four warheads, extricating the warhead rivet by rivet, seven minutes at a time, from the Mk-4 MIRV to which it was secured within the missile. Inside the access panel, the wino chewed through struts with saws, whacked at chunks of metal blocking the extraction path, and hammered and chiseled at rivets, all the while sucking down metal sawdust and soaking up enough radiation to peg a Geiger counter against its stop. The heroin Hiram had been injecting into the wino’s bloodstream did not appear to affect the performance of his assigned tasks.
Though Hiram could not see the re-entry vehicle from his protected vantage behind the access door, he knew the MIRV to resemble a cruise missile without the wings. Having logged nine cumulative hours of such extraction work, Hiram also knew each C-4 Trident I to contain four such MIRVs. This meant that each of the forty-two Tridents was therefore capable of delivering four one-hundred-kiloton nuclear detonations to four independently targeted locations of up to one thousand miles apart. On this particular W-76/Mk-4, Hiram’s slaves had logged two hours, thirty-one minutes, and forty-two seconds to date, leaving Hiram with what he estimated to be one minute and fifteen seconds before the wino got the last rivet out.
Hiram swung the rope over a strut and clipped the hook at its end to the harness. At the three-minute mark in the reboot sequence, the last extracted rivet made a ping against a sheet of metal somewhere inside the projectile; Hiram reached around the access door, handed the wino the harness, and took the lift down to the floor.