Gibson had used the cargo cave as a clandestine freight entrance during Operation Blunt Fist’s construction phase, and while only substandard-size submarines could access the cave, due to the lesser dimensions of its docking bay, much of the operation’s more important cargo had been delivered here. Gibson, for instance, had seen no need to expose the arrival of shipments of enriched uranium, explosive caps, or completed warhead-MIRV replicas to the mercenary guards and construction staff working in the main cavern when, at times, crews there had numbered as many as fifteen or twenty men. Most of these workers had already been or would soon be killed, but Gibson never saw reason to take undue risk.
Standing this afternoon on the catwalk that rimmed the cargo cave’s underground lagoon, Gibson touched a button on his wristwatch to check the time under the dim illumination of the safety lights. The reboot sequence had begun almost a minute ago; if Hiram and the slave arrived on time, he would have just over six minutes and twenty seconds to fulfill the day’s objective.
Just past the 1:05 mark, the door connecting the transport tunnel and the cargo cave eased open and the overloaded golf cart emerged, its suspension dragging with every bump.
Gibson climbed into the control seat of a squat yellow crane positioned in the corner of the cavern. A miniature version of the sort found at container terminals, the crane’s body formed a cube of some twelve feet in width. It stood on a set of rails beside the dock; with its long arm, the crane was capable of accessing nearly any portion of the cave from its home on the rails. A hook was affixed to a cable that dangled from the arm.
Gibson fired up the crane’s two-cylinder diesel engine and steered the machine to one end of the rails, where a series of spare rods, struts, and storage boxes lay against the far wall of the cavern. As Hiram brought the cart to the same spot, Gibson rotated the crane, dipping its hook until it bumped against the roof of the cart. Hiram grabbed the hook and secured it to the harness he and the wino had wrapped around the warhead earlier.
With a surge of its engine, the crane lifted the warhead as if it were a pillow, and at Gibson’s direction maneuvered it out across the field of equipment. Hiram leashed the wino to the side of the golf cart with a dog chain; after yanking on the chain to make sure it held, he walked through the debris to the rear wall of the cavern, where the largest of the room’s cargo boxes sat in apparent disrepair against the wall. He crouched before the first of the box’s eight locks and waved to Gibson. On his cue, Gibson punched a lengthy code into a remote control device, and the first in the sequence of locks clicked open in Hiram’s hands. He removed it, hooked it around his belt, and moved to the next. Once all eight locks had been remote-unlocked and removed, Hiram flipped aside a pair of latches and, feet planted, clean-and-jerked open the box’s thick lid. This act exposed the contents of the box: two W-76 warheads, resting side by side in protective foam padding. The warheads looked like stretched versions of the standard bombs portrayed in Road Runner cartoons-long, rounded, bullet-shaped projectiles with a four-spoke fantail at the rear. There were two remaining warhead-shaped spaces in the padding that filled the crate.
With the help of Hiram’s guiding hands, Gibson worked the controls in the driver’s seat of the crane and lowered the third warhead into one of the slots. Hiram released the hook and unbuckled the harness from the warhead; the bomb rolled into its nook. Hiram replaced the crate’s lid, snapped shut the eight locks, and began his return trip through the mound of industrial debris.
Gibson was off the crane and aboard his private golf cart when he noticed something and motioned to Hiram.
“Looks like we lost another one,” he said. “Toss him in.”
Hiram came around the corner of his cart to see the wino collapsed on the cavern floor. Still leashed to the cart, the former occupant of the alcove on East Queen Street had nonetheless fallen hard on the lava rock floor, which fall seemed to have resulted in the puddle of blood beneath his head. The blood had drained from his ears.
Hiram unleashed the body, dragged it to the edge of the underground lagoon, and heaved it into the water. He hung back a moment to watch as the water roiled in a froth of bubbles and blood, then jumped aboard his cart and drove out on Gibson’s heels.
He cleared the surface exit of the transport tunnel with twenty-five seconds to spare.
43
They reached the waters off the western shore of Mango Cay around four-thirty. Cooper anchored where the water was deep, outside the reef that ringed the lagoon. There was no way he could get his Apache in over the reef, but he spotted a narrow channel where the water looked to be three or four feet deep, Cooper thinking the two float planes he’d seen last time had probably used the channel to enter the lagoon after landing on the open water. He lowered the Apache’s skiff into the water, and once he had it there, climbed in and offered Laramie a hand. She took it with a shrug, Cooper reading the shrug as Laramie’s way of saying she didn’t need the help, but since she appreciated the gesture she’d do him the favor of accepting his assistance. He knew, however, that she could use the help, since Laramie, having refused his offer of Dramamine at sunrise, had turned green around seven, falling into a repeating thirty-minute cycle as Cooper drove them southeast: lean over the railing at the stern, try to find the horizon, lose track of it as the boat planed over a swell, heave whatever was left of the seafood Caesar salad over the edge, feel completely better, stand, return to the seat next to Cooper at the bow of the boat, feel it coming on again and retreat to the rail at the stern. Eventually she’d settled permanently into the copilot’s seat, resigned to her useless state, a glazed, sickly expression on her face. After a while of watching her sit there, Cooper had asked Laramie what she planned to do with whatever evidence they retrieved from Mango Cay.
“What do you mean?”
Laramie had to yell over the roar of the MerCruisers and the wind.
“Say we find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,” Cooper said, “and swipe one. As evidence. You’ll take it where?”
Laramie shrugged, then realized he couldn’t see the shrug given the motion of the boat. “Nobody in Washington seems to care what I have to say,” she said, “so maybe CNN will.”
Cooper steered.
“Since we don’t know what we’re going to find,” he said, “and don’t have much of an idea what to look for in the first place, I’m going to recommend that when we get there, we abide by my tried-and-true, supremely sophisticated espionage technique.”
“That,” she said, “being what?”
“Cause trouble, fuck with people, and generally operate as a pain in the ass.”
Laramie thought about that, then said, “See what shakes out?”
“See what shakes out.”
After a few minutes of nothing but the roar and the roll, Laramie had looked over at him.
“Nice strategy,” she yelled.
With Laramie now loaded into the skiff, Cooper fired up the forty-horse outboard and steered them into the channel. Coming around a bluff, he could see there was a man waiting for them on the beach. From the size of the man’s upper body, it appeared to Cooper that this was the Herculean individual he remembered seeing in one of his photographs, pretty much the only person in the set of photos, outside of the bartender and maid, he hadn’t been able to ID.
Cooper went as far as he could go with the engine. When he heard the outboard begin to clip the coral at the bottom of the shallow lagoon, he tilted it out of the water, slapped the skiff’s oars into place, and came into the lagoon under manual power. Cooper was wearing a short-sleeve beige-on-black Tommy Bahama silk shirt, and wondered whether Laramie was impressed with his physique, rowing the boat into the cove like a local fisherman who’s been doing it for fifty years. When they cleared the coral, Cooper flipped the oars back into the boat, lowered the engine, and broke the glassy surface of the lagoon at a marina-friendly five knots or so.