The Weapon

by David Poyer

  “If I can go as your wife.”

  She meant, so she didn’t have to talk to generals and admirals. “Absolutely. In a veil.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  After some sappy endearments he hung up. He thought about calling his daughter, and at last he did. But the phone rang and rang in Nan’s room and she didn’t answer. She had a cell, too, but he didn’t know its number. He left a message.

  He changed in the locker room at the back of the building, broke out new shoes and fresh socks, a USNA tee laundered so many times the blue lettering was a shadow against the gray, and headed out for a run. The stored sun-energy blazed up off the pavement. A breeze tossed the treetops behind Rodriguez Range. Marines doubletimed past, chanting in unison. God, had he ever been that fresh-faced, that unreflectingly confident? Yeah, maybe he had. Back when he was an ensign, aboard Reynolds Ryan . . .

  He jogged on, caught in memories that only after a time did he manage to wall off. He shook out his arms and shoulders, and picked up the pace.

  When he slowed again, sweating in the heat, he was almost to the piers on the west bank of the inlet. He turned north, thinking to at least get a look—you couldn’t jog down the piers anymore, a security fence cut them off from the rest of the base, but at least he could look at the ships—when a note caught his ear.

  It was the slow tolling of braided wire clanging wind-driven against hollow aluminum. Masts loomed. He turned off the road and jogged past trailered powerboats waiting for the ramp. Then slowed to a walk as he reached the base marina. He hesitated, then headed past the OWNERS AND AUTHORIZED VISITORS ONLY sign, out onto the salt-weathered planks.

  He was admiring a green-and-white sloop when a gray head popped out of the companionway. “Looking for me?”

  “Uh, not really, sir. Just taking a break.” He turned away.

  “Just looking, eh? Come on aboard, then.”

  The owner’s name was Adridge. He was retired, to judge by a paunch that wouldn’t have passed the current fat standards. A captain or master chief, retired on thirty, Dan guessed. But he put on no airs. He showed Dan around, through main cabin to forward cabin, quarter berth, galley, head.

  It wasn’t new, but there was no scent of mold or rot, which was the smell of a badly kept boat. The bilges were dry and sweet. When Adridge unshipped the housing, the engine looked new. Even the fire extinguishers had inked tags with current inspection dates.

  “Put a lot of elbow grease into her over the years,” the owner mused, showing him the ball valves on the through-hulls. “All the electronics are up to date. But it’s time to let somebody else enjoy her.”

  “Putting her on the market?”

  “Yup. Just tinkering today, getting her ready for the broker to take pictures. Have to admit, though, I like the idea of another Navy guy sailing her.”

  Dan looked around the cabin again. He could change after work and jog to the marina. It wasn’t an apartment, so he wouldn’t be setting up separate housekeeping. And living on base meant that much added security, if Nick Niles was right and there really were people who’d just as soon keep him quiet.

  “So . . . what’re you asking?”

  Adridge named a price. It was affordable; his car was paid off, his daughter’s tuition was pretty much taken care of and she was even interning at a company in Springfield; he could do 10 percent down from his checking account, and USAA would be happy to loan him the rest. He asked about slip rental. Adridge said the slips went with the boat, not the owner, and the monthly fee sounded doable even with power and water included. Dan said he’d need a survey. Adridge said he wouldn’t buy a boat without a survey, either. “Do you live around here, Dan?”

  “Staying at the Q, right now. Share a suite with a guy from ATGLANT.”

  “Where you stationed? Aboard ship?”

  “No, shore duty. Stationed over at—over at one of the tenant commands.”

  Adridge looked at the sky, then the channel. The basin was choppy with the wind coming over the dunes. “Well, what do you say we fire her up, see whether she likes you?”

  The diesel stroked on the first press of the button, kicking out a gossamer blue smoke that vanished as it warmed up. Adridge backed out with one hand on the wheel—not a negligible performance, with one screw and an adverse wind—and headed out past the massive gray cliffs of the landing ships. Sailors shaded their eyes from the decks. Once past the jetty and in the Chesapeake, Adridge turned over the wheel. Moving about the deck stiffly but with perfect balance, reaching from shroud to shroud like a seagoing chimpanzee, the older man hoisted the main and set a roller-furled jib, then came aft to kill the engine as they accelerated, tilting on a starboard tack.

  They sailed to Lynnhaven Roads and back, tacking through a stiff northeast breeze. She came about in her own length and cut through three-foot swells fast and clean as a sharp chisel through poplar. By the time they picked up the lines again Dan was sold, having remembered he’d promised to teach Nan to sail when she came East for college. He made an offer, conditional on the survey. Adridge held out his hand. “There were a couple of things I was going to do. Have the injectors checked. Replace the fore and aft stays—they’ve been up there a time. But if you wanted to take care of those, I could make your price.”

  “Injectors. Stays. Anything else I should keep an eye on?”

  “There’s a maintenance log in the navigator’s desk. Oil change schedule and all the repair records and guarantees and so forth.” Adridge looked up at the masthead. “We’ve had a lot of good times. Hope you have as much fun with her as we had, my wife and me.” His eyes went far and Dan knew she wasn’t with them anymore, that he was saying good-bye to a lot of memories with her in them. He blinked and lowered his gaze. “’Course, it’s your call. But I’ve heard it said, it’s bad luck to change a boat’s name.”

  “Naiad? It’s a fine name,” Dan said. “I’ll keep it.”

  Adridge’s weathered lips creased. “Grab that line then. Cross the stern lines—yeah. Like that. That way, she’ll ride out anything that comes her way.”

  3

  Naval Undersea Warfare Center,

  Newport, Rhode Island

  Dan had been homeported in Newport when he’d first joined the Navy. So he knew these dark forested hills, the twisting narrow roads and quaint villages turning more expensive-looking each time he’d been back. But he’d never been to NUWC, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, though every surface line officer knew of it. From the hilltop above the old pier complex its brick buildings looked like the campus of a technical college. They stared out over the gray bay that looked cold even in summertime, or maybe he just remembered the Narragansett that way from what had seemed like eternal winter when he’d been stationed here. A carrier lay alongside Pier Two, ghostly with the queer lifelessness of a mothballed and crewless ship. The bay was flat and leaden, and cloud-shadows hunted over it in the early morning light.

  Dr. Chandra Chone had asked them to come in early. He said he got his best work done late in the evening, which showed where a deputation from TAG came in his priority list. Their rather long wait in the lobby, before a young staffer came out to get them, was another clue.

  Building 106 was a late-1940s structure. Chone’s office had a very high ceiling, strange liquid shapes of machined metal on top of gray file cabinets, Renoir’s self-portrait, a whiteboard, and a safe in one corner just big enough to contain Harry Houdini. The staffer sat Dan and Monty Henrickson at a four-person table with three chairs.

  When Chone rolled in at last he extended his hand from a sleek graphite wheelchair. He was dark-complected, with a cottony-white goatee. The staffer took the third seat, introducing himself as Dr. Charles Pirrell. Both scientists were in slacks and short-sleeve shirts with ties.

  As soon as the door was closed the lights dimmed. A screen glowed. The PowerPoint slide showed the NUWC logo and the motto We are undersea warfare. The second slide read, The Naval Undersea Warfare Center is the Nav
y’s full-spectrum research, development, test and evaluation, engineering and fleet support center for submarines, autonomous underwater systems, and offensive and defensive weapons systems associated with undersea warfare.

  Dan twisted and cleared his throat. In the dim three pairs of eyes met his. “Uh, Doctor—this isn’t the command brief, is it?”

  “Yes, Commander, it is.”

  “Could we skip it? We’re familiar with NUWC’s mission.”

  Chone and Pirrell exchanged glances. The presentation froze, then flickered with incredible swiftness until it came to a blue screen and went out. Chone brought the room lights back up and set the remote aside. “You wanted to know about the VA-111. The so-called ‘Shkval.’ ”

  “Yessir.” Dan wondered why “so-called”—he’d been under the impression that was its Russian designation. “We’d like to understand the scientific basis—”

  “You don’t need to sir me, I don’t hold military rank. I don’t do much research, either. Most of what I do is sit in meetings.”

  “Lot of that going around where we work, too,” Henrickson said.

  “Uh-huh. Well. I hope you won’t leave feeling you’ve wasted your time. You got the Patchell report?” They nodded. “Read it?”

  “We read it,” Dan said, irritated. “We even understood it. We’ve both worked in program development.”

  “How nice for you. Well, we’re required to provide you support. Your CO’s letter—Mullahy?”

  “Mullaly.”

  “OPNAV info’d me on the request. You wanted everything we’ve got on supercavitating vehicle technologies?”

  Dan said that was right. Chone drummed his fingertips on the armrest and squinted at the Renoir. “That’s a broad request. So I have to ask: Why do you want to know? To what level of detail should we tailor our briefing? Help me out, Commander.”

  “Well, first, we’d like to hear about its propulsion. Then guidance. Then warhead. Then tactical employment. Then strategic effect.”

  “Most of that’s outside our purview,” Chone said. “But we’ll do what we can. Charles? Why don’t you address the propulsion angle.”

  Pirrell pulled over a note pad. He drew a long torpedo shape, but with a rod extending from the blunt stern. He etched in rings of small dots around its circumference, and carefully pencilled something small at the nose that Dan couldn’t clearly see from the far side of the table. Then leaned back and sighed. “Uh . . . I’d better start with the phenomenon of supercavitation.”

  Dan was already familiar with cavitation, which occurred when something was dragged through a fluid at very high speed—for example, the rotating blade of a fast-moving prop, which was where the phenomenon had first been observed. The water pressure dropped behind the moving blade, and the water vaporized—boiled instantaneously—forming steam. He’d listened on sonar to submarine screws cavitating; as the vapor bubbles imploded they made a distinctive racket. They could erode or even crack metal blades.

  Supercavitation, Pirrell said, was deliberate sustained cavitation along the length of a moving vehicle, harnessing a phenomenon that up to now had been a nuisance. A supercavitating nose was designed to “wedge” the water apart. When the vehicle got going fast enough, and the bubble was pumped up by injecting additional gas through bleed holes, this wedged-open area sheathed the entire projectile in a skin of vapor and hot gas, reducing hydrodynamic drag to near zero. It would never touch the water, but tear through it enveloped in a slippery bubble.

  Pirrell occupied the next forty minutes plodding through papers, trials, and projects dating back to 1940, when a Nazi scientist had proposed a supercavitating air-to-sea missile. He went on to an Aerojet General study on hydroreactive gas generation from 1962 and ventilated-cavity studies and enveloping-vapor-flow simulations someone had done around 1969. Henrickson asked a couple of detail questions; Dan and Chone were silent.

  The younger scientist went on to more recent ONR and DARPA studies. Dan sat forward when he got to a program that had actually built a ten-inch-diameter supercavitating vehicle with an eye to testing it as an antitorpedo torpedo. The CAV-X had been dynamically simulated and then “in-water test-bedded,” as Pirrell said, there in Newport. In two years they’d fired it three times. Twice the vehicle had self-destructed. The third time it had run, but in an erratic corkscrew that ended by burying itself in the mucky bottom of Newport Harbor. The development team thought lengthening the body would stabilize it, but the program had been run in parallel with a high-power fuel/oxidizer combination being developed for a prospective Air Force antisatellite missile. When Congress terminated the Air Force program, funding for the Navy research had been insufficient to continue. Meanwhile, the undersea warfare community had focused on reducing signatures and using advanced digital signal processing to detect enemy subs early, so torpedo countermeasures were less urgent. Like so many other projects, it had been boxed up and shelved.

  “Okay,” Dan said. “What I’m hearing is, the Russians have put together various pieces of technology, some of which we might’ve developed, to build a two-hundred-knot supercavitating torpedo. But we don’t have anything like it, or any program to develop one. Correct?”

  Neither scientist seemed to relish his summary. “It’s not exactly our choice, Commander. We can propose areas of research, but our funding points us down certain avenues and away from others. The Shkval has come up at inter-agency meetings. We have a foreign technology tracking program. But when the director proposed test-bedding something of our own, as recently as four years ago, PMS-415 downplayed it. And you may disagree, but they have sound reasoning behind that decision.”

  “How so?” Henrickson said.

  Pirrell went to the whiteboard. “This is no wonder weapon. It sounds scary, but when you look closely, it’s less intimidating. It’s fast, but it goes deaf and blind inside that bubble as soon as they fire it. Finally, power density’s a critical limiter. As it always has been with torpedoes. Even with low drag, pushing metal through the water that fast takes an incredible amount of thrust. Even with hydroreactive metal gas generation—that’s what we think the Russians are using—that means, short range.”

  “How short?” Henrickson asked.

  “We estimate Shkval at less than three thousand yards.”

  “And we know this, how?” Dan asked.

  The door cracked an inch or two; they all went silent.

  It opened the rest of the way, and a captain in dress blues came in. He looked as if he’d just come from having his official picture taken. Dan started to get up, then noticed none of the others rose and sank back. “Gene Boscow,” said Chone. “ONR. He asked to sit in, that all right? He chairs Antimine Weaponry now, but he dates back to the CAV-X project Charlie mentioned.”

  ONR was the Officer of Naval Research, which funded and administered the various labs, centers, and universities that developed technologies for the Navy. “I don’t remember, I wasn’t there, and I lost the T-shirt,” Boscow said, shaking hands around the table. “We digging that up again? What’s the occasion?”

  Dan said, “Dan Lenson, sir. From TAG, Little Creek. We’re trying to get smart on supercavitating vehicles.”

  “Lenson? You said Lenson?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Horn?”

  “Her CO.”

  Boscow nodded, lips pushed out. “Heard of you. Sounds like you managed to—well. I guess that’s beside the point, here. Supercavitating vehicles? I’d try Yurly Savchenko, in Kiev.”

  “Well, he doesn’t work for us, sir.” When they were seated again he asked Boscow, “So you were on the CAV-X project? Why didn’t that work, Captain?”

  “It did work.” Boscow sounded surprised. “Though we had vehicle control issues—how to stabilize the bubble cavity, how to vector the flow for low drag. We didn’t have vectorable nozzles then. Not small enough to go on a torpedo. So we were limited to fins, and whenever the fin pierces the bubble, there’s an area we couldn’t dynamicall
y model—we didn’t have the computational capacity then to model turbulent flow.

  “We finally figured out the corkscrewing was due to the tail hammering back and forth from one side of the cavity to the other. We had plenty of power with the TM-382—a neat little dual-thrust engine we could siphon gas off of to feed the cavity—but we sized everything for that thrust regime, and when motor development got zeroed out we couldn’t go to a lower-power unit with that diameter body of rotation. The project rolled up its eyes and died.”

  Henrickson pressed, “But you could have made it work?”

  Boscow shrugged. “The Russians did.”

  Dan asked why ONR and NUSC hadn’t thought a superfast weapon worth pursuing. Boscow said, “Well, a rocket-propelled supercavitator, take away the glamor, it’s really nothing but the old Mark 45 Astor—fast, straight-run, nuke warhead—except louder and shorter-range. Today, the main use we see for something like the Shkval is in antisubmarine scenarios.”

  They discussed how the weapon could be employed. Boscow said the main effect would be in a radical compression of the time available for the decisionmaker’s detect-to-engage sequence—or as he called it, DLAK, for detect, localize, attack, and kill. “The loop execute time goes down to maybe a minute and a half total, instead of seven to eight minutes. The major advantage for the guy who has it, if he’s being attacked, he can turn the tables, especially if your round is wire-guided, which most all of our weapons now are.”

  Dan understood that; Mullaly had said much the same back at TAG. “Okay, but that’s all sub on sub. What about surface ships?”

  Pirrell said, “The original Henschel design, the HS 294, was an antiship weapon.”

  Chone said, “As far as I can see, the only time a superfast straight-runner gives you an advantage is when you have the drop on the surface platform. Either that, or against a technologically sophisticated enemy that can jam or decoy homers.”