The Weapon

by David Poyer

  Now it was just him and the four-stripers. “All right,” Mullaly drawled. “Dan’s got a proposal for us. But he’s not sure we’re going to like it.”

  “Let us be the judges of that, Commander,” Hines said. “In any case, whatever it is, we’d need SURFLANT and AIRLANT approval. Since your CO here seems to be using the requirement to squeeze more funds out of us.”

  Dan said, “My advice is not to tell either of them. Or put it on secure Internet, or distribute it in any other way, either.”

  Mullaly grimaced. “Enough drama. Let’s have it.”

  It might not be the best idea. But it was all he had to offer, the only road that might get them where they wanted to go. He plunged. “I’m tired of having Higher tell us how to go about this. Go to Moscow. Go to the Malacca Straits. The way I figure it, the straightest line from not having a Shkval-K to having one is to go where we know there’s an operational weapon.”

  “Which is where?” Hines watched him closely. “The Russian Navy?”

  Someone knocked at the door; the lieutenant, carrying Styrofoam sandwich containers; Mullaly waved him off.

  “No, sir. Iran. They’re buying all the arms they can get. We know one of them’s the Shkval-K. You’ve seen this on the secret JWICS. They’re making the first installation in a Juliet-class submarine. A former cruise missile sub.”

  The intel officer frowned and sat back.

  “You’re proposing—what?” Mullaly shook his head. “I don’t think—”

  “Wait, sir. Think about what we’d get. The weapon. Plus any guidance computers, software that comes with it. And as an added bonus, it’s a preemptive strike. Dr. P’s just told us it’ll take him at least six months to generate an initial countermeasure. At least. Which could mean a year, two years—who knows?”

  “Right,” said Hines, his tone the essence of noncommittal.

  “For that whole time, Tehran’s got our nuts in a vise; all they have to do is spin the handle. But if we got the testbed installation out of Iran’s hands, we preserve the viability of our carriers in the Gulf until we can get a defensive capability to sea.”

  “You’re not seriously proposing we hijack an Iranian submarine,” Mullaly said.

  Dan turned to him. “Not hijack it, sir—no. We don’t need the sub. But we’ve got a team already trained to take over a ship and offload a weapon.”

  Mullaly looked to Hines. The N2 touched his lips, then shook out a cigarette. “Can’t hurt to look it over. But that’s the kind of thing we’d have to kick way upstairs.”

  “I’m glad you mentioned that,” Dan told him. “That was my next question. Actually, I asked it before and I didn’t get a straight answer. I’ll ask it one more time. Has there been a covert action finding? Has the president authorized us to do this? Or are we tearing off on our own here, doing an Oliver North for you, or for Admiral Olivero?”

  “To be perfectly honest, that’s a VUCA situation,” said Hines.

  “A VU what?”

  “It’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. You ask, has there been a finding? The trouble is, I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  Hines tapped his forehead. “I have a memory problem. Documented in my medical records. Head injury, Desert Storm. So, you ask me questions like that—”

  “This is ridiculous.” Dan stood. “I could have lost guys aboard that freighter, if the crew had resisted. We came this close to getting napalmed on Mindanao, when the Philippine Army hit the rebel camp. Looking for kidnapped Americans I wasn’t told were there.”

  “There’s no diplomatic way to say this, Commander. But the Navy’s not being supported by the civilian intelligence structure on this issue. Including DIA.”

  “But that’s DIA’s mission,” Mullaly said mildly. “How can they back away from it?”

  Hines said, “Oh, there’s very little our national intelligence structure can’t back away from, Todd. But don’t get me started on that. The current chief of DIA’s a lieutenant general. An Air Force lieutenant general. Does that help?”

  “I’m still not clear exactly what ‘not being supported’ means, Captain,” Dan said. “Can you find it convenient to tell me? If you remember?”

  “Sure. To the extent you need to know. Does it mean you have an official finding, a blessing out of the West Wing? You worked for this president. You seriously think he’d find for something like this? You and I both know the answer.

  “On the other hand, is keeping Hormuz open vital to the national interest of the United States? It is. So vital, we’d have to send that carrier in whether there was a threat or not. So then what happens?”

  Dan said after a moment, “We might lose it.”

  “Yeah. A carrier. And an air wing, and five thousand sailors, worse case.” Hines looked at the door again, and his face was calm but his eyes moved this way and that. “I hardly remember half of what they tell me. But from the CNO on down, the Navy’s squatting and straining to shit out a solution here. If that means we have to do it ourselves, our own intel, our own operations, and our own countermeasures, then the phrase that comes to mind is, ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.’ ”

  “Dan, that answer your questions?” Mullaly murmured.

  He didn’t even need to nod. But he kept his hands away from his coffee cup. If he reached for it now, there’d be a real mess.

  17

  USS San Francisco, SSN-711, Off

  Naval Support Activity Diego Garcia,

  British Indian Ocean Territory

  Fifty feet down, Teddy Oberg floated in a turquoise haze that stretched lightfilled above, below, around, without bound or limit. Bubbles tumbled upward in silvery floods. The sun poured down golden torrents that shifted and shimmered across the flat black paint of the massive cylinder he was slowly hand-jockeying out of a black archway into the light.

  He and four other divers hung like strange gourds from the slowly writhing loops of hookah hoses inside the Dry Deck Shelter. The nine-foot-wide DDS was bolted to the main deck aft of the sail. Below it, out ahead of him as he faced aft, was the far more massive curvature of San Francisco’s afterbody, then the towering black blade of its rudder.

  The DDS’s walls were high yield steel, built to take as much pressure as the submarine hull itself. Breathing fifteen times a minute, Teddy hung in the main compartment, or hangar, all the way aft. Forward of it was the transfer trunk, an airlock that mated to the after-torpedo hatch. And forward of that was a hyperbaric chamber, in case a diver had to be depressurized.

  The black shape they were maneuvering out into the blue-gold shimmer on its track-and-cradle gear was a “Gator”-class submarine delivery vehicle. It looked more like a swollen, blunt torpedo than a submarine. But its smoothly faired aluminum was sausage-stuffed with ballast and trim tanks and pumps, fathometer, gyro, ahead-looking sonar, even a small inertial navigation system.

  Starting two hours before, they’d flooded the hangar and equalized pressure. Wearing open circuit SCUBA, the DDS team had undogged the huge exterior door and extracted the tracks. Now they were slowly working the vehicle out of the hangar.

  This was a drill, of course. Lenson and the SDV team commander had insisted on a run-through before they headed in to the Strait. This DDS was brand-new, just delivered, and longer than previous models, to accommodate larger teams for longer missions. They wanted to make sure nothing would go wrong. Not that you ever could . . . He had to admit, it was a lovely sea for a dive. Seventy degrees, so they didn’t really need the wet suits.

  He only knew a couple of the SDV guys. All SEALs operated with SDVs, but these were the West Coast team.

  A grinding scrape dragged. He couldn’t really tell where from, it was difficult to localize sound in the water. One of the divers pointed to the stern. He mimed getting a grip and pushing. Teddy finned around till he could brace himself against the inner wall. He grabbed the crossbar on the rudder and applied force. Not too much; underwater yo
u just wanted steady thrust on something that weighed this much. With massive deliberation it hesitated against his gloves. Then began swinging the other way.

  A few minutes later he clung to the outer lip of the shelter, watching the vehicle leave. The screw rotating so slowly he could make out each blade, it shrank gradually away into the blue. A single ping rang through the sea, jabbing a pick into his right ear.

  He watched till it disappeared, then jackknifed, pulling himself back inside. Joining the line of other handlers, pulling himself down the length of the hangar into deeper blackness. A circle of light showed the hatch to the transfer trunk. He waited patiently, the dry gas hissing in through his regulator, bubbles roaring in his ears as he breathed out.

  Sixty feet forward, Dan perched on the single chair in the captain’s cabin. With two men in it, both taller than average, there wasn’t much spare cubic left under the curved overhead. He kept expecting the air to be close, but it smelled like white bread. Andy Mangum was sprawled on his bunk in blue coveralls, hands behind his head and one foot propped against the door. Andy and he had been classmates at the Academy. The year before, they’d met off South Korea, during a multinational exercise that had turned into the hunt and engagement of a covert strike force. Now Mangum was humming “Take My Breath Away,” and staring at the overhead. Dan waited.

  The sub’s skipper said, “Those boots work out for you?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” He looked at his feet. “Still wearing them, actually.”

  “You know, from what you say, this is an illegal operation.”

  “Covert’s the official word.”

  “But you say there was no finding? You never got written orders?” Mangum shook his head. “We do black ops in the sub force. But there are orders. They don’t travel outside the chop chain. But they’re there.”

  “Do you have orders for this operation?”

  “Matter of fact, I do.”

  “Who from?”

  “SUBPAC.”

  “So what’s your worry?”

  “I guess I don’t have one,” the CO said. “Warm up that coffee?” He pressed a call button on the bulkhead.

  “What do they say?” Dan asked after a moment.

  “What does who say?”

  “Your orders.”

  “Oh. Pretty bare bones. Like always. Pick up a DDS and a task element from SDV Team One in Pearl. Proceed to Diego Garcia and pick up elements of SEAL Team Three and TAG Team Charlie. Transit to Point X-ray and debark. Remain on station until SDV returns; high-speed transit to Diego Garcia for offload.”

  “That’s all?”

  “All that’s my business.”

  “Nothing on our objective?”

  “I don’t need to know your objective. All I have to do is get you there, and pick you up when you’re done.”

  Dan scratched his regrown beard, looking at his classmate’s deliberately incurious face. He felt tempted to tell him. But he reluctantly concluded he had to act like a naval officer, even if sometimes he didn’t feel like one. “All right,” he muttered.

  “Pretty clever, what the Iranians did. The spot market and all.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t follow the market?”

  “The stock market? Not that close. Blair’s got mutual funds, but they’re in a trust or something. Since she’s in a policymaking position.”

  “Get her into energy. Everything revolves around energy. Remember when they announced they were closing the Strait? Going to lay mines?”

  “And then the next day said no, it wasn’t closed.”

  “Right.” Mangum sat up and pulled his notebook over, booted it up. “I had it here someplace . . . the Wall Street Journal Online . . . heck, this battery doesn’t last very long . . . never mind. First they announced they were closing the Strait, warning mariners, threatening to sink tankers. The next day they say, oh no, our mistake. The actual effect? Can you guess?”

  “To put the fear of God into us?”

  “Better than that. The National Iranian Oil Company quietly bets long on millions of barrels of oil futures. Then, after the announcement, the spot price of crude doubles. They start selling. They ride the spike up to the peak, unloading all the way. They sell future deliveries of their own production in Europe and Japan.

  “Then suddenly, hey, we’re sorry, there’ll be no mines, somebody in the Pasdaran got overzealous. But by then all the futures are snapped up, and they sold two years’ production in advance, too. They figure the total take at around sixty billion dollars.”

  “A nice payday.”

  “Enough to fund their naval expansion plans for years. The North Koreans, now the Iranians—they’re learning how to whip us without firing a shot.”

  Dan shook his head in mock admiration. But maybe it would recoil on them, maybe they’d been too clever. Because after that he hadn’t heard a single doubt or problem about his operation, and every piece of equipment and resource he’d asked for had suddenly been his.

  Someone tapped at the door. Mangum took his boot off it, and a young man in the same blue coveralls as Dan and Mangum thrust a hand in with a carafe. “You remember Cus,” Mangum said. “Cus, you remember Commander Lenson.”

  “Yessir, sure do. Honor to have you back aboard, sir.”

  “Damn it, you didn’t need to tell them all that stuff about me,” Dan said when the door closed again.

  Mangum looked at his watch, then at the bulkhead readouts. “Let’s see how they’re doing with the drill,” he said.

  The Task Element Commander for the SDV team was older than an O-4 should be and though he didn’t wear insignia other than his dive pin Dan figured he was former enlisted. He hailed from Pasadena, but he didn’t act or talk like a surfer. In fact it seemed like an effort for him to talk at all. Dan didn’t know much about the special ops side of the Navy, but he knew the SDV teams had split off from the SEAL teams in the eighties, half of what had been the Underwater De mo li tion world specializing into the operators ashore and the other half into the micro-subs. The TEC stood dripping at the bottom of the ladder, stripping off his gear. Dan smelled rubber, salt, urine, and the iron bite of compressed air.

  “Everything go okay?”

  “Went all right.” The TEC frowned at his guys as they clambered down the ladder, shedding gear and water. One was bleeding from his nose but no one remarked on it. The bleeding guy spat onto the gratings.

  “Don’t spit on our boat,” said one of the engineers. The divers and the sub crew looked at each other, then away.

  “So it went okay? No hitches?”

  “Pretty smooth,” the TEC said. He scratched his wet scalp, then added unwillingly, “We ran the mission profile. Eight miles out. Shut down. Reboot everything, then eight miles back. All the instruments work. We have solid nav with the inertial. We’ll have more weight with all your folks aboard, and the drag from the towed body, but since we stripped out that number three battery we should hit neutral buoyancy. But that brings up another problem, Commander.”

  “Sure,” Dan said. “What?”

  “Let’s go back here.”

  He followed the TEC through the engine room till they were as private as they could get aboard a 360-foot sub with nineteen more guys aboard than there were bunks for. The lieutenant-commander looked at a set of weights someone had bungeed to the grating. Not meeting Dan’s eyes he said, “We don’t have the capacity we thought. We can’t take all your people back with us, Commander. Not with the tow you want me to calculate for. So you can’t take them all in with you, either.”

  “Is this a SEAL issue?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Dan didn’t feel like being stubborn, but he wasn’t about to let a single seat go. “These guys have been drilling right along with Oberg and Kaulukukui. They’ve had CQB training. Oberg ran them through a SCUBA refresher. If you’re telling me because they’re not SEALs you don’t want to take them in, forget it.”

  “Training ai
n’t but training. If they freeze up, or freak out, they’ll get people killed.”

  “I don’t know your people either, uh, Chibbie. But my guys have been in on this mission from the get-go. How many drivers do we need?”

  “They’re pilots, not ‘drivers.’ And we need two.”

  “How many personnel’s the vehicle have seats for? It doesn’t matter if they’re in each other’s faces. It’s only for two hours, three tops.”

  “It’d be more like face to buttcrack, but we can get eight bodies in. That’s not the problem.”

  Dan rubbed his face, thinking it over. Oberg, Henrickson, Kaulukukui, Im, Carpenter, Wenck, and himself. Seven bodies.

  During the planning phase they’d considered various methods of insertion—by helo or combat raiding craft, by submarine, even high-altitude, low-opening parachute insertion—but the known emitters around the Bandar Abbas base had indicated such heavy antiaircraft defenses as to rule out any insertion by air. Plus, once you inserted, you had to extract. The next iteration had Team Charlie inserting at night, via “combat rubber raiding craft”—CRRCs in SEALspeak; rubber rafts with waterproof outboards. But a careful plot of coverage of Iranian surface patrols in the Strait had pushed them off that square too and onto the last one—a covert, submerged penetration of the Iranian harbor.

  The insertion itself should be fairly straightforward; what happened afterward might not be. Preparing for this had entailed three furious weeks of planning and training.

  One major complication surfaced early: Juliet-class submarines had no torpedo loading hatches. It seemed strange compared to American practice, but there it was. To load, they ballasted down at stern or bow. The crew opened the outer and inner doors on the tubes and fed the torpedoes aboard through them, in effect reversing the launching procedure.

  Eventually Dan had decided this was an advantage. Once they had control of the boat—assuming they got that far—all they’d need to do was ballast down forward, open the forward door, and let the weapon slide out, underwater, onto what a survey dating from back when U.S. ships had used Bandar Abbas, in the Shah’s time, said was a soft sand-and-mud harbor bottom.