The Weapon

by David Poyer

  It wasn’t what he’d call robust, but it was a plan. According to Hines, the Iranians didn’t stay at high readiness. It should be possible to get in without being observed. But to get out again, they’d have to do so submerged.

  So the extraction would be via SDV as well. The vehicle would settle to the bottom a few yards off the bow. The assault party would exit, using Draeger rebreathers, and take over the Juliet while the handling party—the two pilots—stood by. When the Shkval dropped out onto the mud, they’d wrap it in a buoyant jacket and attach a tow cable. The assault team would exit the target, swim back down to the SDV, and all hands would extract back to San Francisco safe from any Iranian lead that might be flying around by then.

  Meanwhile, while they’d been thrashing this all out, the NUWC model shop had been building a sheet-metal-and-wood full-sized dummy Shkval. When it was done they crated it up, labeled it “wind-tunnel body,” and flew it to Norfolk. Dan and the rest of the team practiced with it aboard Spadefish at the destroyer-submarine piers, coached by a master chief torpedoman from SUBRON Six who was the only soul allowed in the torpedo room with them when they were practicing. Hines had turned up one day with photos of the interior of a Juliet-class; Dan had no idea where he’d gotten those.

  They’d eventually learned to move the thing around pretty rapidly. The question would be, of course, how well they could do it in a strange torpedo room, working with non-U.S. equipment. Dan hoped they’d find the Shkval already in the tube. That would make it simpler, faster, and so, a whole lot less dangerous. The less time they spent smack in the middle of a hostile naval base, the better.

  He felt someone next to him. When he turned his head it was Mangum. “Problem?” the captain said.

  “Not sure yet. What exactly are you asking me?” Dan asked the TEC. “I thought the plan was, nine guys go in. That’s two helmsmen, or you’re calling them pilots; and my seven guys, the assault team. While we hit the sub, the pilots stand by on the bottom. The shooters take the sub over and shit the thing out the tube, where your guys are waiting. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “What’s the problem, then?”

  “The weapon. Coming back.”

  “Why’s that suddenly a hard spot?”

  “Drag.”

  “And why’s drag suddenly the problem? Didn’t we go through all the numbers already?” He exchanged glances with Mangum. Damn, he had to drag every word out of this guy.

  “The hitch is, we’re not getting enough energy out of the battery. Enough power hours. That’s like a horse power is point seven four six kilowatt hours—”

  “I know how batteries are rated. What’s wrong with the battery?”

  “What’s wrong? It’s old. They’re talking about replacing these with lithium batteries, so they didn’t do a rebuy on the silver-zinc. But now the new batteries are held up and we’re still operating with the old ones.”

  “Bottom line?” said Mangum.

  “We can’t take everybody he wants to take. Either he cuts his guys to six, or I’m calling a no-go.”

  “This battery,” Mangum said. “What’s the storage cycle?”

  Dan stood back while they went into the technicalities of recharge and reforming. Mangum kept asking if they could reform the battery. The TEC said they didn’t have chargers that would do that. Mangum picked up a bulkhead phone. “Chief electrician, to my cabin. No, make it the wardroom—might as well sit down.”

  At the end of another hour’s conference and much unfolding of diagrams from manuals and arguing, they had something set up. The chief electrician seemed hesitant, but said he’d give it a try; if they brought down the batteries into the engine room one by one, he’d discharge and reform them, bring them back to their original capacity. And finally the TEC agreed that, yeah, Teddy Oberg could serve as the copilot, thus meaning one less body to haul in and back.

  So that was the compromise. Dan sat through it all as his butt went from torpid to numb. He kept trying to internalize that in just two days, they’d be back aboard, with their prize.

  Either that, or they could very well be dead.

  That night, in the torpedo room, Donnie Wenck punched the limp little pillow. The bunk they’d given him was unbelievable. Not even room above him to turn over, and he had to share it. It was only his till midnight, then one of the off-watch engineers owned it. And there were always guys going in and out, the lights were always on . . . But it was impressive, being aboard a nuke. He’d roamed the passageways with his mouth open, asking about the gear. This was his kind of duty. He should have been a nuke.

  Instead of . . . whatever he was now. Some kind of nerd, pretending to be a SEAL.

  They’d spent most of the day learning how to tear down, test, reassemble, and troubleshoot the oxygen rebreathers they’d be using on the mission. Oberg had made them all, even Mr. Lenson, check and lubricate the various O-rings and seals and canisters, while he explained how the Draegers worked, and what would happen if they didn’t.

  They wouldn’t be pirate look-alikes this time. This time they’d be real commando types. He slid his hand under the pillow for the SEAL patrol leader’s handbook Teddy had given him. He was memorizing it, all the detailed stuff about C-3 vans, and target analysis, and special boat capabilities. He wanted to know it cold.

  He rubbed his arms, wincing. He’d been lifting with Obie and Sumo Man. He couldn’t do it the way they did it, clanging metal and shouting at each other, faces red and streaming sweat. He wished his arms didn’t look so thin. He wished he could shoot better.

  He wished he could get a girl like the one he’d seen Obie with in Virginia Beach. He’d been sitting at the bar in Croc’s with his lonely drink, yearning after one of the waitresses, when he’d glimpsed Teddy’s scarred hard face in the mirror, up by the hostess’s station. And then, slowly, every male head at the bar had rotated, like so many radar dishes, to home and track on the woman hanging on his arm: so stunning she stopped all conscious thought; a gorgeous, gorgeous natural redhead, with long curly hair, and gorgeous tits, and gorgeous legs, and a gorgeous ass, and a face Donnie was sure he’d seen in some movie or TV show, so that when he reluctantly turned his gaze back to the waitress he’d thought so hot she seemed overweight, tired, somehow malformed.

  Donnie closed his eyes, calling up again her legs in tight black capris and high heels, the way everything got outlined when she bent over. It made him want to whack off, but not here, there was no privacy. He felt lightheaded. Then he remembered the mission and felt scared.

  He rubbed his arms and tried to focus on the manual.

  The next day. 1000. Oberg sat in the crew’s mess, hunched over the game Sumo had brought, sluggish after a heavy breakfast of baboon ass, liver transplant, and battery acid. You couldn’t work out all the time, you couldn’t do brief-backs all the time, and on a sub, the crew never let the SEALs touch anything. They were protective and assholes about it, though they had it backward, they thought the SEALs were the assholes. Sumo had brought a folding bike but it broke the first time he got on it. Teddy didn’t mind. His jump rope and weights were enough for him, and you could do those back in the engine room between the turbines, where it was over a hundred, get yourself a real sweat going.

  Kaulukukui, though, was the Game Boy. He always brought games on missions. This time it was some kind of Japanese card-and-board thing that was actually pretty interesting. He wondered how Lenson was doing. He hadn’t seen much of the commander since they’d come aboard.

  “You think this thing’s gonna fly, Obie?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “We’ll get our hands on it this time?”

  “We’ll grab it, shit it out, and run like a raped ape.”

  “With these guys for a team?” Kaulukukui said. “It’s gonna be a fucking boodiddley goatrope. What if one of them gets his Draeger caught?”

  “Deal the fucking cards,” Oberg said.

  Rit Carpenter felt perfectly at home. He hung out wit
h the crew, not with the SEALs or the SDV guys or even the rest of Team Charlie. He spent most of his time in the sonar shack, getting smart on the gear that had come along since he’d gotten out. The 688s were like spaceships. Everything was solid state, digitized. The sonar suite was amazing and they could fire Tomahawks from the torpedo tubes. But a lot of the systems were pretty much like what he’d trained on, just faster and with more bells and whistles.

  He hoped this went okay. He had the feeling Lenson was close to bouncing him off the team. So, maybe he’d slipped up once or twice. What of it? He liked to interact with the locals, see the sights, drink the beer. Was that anything sailors hadn’t done forever? Everything was getting so fucking PC a guy couldn’t scratch his ass without some lezzbo female JAG type calling him on it. It sure wasn’t the old Navy, the one he’d grown up in.

  He was thinking this when he came around one of the dogleg corners and collided with the man he’d just been stewing over. Lenson looked irritated. They dodged this way, then that, trying to get past each other in a space so walled with electrical cabinets only one could pass. At last he said, “Commander. We talk a minute, sir?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “Not here.”

  Lenson glanced around. He seemed unwilling. “Up one deck,” he said at last.

  When they closed the door to his stateroom the commander waved at the chair. Rit stayed on his feet. “Won’t take long, sir. All I wanted to ask was, you still got it in for me?”

  Lenson took too long to reply. “Okay, you asked. You put us all at risk back on Mindanao, Carpenter. And before that, in Pusan. At the military cemetery. Where they caught you with that girl on the British soldier’s grave.”

  “We weren’t doing anything he wouldn’t have cheered us on, sir.”

  “Everybody else in the team seems to be able to keep it in his pants. You’re the only one who gets in trouble.”

  “All due respect, sir, but ever think, I’m just the only one gets caught?”

  “Then that’s just as good a reason. This is your last mission with Team Charlie, Rit. No prejudice. I was steamed in Mindanao, I admit that, but I’ve decided to let you go without an adverse report. I just think you’re better off back at the Group, eight to five and weekends off.”

  Rit thought about trying to argue him out of it. Then thought: Fuck it. He’d almost had his head handed to him in the Philippines. He didn’t like being patronized by Oberg and his oversized asshole-buddy. He didn’t even need TAG. He’d had offers from Honeywell, Hughes, Loral. If Lenson didn’t want him, fine.

  Besides, he had a realtor in Virginia Beach and a base bunny in Norfolk. Nice clean American girls. Not that exotic wasn’t exciting. Everybody liked a change.

  Finally it was the last day. Then, the last afternoon. Mangum had bunked Dan in the executive officers’ stateroom, a clone of his own, but no roomier. He went there after dinner and turned off the light. Then lay awake, staring at the overhead. They were tearing through the water, hundreds of feet below the surface, but only the faintest clues conveyed that reality. A repetitive tremor writhed through the steel around him. Something ticked beneath his bunk. Air sighed through the ventilation baffles. It smelled like oiled steel.

  He turned his head nervously on the thin Navy-issue pillow. The light was dim but he could just see the photo. Nan and Blair together, taken at a deli in Alexandria. They were both laughing and though they didn’t look at all alike Dan always thought when he looked at it that they might be mother and daughter.

  He smiled. At any rate Nan would be taken care of. After one of the rehearsals, Kaulukukui had unobtrusively slid a form in front of him. Dan hadn’t known the spec ops community had its own term life insurance program, over and above the group life every service member was eligible for. If he didn’t come back from this one, she’d have no money worries. Not for the rest of her life, if she was careful.

  But then his sight focused past the picture, on the heavy steel arch that spoke silently yet eloquently of the crushing force it resisted from microsecond to microsecond. No. He couldn’t think about that.

  Think about the mission instead. No, that wasn’t any way to invite sleep either. Think about his daughter. His wife. Or his new boat, which he hadn’t even gotten to take out yet.

  That didn’t work either, and at last he swung out of the bunk and folded the little desk down, and clicked the light on.

  They’d held the last backbrief that morning. Gathered in the torpedo room, the crew locked grumbling out of their sleeping and work space. Perched on the racks, the Mark 48s, he’d gone over it again, making each man explain what he had to do and how he’d do it, and what would happen if he didn’t. He’d had them bring weapons and gear, and inspected it himself.

  Team Charlie was as ready as he could make it.

  He just hoped nothing popped up they couldn’t handle.

  He tried to read, sitting in his skivvies, but his eyes wouldn’t track to the ends of the sentences. At last he pulled out the tan briefcase and unlocked it. Fanned out the charts, the photos, the op order. The port layout. The bottom hydrography.

  He’d memorized the distances from the entrance to the piers, and from one pier to the next. He’d spent hours visualizing their relationships, engraving into his memory where they’d lie relative to one another as seen from here or there. Just in case they had to do some swimming within the port. Or the SDV was forced to the surface. Or if, when they got there, K-79—the cruise missile sub the Russians had sold to the Iranians—had been shifted across the basin.

  American contractors had modernized the ancient port of Bandar Abbas into a base from which the Shah’s fleet could protect the world’s energy traffic. Unfortunately it had turned out to be just as strategic a location under the mullahs. Also, secure; guarded by three islands between it and the Gulf of Oman, layered with radar sites, missile batteries, coastal guns, and surface and air patrols.

  Assuming they got past all those, the charts showed a dredged basin shaped like a giant trident. Breakwaters protected the entrance, which was thirteen hundred feet wide and about fifty deep. Narrow for a submerged insertion, but doable. At night there were supposed to be lights on the ends of the breakwater—Bandar Abbas was a fishing port as well as a naval facility—but no one had been able to tell him if they’d be lit.

  He kneaded his forehead in the humming light. Once inside, they’d pass an anchored guardship, then proceed for half a mile to the original harbor entrance. This was much narrower than the breakwater entrance, but deeper. Past it the harbor branched into its tripartitite flowering. To the west, the shallowest branch, was the torpedo boat harbor. Directly ahead, a dredged channel led to warehouses, loading areas, and the commercial fishing piers.

  He studied a color photo. Congress and the President had prohibited overflights of Iran, but somehow he was holding several obviously taken from low altitude. So clear he could make out individual figures walking along the piers. Their shadows stretched west; taken about 0800 local, he guessed. The building with the ragged line in front of it had to be the mess hall. He’d examined photo after photo, and finally concluded the Juliet’s crew either hadn’t reported aboard yet, or slept ashore. Most likely the former; the Iranians had probably sent them to Rus sia for training.

  To starboard—the direction in which the SDV would slowly pivot, assuming they made it through the entrances—they’d squeeze through another bottleneck, between piers to north and south. The northern piers served the frigates and corvettes left from U.S. and British support of Iran in the seventies. One had been sunk during Operation Praying Mantis, but had been raised and repaired. Intel doubted the effectiveness of their electronics and computers, but Dan had no doubt they had enough weapons still operational that if the team was detected, they’d not have to worry long.

  Past them, at the far end of the right-hand branch—farthest from the entrance, of course—lay their target. He lifted the photo, squinting.

  The oblate si
lhouette of the Juliet lay between two Kilos, one moored ahead, the other astern. The pier was offset from the shore and linked to it by ramps; this meant, he was fairly sure, that the bottom slope was gradual there. Looking closer, he noted a squared-off shadow between the sub’s hull and the pier proper. It might be a camel, a floating balk of raw timber. That made sense. A Juliet drew a lot of water. She might even ground on the bottom during extreme low tides.

  Once they had what they came for, they’d have to retrace their steps. Past frigates, corvettes, guns, out again through the narrows . . . was it realistic to hope to make it out unobserved? They had a diversion planned, even a rescue force; the USS Nimitz strike group was carrying out a joint task force exercise off Bahrain, along with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard USS Bataan. But he’d need the sat phone to call for help.

  Which meant he’d have to be on the surface.

  Which would mean every Iranian with an AK would be shooting at them before he got to say word one.

  Under the buzzing light he dug the heels of his palms into the sockets of his eyes. This felt like the night before the Looking Glass mission into Iraq. The one that had lost him so many people. So many good people.

  What could go wrong? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything would go smooth. For once.

  They’d go at dusk. Four more hours. He really should try to get a little sleep. But his guts felt like shitting out everything he’d eaten that day.

  He’d have to look confident. He’d have to lead. But Christ, he didn’t feel at all confident, and he didn’t want to lead.

  An icy sweat broke out all over his back, soaking his skivvy shirt. He took deep, slow breaths, digging his nails into his face, trying to dike the dread that burrowed like maggots within a corpse.