by David Poyer
But maybe Team Charlie could put a thumb in their eye. Abscond with their carrier-killer, and buy time for the Navy to build a countermeasure.
A pop; he started as a pier light fizzed out, pulling a black cloak over the bow. Oberg slid around the sail. “Everybody here? Everything okay on the pig?”
“Vaught’s set and waiting,” Dan told him. “Anybody aboard?”
“They won’t give us any trouble. Let’s move.” Oberg pointed to the trunk. “One at a time, and keep low. I don’t know if there are any cameras, but I figure maybe forty minutes before the patrol comes back.”
“Forty minutes?” Henrickson muttered. “I don’t think we can—”
“Well, we better. You first, Commander.”
Dan held his weapon at port arms. He ran in a crouch and slid into the hatch. He clambered down a narrow vertical trunk maybe fifteen feet long and stepped off into a subterranean Morlock-world of humming machinery and oil-heavy air. Where he stood motionless, waiting as first Henrickson, then Wenck, then Im, and finally a puffing Carpenter slid down the ladder.
His first impression of the Juliet-class submarine K-79 was of unexpected spaciousness. The passageways were wider than San Francisco’s, the door through which he peered larger. The bunks were positively spacious compared to the 688’s forward berthing, and he didn’t have to watch for sharp edges jutting from the overhead to open up his scalp.
But the paint looked faded, the moving parts on the hatch worn, the equipment looked like it was 1963 again. The smell was nothing like the nuke’s: a deep gravy of unwashed bodies, diesel fuel, ozone, and—he sniffed again—burnt gunpowder. Nothing he didn’t expect. But something in here was wrong. Missing. What was it?
“Dead guys,” Carpenter called softly.
When he went over he caught the reek of blood and emptied bowels. “What happened?”
“Just clearing the objective, Commander,” Oberg said.
Dan started to react, then put it aside. He headed forward, frowning and rubbing his mouth. Something else was wrong. The dead staring eyes were disturbing, but neither the first he’d seen nor, he suspected, the last.
Then he stopped. Turned back, and peered again. There were the racks, complete with rails, rollers, chain hoists.
But no torpedoes.
Nor were there any in the compartment he was in. Bunks, workbenches, test equipment, handling equipment, yes.
Don’t tell me this, he thought. Don’t tell me they took them all off and stowed them ashore. “Find the fucking Shkval,” he snapped. “Monty, check aft. Rit, Im, let’s take a look at these tubes.”
He stood back, waiting as Carpenter and Im began checking. To him the tubes looked just like the ones aboard San Francisco. Probably they all descended from the same design, way back with Holland. Each heavy bronze tube and its dished-out inner door was festooned with drains, valves, hydraulic and pneumatic lines, gauges, and indicators like ivy grown tight around the trunk of an old oak. He looked at Carpenter, who was rubbing his head. “Rit? Know what you’re looking at?”
“Oh yeah. Torpedo tube’s just a big gun, with a lid on the end of the barrel. You open the inner door and load. Then flood, to equalize pressure, so you can open the outer door. Blow the fish out with compressed air. Close everything again, drain, and you’re ready to reload. What we got to be careful of is the interlocks.” He reached in to point out several levers painted bright red. “What we really don’t want to do is open those outer doors, same time you’ve got the breech doors open.”
“Are the muzzle doors closed now?”
The heavyset submariner bent and inspected all three port tubes, going up from the bottom to the top, then turned and did the same to the starboard ones. “Affirmative.”
“Any way to tell if they’re loaded?”
“Well, ours have a sight glass on them. But no glasses on these. And we used to hang a card on them, so we knew what was in each tube. No card, no load. No cards on any of these.”
Dan bit back a curse as Im cleared his throat. He rounded on him. “Yeah? What?”
“What is bad, Commander?”
“Nothing’s bad, Yeong-min Im. Just tell me this looks familiar.”
“Is familiar.” The Korean started pointing. “This indicator outer door open, shut. This hinge. This here you need wrench to fit and turn, unlock inner door locking ring. Wrench is on bulkhead . . . yes.”
“Can you open these inner doors?”
He shrugged. “Sure. I open. Which one?”
“Open them all,” Dan told him. “Just don’t sink us.”
While they got busy he took a deep breath and moved his personal indicator to the next task. But first, he reviewed the team’s positions. Oberg: topside, watching the pier and road for unwelcome visitors. Henrickson and Kaulukukui—the latter with plastic explosive, for safes—were going through the staterooms and work stations, looking for manuals, circuit diagrams, anything with “Shkval” on the cover. Donnie Wenck, with the little computer he’d brought in a sealed Pelican hard case, would be in the control room, downloading the programming from the fire control system.
Which left Dan to deal with the ballast tank. He went through the shelves under the workbench and found a hack-sawed-off stub of copper pipe in a scrap metal bin. He balanced it on the smooth steel surface of the workbench, waited a moment, adjusted it. Good.
He walked aft, searching the valves and indicators hanging from the curved overhead. They projected through what looked like cork, painted white on the inside. He came to a green handwheel a foot across, reached up, and started cranking. It moved stiffly, as if it hadn’t been lubed for a long time, but it turned. He cranked it all the way open, listened, then went aft.
The control room, starboard side. He found the “Christmas tree,” the bank of indicator lights that showed valves open or closed, and searched around it until he found another panel with black Bakelite knobs with red and white arrows. It was marked and and was pretty easy to spell out: “grupa”—group.
Forward group, midships group, after group. He clicked the upper and the lower knobs over. The upper would be the hydraulic vent valves on the two forward tanks. The lower would be the valves on the bottom of the tanks that admitted water. Something went “clunk-clunk” up forward and a light on the panel went from white to red.
So far, so good. He noticed a speaking tube and uncorked it. Put his ear to it, and heard only the wind. Murmured, “Teddy?”
A clank, a scrape. “Commander.”
“Everything quiet up there? Where are you?”
“Top of the sail. Good observation position. Nobody moving. Where are you?”
“Control room.”
“Hear me all right?”
“Yeah. I’ll leave this open. Going forward now.”
Dan headed back forward, ducking through the doorways, and stood under the green wheel. The indicator on the remotely operated valve, beside it, had moved.
The piece of pipe on the table suddenly began to roll. He caught it before it hit the deck, tossed it back into the scrap bin, and reached up to crank the green wheel closed again. He’d flood down the rest of the way as soon as they had the Shkval ready to offload.
First, though, they had to find it. As he got to the forward torpedo room again Carpenter was grunting, “Okay, pull.” Im leaned back on the handle and the upper-left tube popped open. It was painted red inside, scuffed, with a black rail to guide the fish.
“Empty, sir.”
Im finished spinning a crank on the next tube down. Carpenter reached forward, tripped the interlock, and unsealed the door. It, too, opened on nothing but an echoing tunnel.
Dan gnawed his lips. Tube two, port side, down almost in the bilge; Im had to hop down off the deckplates and crouch to crank the inner door unlocked.
It, too, was empty. “Son of a bitch,” Carpenter muttered. He glanced over his shoulder at Dan. “Maybe it isn’t here. Anybody check aft? After torpedo room?”
Dan fel
t a sudden jab of uh-oh. Then remembered. “No way. Shkval’s a twenty-one-inch weapon. Tubes aft are smaller on Juliets. Fifteen inches, I think.” He hoped that was right. He was getting tense, more rattled than he liked to be. Had to chill. Take deep breaths, think about something other than how little time they had left. He checked his watch: only thirty more minutes.
Then the patrol would be back. They’d wonder where their sentry was. And take a look aboard.
They could kill them, too, certainly. But then their headquarters would wonder why there was no patrol report.
The upper-right tube thunk-popped open. Nothing but a little water in the bottom, glimmering in the light of their flashes. “Shit ’n’ Shinola,” Carpenter muttered. “Did we miss something? Or is it our crappy fucking intel again?”
Dan didn’t answer. He headed aft, swung through the door, past the torpedo racks, giving them another worried scan just in case; but they were still empty. Then nearly collided with a pale, sweating Henrickson. “Monty! You okay?”
The analyst lowered a seaman’s duffel bulging with angular objects. He said in a hurried voice, “There’s two bodies in after torpedo.”
“And move up forward, Monty.”
Henrickson pulled sweat off his face. “I’ve never, uh—seen one before. Ha, ha! You’d think—well, never mind.”
Dan squeezed his shoulder. “Mind on the job, Monty. A guy told me once there’s plenty of time to think about it, after it’s over. But—I’ve got to see Oberg. I don’t know if they, if this was necessary.”
“I think he likes to kill.” Henrickson avoided his eyes, lowered his voice even more. “Sumo, I don’t think he enjoys it. Oberg does.”
“Let’s not overreact. Stay focused. What’s in the duffel?”
“Manuals, test equipment. There’s more, I just cherry-picked what looked portable.” Henrickson looked past him. “Any luck up forward?”
“Not yet. Any of the stuff you got Shkval-specific?”
“Yeah, there’s Shkval stuff. Like I said. Manuals. Tapes.”
Dan grimaced. “So it was aboard at one point—”
“What?” The analyst went even paler. “It’s not here?”
“Commander,” Carpenter called, voice echoing. “Better look at this.”
When he got back up to the tube faces it was hard to say which submariner looked grimmer, the North Korean or the American. Dan exhaled, ready for the bad news. “Okay. What’ve you got?”
Im put his hand on the grip for number three door. “Torpedo tube three.”
“Yeah? And?”
“Open it for him,” Carpenter said.
The door swung open in greased silence. It revealed something Dan didn’t at first make sense of. A black rubber plug, pierced with scores of tiny holes. He stared. “What the hell’s that?”
Im and Carpenter reached in. Their fingers hooked over opposite sides and they gave a coordinated yank. The material came back and out of the tube. When Dan bent and pointed his light in, the spot of brightness showed him a six-inch-diameter tube running forward to some larger body he couldn’t make out, since it filled the cylinder it nestled within. All he could see was one large hole, circled by eight smaller holes around its perimeter.
Carpenter said, “It sure as shit isn’t a torpedo.”
Dan peered in again, not sure what it was. “What’s this rubber thingy?”
“Probably a pressure plate. Protects the nozzle, then drops off after launch.”
“Can you get it out of there? Or, wait. Check the lower tube first. See if that’s the only one.”
“Already,” Im said. “Number one tube empty. This only tube with . . . thingy.”
Carpenter was chaining up the bunks, throwing pillows and personal gear into the bilges. Im hurried to join him. Dan glanced at his watch as they pulled rails off the bulkhead and pinned them together, and helped them rig a chain hoist from the overhead lifting point. Im half crawled into the tube, head and shoulders vanishing in the maw, to attach a wire rope as Carpenter hooked a comealong to a padeye on the aft bulkhead. With a ratcheting click, he started throwing the lever. Inch by inch, the projectile emerged, shining with a thin coating of grease.
It was half an an inch smaller than the tube diameter, so tight a fit Im’s little finger wouldn’t go into the gap. Its greased length rode on lands on the interior of the barrel that fit it so tightly there was no play as it extruded smoothly into the light. Smooth, unpainted, polished metal, with a red stripe halfway up it. When they had five feet of it out Dan put his hand on it, hesitantly, as if it were a dangerous pet. Im glanced sideways at him, like a Christian trying to blend in at a Shabbat service; then put his hand on it as well.
It was greasy and cold, but Dan couldn’t restrain a fierce smile. Their work and risk had not been in vain. If they could get it home, the Navy would be on the way to protection against a grave danger.
Carpenter was touching it, too, all three hands on it, only his moved in a slow up and down rubbing that Dan thought, with a flash of first irritation and then sardonic realization, had something almost masturbatory in it.
Rit caressed the thing’s flank, way back in his mind now, to when he used to load Mark 37s aboard the old Tiru, before he went to the sonar shack, and he was single and didn’t have to worry about anybody finding out things she didn’t need to know. He got a thrill handling a torpedo he didn’t get from anything else. Almost as good as a woman. No, not quite. Nothing as good as that. But it was close.
This arrangement was like U.S. boats, but the tubes were different. The castings were bigger, rougher, the parts weren’t as well machined. They used plain steel or bronze where a U.S. boat would have stainless. You could tell what everything was, it was even more or less in the same place, but there weren’t as many interlocks and it looked as if it’d be easy to bypass the ones there were.
Right now though he had to figure out how to handle this. They’d discussed it and he and Im had brought some gear but the thing was different than he’d expected. He said tentatively, “Fucker’s tapered. Nobody said it’d be tapered.”
“We didn’t know what it was shaped like. Only that it fit a twenty-one-inch tube.”
“Tapered,” Im repeated. Rit showed him with his hands. The guy seemed to know his way around, but communication could be a problem. They had to get this done fast. He didn’t need Lenson looking at his watch every five seconds to know that. He didn’t want to spend the next ten years in an Iranian prison. If they didn’t stand them up against a wall and shoot them, yeah, that’s what they’d do, for the fucking SEALs killing the guys they’d found aboard.
“That a problem?” Lenson asked.
“Could be . . . here’s like a sabot . . . here’s the nose. Jeez, look at that.”
A sudden flash made him almost jump out of his skin. The commander had leaned forward and gotten a picture with a little camera he hadn’t seen before. “Jeez, how about a warning before you do that.”
“That plate on the nose is the cavitating disc. Can you get it out of the tube?”
“It is out of the tube.”
“I mean going out, Carpenter. Can you reverse direction and slide it on out the bow end?”
“On it, Commander. Can you finish up getting us ballasted down?” He turned to Im, but the Korean already had their tool-roll unlashed and was laying gear out. They’d figured to find most of what they needed in the torpedo room, but there was one thing the Iranians probably wouldn’t have.
The tube of super-special Teflon lubricant he’d come up with off an obscure Web site that catered to private investigators and paranoids. Not only was it Teflon, embedded in it were tiny nylon balls. It was supposed to be practically zero friction. Im handed it to him, and Rit handed it right back.
“Not me,” he told the Korean. “It’s for you.”
Im peered into the tube, then back at the Americans. He understood what they wanted him to do, but still wasn’t sure what was going on. The commander was stud
ying his watch again. He looked angry. The fat American looked angry, too. He looked into the tube again, getting angry himself.
Because he had no choice.
He’d never had a choice, not since that moment on S-13 when his captain had decided to spare his men and surrender, rather than killing them all. Since then he’d been a puppet. The Great Leader had always said the South Koreans were American puppets. Now he knew what he meant.
Raging, but keeping his face like stone, Im pulled off his wet suit top, shirt, and finally his undershirt. He kicked off his shoes. Carpenter meanwhile had taken the tube back and cracked the cap. The fat man squeezed the compound into his palm and began slathering Im’s shoulders and chest with it. His flesh crawled at the man’s flabby touch. He grabbed it and began rubbing it on himself.
“Hurry,” Lenson said. “We should be back in the water in fifteen minutes.”
“Just let our boy here grease those lands up,” Carpenter said, giving him a push.
“Do not push.”
“Get in there, guy. Quit stalling. Move it!”
He bared his teeth, but with face turned away. He bent and squirmed between the sharp plate at the nose of the weapon, on the temporary loading rack just aft of the tube, and the tube itself. Got angled right, hunched his shoulders, and forced his upper body into the opening.
The bronze walls were smooth and cold. Fortunately he was not fat like Rit Carpenter. The lands, the four straight rails that lined the inside to right and left, top and bottom, dug into his shoulders and back. He was face down staring at the lower one, right arm extended in front of him. He couldn’t bring it back down. Nothing but dark ahead, with his body plugging the tube. He wished he’d brought a flashlight. But he’d have had to carry it in his teeth. He might drop it and jam the weapon. No, this was better.
Thrusting with his legs, he drove himself up into the tube. They were the same as on S-13, which the Russians had also built. They were 533 millimeters wide and almost eight meters long. Which meant, since he was only a little over one point six meters tall, he had a long way to crawl. He wriggled ahead, using the tips of his stockinged toes against the pebbly cast-bronze interior.
