The Weapon

by David Poyer

  “We have two tin cans coming up our ass—”

  “Lemme work on it, Commander, okay?”

  Lenson went forward, and Rit went back to the panels and gauges and lines that covered the whole starboard side of the compartment. Gleaming brass, paint in six different colors, cables, valves, switches. He murmured to the Korean, “It’s like some fucking nightmare, you know? Where everything looks familiar but when you look close it’s not what you’re used to at all.”

  Im pointed at his ear and Rit nodded, like yeah, I know, high suck factor, right? But then the guy pointed at the panel with the big black switches to the right of the BCP and mimed each of them going over, one after the other, then did with his hands like they were going under, like a kid playing submarine in a pool.

  He studied those switches, sweat running down his back. It wasn’t just the wet suit, either. The voice of his old chief of the boat was bitching in his brain. A veteran of three war patrols in Tirante who, if there wasn’t an officer around, would bounce your forehead off a valve handle if you did something stupid, to make the lesson stick. You didn’t crack a valve, you didn’t know exactly what it let flow and how fast.

  He pinched his lip between thumb and forefinger, frowning. Gotta think here . . . the black switches had the exact same squigglies as the light banks. Okay. To the right of the switches was a single box with one big red button. The squigglies on it were red, too. That had to be the “chicken switch,” for emergency blow. And back of that, the spaghetti piping for the old manual-style HP air banks. He put his finger on the red button and mimed blowing out his cheeks, looking up. Im nodded enthusiastically.

  “We’re gonna do this,” Rit called to Vaught. “He wants us dived, we’re gonna dive.”

  “Just keep it fucking real, all right?” the SDV driver said. “It’s only about thirty fucking meters deep out here. Stick us in the mud and the camel jockeys are gonna run all our cards.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re the asshole on the planes. Stand by to fucking dive.” He jogged to the forward door and stuck his head through. Lenson was talking to Wenck, making quick motions with his hands. “Commander! Wanna give this a try? We still got guys topside!”

  Lenson came aft fast and yelled up the ladder. Rit winced again. They were really going to have to quiet the commander down, if they were going to run submerged. He muttered, “Make sure they dog the hatch tight when they come down. There’s gonna be a light around it someplace. Make sure that light goes green—I mean, white. Or whatever color it goes to once they get it dogged.”

  He was watching the panel and when the light went from red to white he nodded, bingo, and marked it with his finger and looked around. Im handed him a china pencil he’d found somewhere and he blocklettered in “CT ACCESS HATCH” under the squiggles as the two SEALs and Henrickson dropped down the ladder. “Okay, sir, here it is.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “We don’t have a diving officer so I’m gonna be Chief of the Boat, got it? That means you tell me what you want to do and I figure out how to do it, okay? I’m gonna keep Im here with me and I’m gonna keep Vaught on the helm. But we’re gonna need guys back aft on the main motor switchboard and the electric panel.”

  “You want me back on the motor?”

  “Yeah, Teddy, sure. How about you and Sumo back there and—fuck, how’m I gonna talk to you?” He searched the compartment and Im, following his eyes, put his hand on a little brown plastic box. “That the bitch box? Okay, but we got to keep it turned down. Everybody, once we pull the plug, no yelling, no hammering, nothing that makes noise, got it? Commander, you hear me? We’re quiet running on the battery, but there’s gonna be guys on that frigate listening for shit like that.”

  Henrickson leaned past him and tapped one of the labels. “Know what this says?”

  “Not the faintest.”

  He took the pencil out of his fingers. Rit almost batted his hand away from the panel before he realized what he was doing. “Hey. You can read this?”

  “Only the Russian, but yeah. Here. Uh—main ballast tank . . . kingstonya, I don’t know that word? . . . ‘hydraulic drive.’ That make sense to you?”

  “Write it down, Goddamn it, write it right on there. Kingstonya, that’s gotta be a Kingston valve. We don’t use them in our boats, but I visited a Brit sub once. Go around this fucking compartment, translate all these fucking labels, okay?” He wiped his face; they were going to have to get the ventilation going, too. Even when he’d first come aboard, the air had smelled like somebody had breathed it and farted it out already. He figured the dead guys, whoever they were, had kept the ventilation shut down, probably to keep the sand out of the boat.

  “We need to get under,” Lenson said again, and Rit snapped back, and ran eye and finger down the Christmas tree, white, white, white. “Yessir, just give us a minute. Monty, what’s this say?”

  “Otkrabit—open. Zakrabit—shut.”

  Dan watched them for a couple of seconds, wishing they’d move faster, but knowing Carpenter didn’t want to hit the wrong control, and not wanting him to, either. Instead he got on the attack scope and spun it around to look aft.

  He bent into it, squinting into the rubber eyecup. A blur. Then the lenses and his sight merged and the big light-gathering objective panoramaed the stem of a frigate, bow on, reaming its way out of the inlet. Headed their way, and throwing up a glimmering bow wave that was white even in the darkness. A flash that was probably another shell.

  Rit mimed to Im, spinning a valve wheel on the overhead, pointing to the Christmas tree, then aft.

  Im touched his ear, wishing the singing would stop. It sounded like women wailing some endless song without words. The fat American jabbed his finger again and he nodded and headed aft, searching in the overhead.

  Vent valves came in pairs, the manual one inboard, the hydraulic one, remotely actuated from the control room, inboard. They were in series, so both had to be open to flood a tank. In port they’d be shut, so no accidents could happen even if somebody cycled the hydraulics by accident, maintenance, or just bumping one. When it was time to get underway you’d open them all and then just cycle on the hydraulics, adding air and opening and closing the upper vent valves and the Kingstons, which let the water in, to adjust the buoyancy.

  This was a different class boat, but it had been built by the same people and the arrangement was the same as the one he’d been second in command of. After months of practice, S-13’s crew had been able to balance her so precisely she hovered with the engines off, drifting like a steel bubble in the sea.

  He hadn’t mentioned this to the Americans. But these rubber-treaded corridors, these cork-lined overheads, the smell of the closed-in air brought back the terror of the long days below, desperately trying to evade the South Korean puppets. Only to fail just a few kilometers short of their goal . . . S-13 lay at the bottom of the Eastern Sea, her deadly cargo still aboard; a cargo her crew had feared so much they’d barricaded the forward bulkhead with rice sacks. And the man whose name he wore was a skeleton now, picked by crabs.

  Now “Im Yeong-Min” served those who’d been their enemies. He came to another vent valve and cranked the green wheel around to full open, setting it and moving on, passing Oberg and Kaulukukui as they argued by the motor control panel over something too fast for him to catch, slipping silently along the corridors as they began to tilt beneath his bleeding feet.

  “White board,” Rit muttered. “Ready to dive. Commander?”

  “Dive,” Dan said.

  “Planes down twenty degrees, Vaught.”

  “Down twenty. Both planes down twenty.”

  Nobody said anything, but the curved steel circling them echoed their breathing. Rit hit the buttons, one after the other. The valves went ponk. Ponk. The lights turned from white to red. “Flooding forward group . . . flooding forward. Flooding midships.” He searched the bulkhead for the next instrument he needed. A bubble, but he didn’t see one.

  Lenson:
“We need to flood aft, Rit?”

  “Let me run the board, sir, huh? There’s only three flood valves aft, I figure that’s gonna be the smallest tank anyway. Okay—Vaught. What’s your depth gauge read? Never mind. I got one here, too . . . shit, this thing doesn’t go too fucking deep, does it?”

  “That’s in meters.”

  “Thanks, Monty, I’m with you now. Meters . . . Uh, two eighty, two ninety, three hundred . . . red line on the gauge at three hundred . . . that’s nine hundred feet but the gauge goes to four hundred.” Despite himself his gaze flicked to the steel behind the instruments and gauges, the sloppy-looking welding on the ribs. An Electric Boat or Newport News hull would do it, but this thing wasn’t going to make it to twelve hundred feet. Not without mashing like a beer can run over by a semi.

  Dan swung the scope and searched to starboard. Twisting the handgrip popped him from high magnification to wide angle. He made out a faint skyline against a ruddy glow far away. An island? The tip of a peninsula?

  Remembering then he’d seen a little nav station or quartermaster’s cubby to port, he stepped into it and rooted through racked rolls of paper till he found one that showed the familiar worm-writhe of Hormuz and approaches. It was even in English. “Admiralty chart,” he muttered, bringing it out and flattening it against a cabinet. “Kind of old, but . . . what are we at? Mark your head.”

  “Mark my head, one zero zero.”

  “Come right, one two zero.”

  They spoke in hushed voices. He peeked through the scope again, checked the relative bearing on the ring, and added that to the course. The skyline was the eastern tip of Queshm Island. Past that was Larak and they’d be in the Strait. It wouldn’t be long, either.

  Dan draped his arm over the ’scope and spun it, feeling like he was in an old movie, Das Boot, or Run Silent, Run Deep, and found the frigate again. It was closer, the bow wave high as her foredeck. Another was echeloned behind it. Both had running lights on and searchlights were sparking on, too.

  No. This was no fucking movie. He was opening his mouth to snap at Carpenter again, when the scope went suddenly dark. It took a moment to realize why.

  “Passing ten meters,” Vaught said from the control station.

  “Planes up ten,” Carpenter said, gaze roving his instruments. He thumbed three valves on the left of the panel. Ponk. Ponk. Ponk. Distant impacts as the hydraulics reseated. The lights blinked from red to white. Rit sized up another panel and twisted a switch. Air rushed through pipes above their heads, sounding both loud and queerly muffled.

  “Up ten . . . planes at up ten. Passing twenty meters.”

  “It’s not very deep here,” Dan said, studying the chart. “It says—”

  They hit bottom so hard every man standing staggered or went to his knees. The hull vibrated a deep note, like a giant hand chime, and all the lights went out except for blurred bulbs that lightning-bugged on here and there twisted into overhead cabling and piping, flickered, then went off as the main lighting cut back in again. Im stammered rapid Korean. Something shrieked in a high staccato as it tore away and went clanging along the side.

  A slithering scrape grew louder as the stern met the bottom, too, making contact with a second impact that staggered them again. “Up thirty!” Rit said, sweating as he thumbed valve after valve, then shifted back to the blow panel and twisted more switches. Remotely actuated valves thumped forward, then aft. Air hissed in a howling storm confined by pipes that shuddered in their supports as the charge hit them, trying to straighten each curve and ream out each bore.

  But the noise still increased, even though they didn’t seem to be rising. The hull rocked, scraping along, banging and swaying. A high-pitched clamor rose aft. “Engines stop,” Dan said, voice not loud but tense, tense. Rit grabbed an overhead hold and clung with one hand as he played the board with the other, trying to get her off the bottom without sending her rocketing out of the water again. “Fuck, it’s too fucking shallow here,” he muttered between clenched teeth.

  “Left, steer zero eight zero,” Dan said. No matter what else was going on, they had to get off the course the surface ships had just seen them submerge on. Or the frigates could drop their weapons ahead of their track and wait until the sea boiled oil and bodies. “Vaught . . . hear me? Zero eight zero.”

  He flinched and coughed, head bent at a strange angle over the controls. “Zero eight zero. Yessir. Coming to zero eight zero.”

  Rit said, “Monty, stand by that gauge and feed me readings. Not that one! Forward of it.”

  “Fifteen meters. Thirteen. Twelve. Ten. Nose going down—”

  “Planes down, forward planes down twenty degrees, aft down ten!” Streaming sweat, too busy even to scratch his itching balls, Rit flooded the tanks he’d just started to blow. “This is fucking . . . fuck this . . . fuck—”

  “Breaking the surface!”

  “Control, main motors—you still want full power back here?”

  Four people yelled at once, but Dan got to the brown box first. “Half power, Oberg, or standard, or whatever’s half power. Did we foul the prop? Any vibration back there?”

  “Think we got lucky that time, Commander. But let’s not do that again, okay? Who’s on the stick up there?”

  “We’re still trying to get a rope on her, Teddy.” Dan muttered, “Rit, can you control this thing? We don’t have a lot of depth to play with until we get past Larak, hit the fifty-meter line.”

  “Ten meters again—twelve—fourteen—going down fast. Going down fast—”

  “I’m getting it,” Rit said, biting his lip and hitting the forward tanks with another long blow. “Goddamn it, just give me a minute.”

  A whishing like a giant washing machine began aft. It moved rapidly over their heads, hovered for seconds that seemed like epochs, then grew faint again, moving away. “Mark, warship on top,” Vaught remarked in a deadpan whine. “Steady on one nine zero.”

  “Come right, one six zero,” Dan snapped, trying to stay on the chart and the dead reckoning he was doing in his head though what he really wanted was to jump out of his skin and go shrieking down the passageway. He had to get south. But he couldn’t turn too soon, or they’d hit the shoals around Larak. The chart showed an anchorage to the east. He hoped no one was anchored there at the moment, because he was going to cut the corner and go through it. “Rit, we can’t keep yo-yoing up and down. They can hear us blowing those fucking tanks. And we don’t have all the air in the world, either.”

  A rattling bam, another scraping slide. Carpenter fought with the panel. Vaught remarked in a nasal, disembodied voice, “We don’t have enough guys to run a boat this size.”

  “Well, we’re going to try,” Dan snapped.

  “Control, motors. We gotta keep doing bobsled races?”

  “Just to make the point, sir: we surface and give them their sub back, they might let us go.”

  “They’d line us up on the afterdeck and shoot us all,” Dan told him. “So shut your mouth and concentrate on your planes, Vaught. When I want your tactical advice, I’ll ask for it.”

  “Fuck’s going on?” said Wenck, coming up a ladder from some lower deck Dan hadn’t noticed till then. “Felt like we went into the crowd barrier there—”

  “Did I give you a job, Wenck?”

  “Uh, yessir. Back on it.” He turned on his heel and went back down the ladder.

  “Forward planes up ten, after planes at zero.”

  Vaught repeated it in that dead tone. The deck trembled. Dan checked the scope, but it was still under water. He decided he didn’t need a big feather—the spray the extended scope kicked up—and tried buttons until a motor hummed and the shining oiled steel began moving past him, feeding down into some deep well far below. Fingers plucked at his arm. It was Im. “I maintain contror.”

  “What?”

  “He says, he can maintain control,” Oberg said, behind them.

  Dan wheeled. “What’re you doing up here?”

 
“I was calling. Nobody answered.”

  “We heard you, fuckhead. We had better things to do than answer you,” Rit barked. “Get back aft on those fucking motors.” Oberg looked at him for a second, glanced at Dan, then turned and went aft.

  Dan nodded at Im. “Rit, how about giving him ballast control? He used to be XO on a boat like this. Or sort of like this.”

  “Give him control? How? He can’t hear the orders.”

  “I can write them down for him. But I’m going to need you on the stack.” Dan looked at the depth gauge again. He expected every minute to hear the hornet whine of an incoming torpedo, which would probably be an even less pleasant feeling down here than it had been when he’d heard it aboard a destroyer. “You got us under. Great, but we’re going to have to play cat and mouse with those frigates. If I can’t see, I’ve got to be able to hear. And you’ve got to be my ears.”

  Im didn’t seem to do much, just wait, balanced on the balls of his feet, as if sensing the boat beneath him, then pushing and holding down this or that control for two or three seconds; but their fishtailing and vertical excursions smoothed out. Nor did they hit bottom again. They ran for ten or twelve minutes at half speed, which Dan figured would be about eight knots, on 120.

  It seemed to be a respite. Dan took deep breaths and worked his neck, trying to get the stress out. He thought about putting the scope up and checking for the loom of the village the chart showed at the tip of Jazireh-ye Qeshm, Qeshm Island, but decided not. He’d done a lot of antisubmarine work. One of the biggest mistakes a sub was liable to make was to put up a mast. Mast down, no radar could detect you; mast up, you were vulnerable.

  He wasn’t going to foul up that way. And he’d better start thinking in terms of making no mistakes . . . Through all the excitement of getting underway and submerging he’d tracked their courses and distances run in his head. He had a good idea where they were and absent any really fierce currents, he could run on dead reckoning for a while without feeling lost. He went back into the nav station, found a pair of dividers, and taped down the chart. He walked their position off and pencilled in the half circle that meant dead reckoning position. Then stood stock still, if you didn’t count the trembling in his thighs, smoothing the heavy paper again and again, stroking it like a horse’s mane, trying to think dispassionately as a man could who might die from minute to minute.