The Weapon

by David Poyer

  Vaught repeated it, but his voice was going high again. Dan wondered when they’d all start screaming. He couldn’t imagine going through this for days at a time, the way U-boat crews had, or Pacific Fleet submariners in World War Two. On the other hand, if they could just get some decent air . . . he swung his yawing attention back to keeping them from being blown out of the water. Any second now those fucking mortars would be reloaded, ready to fire another salvo.

  “Keep her steady. Steady . . . full back emergency!”

  “Full back emergency!”

  “Electrical, Control: spit two countermeasures, close together as you can!”

  As soon as Oberg rogered Dan told Im, half by pantomime, that he wanted sixty meters, wanted their belly on the bottom. The valves thudded hollowly as they slammed shut. Air wheezed in the pipes, sounding nearly exhausted. He counted seconds, then snapped, “Left hard rudder. Port back one third, starboard all ahead flank. Come to zero three zero.”

  A ping rang through the water, shivering the hairs up on the back of his neck. It sounded different when you were the one being pinged on, when that tentacle of high-frequency sound searched out through the dark for you. He’d never think about the men he hunted quite the same way again.

  Seventy feet aft, Teddy slogged along as if in a swamp up to his waist. His vision was strobing on and off. It was like the last day at BUD/S, after being hosed over and stressed for five days. When the only thing that kept you going was blind hate, the stupidity of the determined, and an absolute need not to let your buddies down. Each breath burned like flame. Each respiration made him feel like puking. But still he got one hand on the clips that held the canisters, then the other.

  He threw the heavy toggled lever on the ejector and laid the cylinder in the port. Or tried to, but it wouldn’t fit. He stared at it for several seconds. Then turned it upside down and dumped the sheet-metal can inside out, holding it together with both hands. He forced it into the breech and wrenched it closed.

  Or thought he did. Because just then he must have blacked out. He didn’t know for how long, just that he came to lying under the ejector. He crawled up onto it again, teeth fastened in his lip, and grabbed the wire. Started to pull. Then stopped. Looked again.

  “Is this fucking thing closed?”

  Nobody answered, but he thought it definitely didn’t look closed. Did it matter? Maybe. If he didn’t want to flood the whole fucking compartment. He started to black out again, but bent his head and concentrated on not going.

  Then he lifted his head and with every bit of strength he had left, slammed the breech shut with the heel of his hand. He spun the wheel that opened the outer door. Water began to trickle, then spray. It felt good on his sweating face. He grabbed the dangling wire and yanked.

  All the way forward, under a dangling light, Donnie Wenck rubbed sweat and tears off his face. He couldn’t stop the tears. They ran down his cheeks and now there was a little rainstorm all over the torpedo and a puddle in the guidance compartment they’d finally located deep inside the weapon.

  “Gee, Donnie, give it a rest,” Henrickson said.

  “I can’t help it. I don’t wanna die. And I keep feeling like we’re gonna.”

  “It’s just the air,” the older TAG teamer told him.

  Donnie glanced at him out of the corners of his eyes. “You think?”

  “Sure. Makes me feel the same way. How about that plug? What’re you getting out of it?”

  “Uh, this is the signal processor. I’m using the control unit to inject like single event upsets through direct access to the memory. SEUs to the DMA, you know? And seeing what outputs I get.”

  “So—?”

  “Well, I’m not getting much. Takes a long time to map. But I’m starting to think this unit up here is where it’s coming from, you know?”

  Henrickson pulled the light closer. “This board here? And the other one, the other side?”

  “Yeah. Uh-huh.”

  “Then let’s finish getting it apart, okay? Sooner we can do that, the sooner we can get back to Control with the rest of the team.”

  Donnie knew it didn’t make any difference really, being one more deck up, if the whole hull imploded. But if that was what Henrickson wanted . . . He tried to steady his fingers as he laid the control unit aside, aimed the camera, and snapped off another high-res shot of the interior of the weapon. “Okay, Monty. Give me that screwdriver. Here we go.”

  Dan grabbed a handhold instants before they slammed into the bottom again. Im was swearing in Korean at the ballast panel, a white-faced Vaught had the planes on full rise, but they still crashed into it nearly as hard as the very first time they’d dived. He bit back a reproach; they were doing the best they could, with an unfamiliar boat and degraded control surfaces. “Electrical, Control: damage back there?”

  “I hear something funny back aft.”

  “Sierra One, three zero five, drawing left.”

  Carpenter, calling bearings to the frigate. Dan wished he had decent target-motion analysis. There should be a whole crew plotting bearings and calculating ranges to the enemy. But he didn’t, and he couldn’t raise the scope again; he had to guess and infer, and it was harder and harder just to stay conscious. “Don’t overcorrect, Vaught,” he snapped, more angrily than he’d meant to. “We don’t have the depth to play with here. If we pop out we’ll get another mortar salvo, probably shells, too.”

  Vaught twisted, eyes blazing, but without taking his hands off the controls. “Doing my fucking best here, Commander. Why don’t you show me how it’s done?”

  “I know you are. Sorry, goddamn it—I know you are.”

  “We’ve got fucking damage here, and you’re telling me—”

  “Three zero zero, still drawing left.”

  A thunder in the deep, but not near. Not near. Still, it silenced them. “Explosion effects, bearing one eight five,” the sonarman called.

  Nearly dead astern. The frigate was pinging and firing on the knuckle they’d left by briefly going astern, and the false contact from the hydrogen bubbles the countermeasure was generating. Good for the moment, as they crept away, but soon that mirage would evaporate. He had to be far away by then, or hidden in some way, or they were dead meat. But they were making more noise than ever, and despite Im’s and Vaught’s frantic efforts, losing depth control.

  He never felt himself going, but there he was lying on the deckplates with somebody slapping his face. Im, dark eyes concerned. “You okay? You okay?”

  “Uh—sort of.”

  “Here, take.”

  Something rubbery was forced between his lips. It tasted of decay. He gagged, then took a reluctant breath. A second.

  The mists thinned, and he sat up. How long had he been out? Long enough for the others to be wearing rebreathers, too. He hadn’t wanted to go to them, they made it hard to move and communicate, but apparently the choice had been made. He pointed aft, then to the rebreather; Im nodded. “Them, too,” he said, and replaced his mouthpiece.

  He remembered suddenly what threatened, and tottered upright and handed himself along into Sonar. The familiar triple waterfalls rolled on the screen. Carpenter pointed to a lighter band on the upper one. “Ill coming lef’,” he mumbled around the mouthpiece. “Urn coun’s ay own, ’ough. E’s jus’ coas’ing through the wa’er.”

  “He acquired us yet?”

  “He’s coming our way, but he’s not headed right at us and he’s not pinging in localization mode. So I’d say, not yet.”

  Dan leaned into the scope, looking for anything that would indicate an irregularity on the bottom, before he remembered: He couldn’t see what the seabed looked like without pinging, and if he pinged, his enemy had him. Whoever his adversary was, he was sharp. He’d lost contact, but regained. Lost them again; hidden, waited, and pounced. By now he must have realized he’d fired on a specter, but that his real quarry was still somewhere nearby. Both hunter and hunted ghosting through the water as they listened with a
ll their skill.

  Okay, how to hide? The gas he was sucking tasted foul, but his brain was rekindling. He couldn’t find another valley, but might be able to hide another way. Actually, the same way the frigate had. He leaned out into Control and tongued the mouthpiece out. “Ten degrees right rudder. Come slowly around and steady on one-seven-zero.” He scribbled “three knots” on a scrap and handed it to Im and pointed aft. The Korean left, treading cautiously around the shattered glass, and Dan saw he’d taken his bloodied socks off and was in bare feet.

  He leaned at the little standup desk at the watch officer’s station, watching the heading indicator start to tick around. It re oriented with glacial deliberation, but that was okay. They were skating a circle a mile in diameter, gradually bringing the sub’s course round to nearly due south. The frigate was headed east, as best he could tell. K-79 would be crossing his bow, beam on, but as long as he hadn’t picked them up yet that didn’t matter.

  To the south lay the enormous Fateh oil field, managed by Conoco. Dan had sailed past dozens of times on previous deployments. By day, huge supertankers lay alongside the terminal, waterlines gradually rising as they sucked aboard millions of barrels of “Dubai, 32.5 API,” while cranes swung and dipped on the maintenance platforms and he licop ters and service boats shuttled back and forth from the mainland. By night hundreds of strobes and marker buoys flashed warning signals visible halfway to Hormuz. But the wellheads themselves, and the lines that carried crude to the massive subsea holding tanks known locally as the “Pyramids of Dubai,” were invisible beneath the blue-brown, dust-frosted chop of the mid-southern Gulf.

  Fateh meant two things: noise, which was good, and a lot of clutter on the sea floor, which wasn’t. But if he could get there without being detected, he could bottom out again and maybe the guy would get tired this time and leave.

  He checked the chart again. The oil field itself was an isosceles thirty miles long, with the shallow point in twenty-three-meter depths and the base out near the middle of the Gulf, where it was about fifty meters. Which meant nowhere deep enough they could take on much of a down angle without sticking the stern out of the water, mooning anyone who was looking for them at the same time they exposed the screws and lost propulsion.

  “Sierra One bearing steady. Turn count increasing.”

  Dan realized that during the attack he’d lost track of his dead reckoning. He’d gotten a single line of position, the bearing on Farur Island he’d memorized from the ’scope. He sketched that in on the chart and tried to reconstruct their movements since.

  He got a position two miles, more or less, north of the edge of the oil field. Much closer, and he’d be inside it. He didn’t want that. He jerked his mouthpiece out again. “Farther left. Steady one eight zero,” he told Vaught, who nodded instead of acknowledging aloud. “Rit, what’s he doing now?”

  “Turn count bumped up again. Still in search mode though.”

  “Range?”

  “Gimme a TMA team and I’ll tell you. But he’s closing, based on the doppler.”

  “Still pointed at us?”

  “Hard to tell.”

  When he peered in Carpenter was slumped into the console. His breathing bag inflated slowly, then deflated. His slinged arm was wedged against an equipment cabinet. He was still watching the screen, though. Except for short breaks, he’d been at it for fifteen hours straight.

  As had they all, on top of a sleepless night, a lockout, the transit in, and a firefight. Sandwiches and hot tea helped, but men needed rest. A boat needed maintenance, lubrication, repairs. They were running out of everything: time, air, power, and bright ideas.

  Give up? The temptation nagged, as it had since they’d cast off. He shook it off once more, but had an uneasy feeling the time was coming when they’d have to look for some white cloth to wave.

  “Aircraft effects.” After a moment Carpenter added, “To the north.”

  “Fuck,” Dan muttered into the mouthpiece. Just what they needed. He sucked several more breaths, wondering if the thing really was regenerating what he was breathing. After the first few mouthfuls, the lift had gone away. He touched the button on the intercom and put his lips next to it. “Electrical: increase speed to five.”

  “Five,” Oberg whispered back. “They still humpin’ our ass, up there?”

  “Still on it. Keep it quiet.”

  “Faster we go, more racket this thing makes. Something’s loose, banging away.”

  He didn’t answer, clicked off. Gave Vaught a new course, to parallel the edge of the oil field. His injured eye burned as if someone had thrown acid in it. Rubbing it felt like he was grinding in powdered glass. He tried to focus on the chart. If they could only get over to where the machinery sounds were coming from, which seemed to be the western side of Fateh—

  “Screw effects, twin screws, warship type, bearing zero four three true. Designate contact Sierra Two.” Dan had just registered this when Carpenter added, voice flat, “Sierra One commences short-range pinging.”

  Vaught and Im were watching him. He stood frozen at the little plywood watch desk, like where the hostess stood at a Ruby Tuesday’s. His mind was an erased blackboard. What now, he asked it, and got nothing back. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. And the hunters were closing in.

  “Splash! Starboard side!”

  He barely had time to whip his head around when Carpenter added, “High-speed screws. Torpedo! Torpedo incoming, starboard beam!”

  This time they could hear it, a vibrato snarl that sounded like nothing so much as a daiquiri blender churning ice flakes and rum at full speed. Or at least that was the picture and even the fucking taste his memory decided to furnish him at this crucial moment. Im started forward, then halted. Vaught turned a pasty-white, shocked face from the gyro repeater. Wenck was shouting something from forward.

  And for that moment Dan froze, unable to think. Or, more accurately, unable to imagine any action that might lessen the overwhelming odds they were in the last seconds of their lives. Turning toward wouldn’t help. Sprinting away would just run them into the oil field.

  “Torpedo in homing mode!”

  He’d hoped this one would head for the bottom the way the last had. But it was running. Hot and straight, right for them. Their eyes followed him, waiting for him to save them. The rubber mouthpiece swelled like some malignant growth bent on choking him.

  Then he understood. The only chance. Maybe suicide, but the only move he had left. “Left hard rudder,” he snapped, and hit the bitch box; noise didn’t matter now. “All ahead flank emergency. Flank emergency!”

  The deck tilted as they came around. He gripped plywood so hard his hands cramped.

  The oil field lay ahead. Wells. Compressors. Pipelines. Valve trees. Enormous undersea tanks filled with millions of cubic feet of low-sulfur crude. A great submerged junkyard full of traps and obstacles, into which no prudent captain would even think of tiptoeing.

  He only hoped they made it before the hound of hell behind them caught up.

  26

  The Fateh Oil Field

  He let Oberg run all out for three minutes, then four, heart slamming, terrified at what he was doing, but looking at no downside given what was on their tail and closing fast. The whine behind them climbed into a shriek that drilled through steel into the ears, into the skull, like those African insects that bored through your inner ear into your brain. He glanced at the knotmeter, then dragged the rebreather mouthpiece out and hit the brown box again. “Teddy, can’t we go faster? I’m only seeing ten up here, we were doing like sixteen before—”

  “That’s when we were fresh out of the box. One of our battery banks is dead. And the other’s going fast.” The SEAL sounded tired. “I’ve got it red-lined, we just don’t have much left back here.”

  He double-clicked, because he couldn’t think of anything to say back. Then triggered it again. “Fire two more countermeasures, Teddy. Fast as you can kick ’em out.”

  “That’
ll leave us empty racks.”

  “Just kick ’em out. Right now!”

  He gave him thirty seconds, every muscle tensed as the sound of the incoming torpedo built, then snapped to Vaught, “Left hard rudder.” Feeling like a blind man running fill tilt into a minefield. They had to be inside Fateh now, and he had no idea what was around, ahead; they could be headed for pipelines, wellheads, abandoned oil platform supports, a whole junkyard of rusty steel to tear their planes off, impale them, maybe even penetrate the pressure hill, going at this speed.

  But a higher-pitched, nearly supersonic note rang through the hull now. “Homer going active,” Carpenter sang out, and even through his terror Dan noted how carefree the sonarman sounded. As if this was scary but fun, like skydiving or bungee-jumping. As for himself, his skin was trying to crawl off his body and hide. But his mind was standing outside that skin, observing. Unafraid. Almost, unconcerned, as if it was not and never had really been part of the body, the individual, called Dan Lenson. He heard the detachment in his own voice. “Rit, can that thing home on our active transmissions?”

  “Not anymore. It’s tuned to its own pulses now.”

  “Then go active. See what’s out ahead, short range.”

  The keening whalesong of K-79’s sonar cried out. Simultaneously with it came a heavy, rocking bang from dead aft. For a second Dan thought the torpedo had hit them, but it hadn’t been as violent a jolt as he’d expected.

  “Torpedo explosion astern,” Carpenter reported. Then, louder, “Obstacle dead ahead, one hundred meters.”

  “Hard a-starboard,” Dan snapped. He gave up on the mouthpiece and let it dangle on his chest. “Vaught! Starboard!”

  “Right hard rudder!”

  “Anything out on that bearing, Rit?”

  “Hard to say—scattered returns—maybe five hundred clear yards on zero eight zero. No, wait—make it two zero zero.”