The Weapon

by David Poyer

  “Continue right to two zero zero. Electrical, Control: slow to one-third, turns for four knots.”

  Oberg acknowledged. Dan wiped his forehead, wondering what had set off the torpedo. The countermeasures might have decoyed it, but they shouldn’t have set it off. It must have hit something, but he had no idea what.

  Which meant there were more obstacles out here than the one they’d narrowly missed. He hit the brown box again. “Slow to two knots, Teddy, two knots.”

  Im was gesturing, pointing to his mouth and the breathing gear. Dan nodded and was sucking rubber again when a hideous screeching began up forward. The deck sloped to port and shuddered. He shouted to Vaught for right rudder, to get the screws out of the path of whatever they were dragging over. The screeching intensified as it moved back toward the control room, then passed down the side, grating like tungsten carbide claws, until it trailed off. “Back to two zero zero,” he ordered. “Rit, did you see that?”

  “I secured after the ping. They can still hear us in here.”

  “But will they come in after us?”

  He leaned in, but Carpenter didn’t answer. The pudgy sonarman was staring at the waterfall, turning a dial in increments too small even to see.

  Rit had the hang of this gear now. It wasn’t too different from what he’d learned on, back aboard the old Bonefish. The lower band of the waterfall display showed a strong signal at 3000 hertz with overtones at 50 he figured was some kind of electric motor. Most electrical power in the Mideast operated at that frequency. It was coming from 190 true or 340 relative. When he panned around he got two other sources close to that freq off to port.

  His arm jabbed, making him gasp. Whenever he moved something sharp, must be the ends of the busted bone, rubbed together. It really hurt then. His jaw ached from clenching his teeth, to keep from howling.

  What in hell was Lenson doing, taking them into an oil field? Rit could hear pumps and motors, but if there was an abandoned platform out here, salvaged down to the water line and then left, it would be invisible unless he pinged, and not all that obvious even if he did—the reverb was savage in water this shallow. Even pinging at reduced power and high frequency he couldn’t make out much beyond five hundred yards away. By the sound of it, whatever they’d just hit had come within a couple of feet of taking off the starboard plane. They already had one damaged plane; break another and they wouldn’t be able to hold depth.

  On the other hand, it might be a smart move. No sane sub commander would come in here.

  But no sane destroyer commander would, either.

  He hoped the Iranians were saner than Lenson.

  He cranked the head around to scan aft and found he’d lost the frigate in the baffles. He went the rest of the way around and heard a put put put out around three three zero that sounded obscurely familiar. He’d heard it before. What was it?

  He took out his mouthpiece. “Helicopter at three three zero.”

  The Skipper gave him a grunt but didn’t look in. Rit watched the doorway for a second, wondering what was going on out there, then looked back at the set.

  Being an enlisted dude meant you never got the big picture. He’d been what the nukes called a “coner,” somebody who worked in the front end of the boat, and that was even worse. You not only didn’t know what the skipper knew about the mission, nor what the officers knew, you didn’t know what the nukes knew, either, which meant you just about lived in the sonar shack and picked up what you could on your own. And the scuttlebutt grew in the dark like magic mushrooms.

  Once they’d gone into the Sea of Okhotsk to try to find Threadfin when she hadn’t reported back from a special mission. (Years later he’d read Jay Harper, the master spy, had been selling intelligence on the patrols.) They’d crept deep into that remote sea, running ultra silent because the Soviets had their own listening system on the bottom, and no one had told the sonarmen what they were supposed to be listening for. Which he’d always thought was stupid. How could they look for a missing boat if they didn’t know it was missing?

  But that was the way the Navy operated. And he wasn’t in the Navy anymore.

  Only if he was out, what was he doing in front of a sonar stack, sucking rubber at 18 percent 02 and wondering if the guy in charge had any idea what he was doing?

  Yeah, you managed this real good, he told himself. You fucking stiff. Well, at least he was getting laid more often than on active duty. And paid better, too. If he lived to spend it—

  “Update, Sierra One? Still got that frigate?”

  “In the baffles. Want me to check him out, give me a fifteen degree yaw to port.”

  “Is it clear there?”

  “I think. Mushy as hell, though. Just tell Im to stay as close to the surface as he can.”

  The gyro indicator on the bulkhead whirred. He waited till the baffles were clear and checked.

  “Got him?”

  He listened to the thrum of pumps, the drone of reduction gears, the chuk-chuk-chuk of that damaged blade going around. The same asshole who’d almost sunk them twice before. He tongued the mouthpiece out. “Turn count low . . . going real slow . . . steady bearing, high-freq ping mode . . . the son of a bitch’s coming in after us.” He yelled, “Another set of frigate screws farther out, left fifteen degrees, higher turn count, down doppler.”

  Wherever Lenson was taking them, that was one thing you learned bone-deep in Rickover’s Navy: to trust the guys beside you, and above you, and below you, even if you didn’t know what they were doing or even what the mission was. Trust they knew what they were doing, and that if you did your best, you’d all make it out of whatever shit you were in, alive.

  The ship comes first. Every smokeboat sailor learned that, back in the day. If she made it, you would too.

  He tried not to think about the fact that, as far as he knew, Lenson had never conned a submarine before.

  Dan leaned on the watchstander’s desk, sucking stale air and trying to think. Think, goddamn it! His hands shook with frustrated rage.

  That fucking frigate. The one with the nicked prop. He’d broken contact how many times now, three? Every time, the bastard had locked on again. And now was following him into the maritime equivalent of an uncharted reef.

  Who was this bastard? From the Shah’s old navy, trained in Norfolk or San Diego or Newport? Or a homegrown fanatic with fantastic luck and a death wish? He didn’t know. But obviously, someone as committed to getting him as Dan was to escaping.

  Only the guy above had an operating ship, a full crew, plenty of fuel, air support, even helicopters now. They could bracket K-79 and localize her and just wait for Dan to run out of air, run out of charge, run out of determination. Crack, and come up.

  “I gotta whiz,” Vaught said.

  “I got it,” Dan said, flinching. “What are you on, again? Oh yeah, two zero zero.”

  “Coming back off the clear-baffle yaw.”

  “Right, right.” He swung his leg over the butt-polished bench seat as Vaught swung off. Drops of moisture speckled the brown leather. He hoped it was just sweat. “Rit, where’s that helicopter? Steady, or moving?”

  “Helo effects steady, bearing zero eight zero.”

  To port. Where he’d hoped he’d be able to go, eventually, slice through the sharp angle of the oil field and come out headed south or southeast. He wouldn’t be headed the direction he really wanted, toward the Task Force, but he could no longer go where he chose. Like a king in the last stages of a chess game, the only moves remaining to him were to escape imminent destruction. When they were exhausted, it would be checkmate. Shah mat. That was Persian, wasn’t it? King Dead. A finger on his crown, toppling him. “What’s he doing out there, Rit? Can you tell?”

  “Hovering. Could be dipping?”

  “No pings?”

  “No, but if he can hear us at all, he’s got a line of bearing. Then another line of bearing from the frigate would give him enough to—”

  BLAM.

  This
explosion was louder than any of the others, like a lightning bolt striking a power transformer. The shock wave skewered pain up his spine and knocked his chin into his chest. If he’d been speaking he would have bitten through his tongue. The aftershocks belled and wowed away through the hull like a saw struck with a mallet. Alarms went off all over the boat, warbling and beeping like a plague of electronic locusts. The lights went out and all they had were automatic battle lanterns, and not many of those, just jaundiced beams shafting around the space.

  Dan fought the controls, too terrified even to curse. The explosion had shoved the entire boat toward the bottom, the way a full salvo fired abeam skates even a battleship sideways in the water. They were gaining depth too fast, considering how little clearance they must already have between keel and seabed. He pulled back on the planes, bowed like a rower, as if he could haul her up by sheer will. He came right instinctively, pulling the rudder hard over despite not knowing what was out there. His eardrums stabbed and rang.

  Carpenter staggered out of the sonar space, holding his mouth, blood seeping between his fingers. He started to speak, then crouched, staring up as Dan felt it, too.

  A cool mist, welcome in the first second on the back on his sweating neck, then suddenly claiming all his horrified attention—Im’s, too—as they stared up at the spray playing in a graceful undulating membrane all around the periscope tube.

  “Control, Electrical; leakage aft, heavy leak from vicinity of the lower snorkel induction.”

  A hand on his shoulder. “I go to piss, and you guys sink the boat?”

  “Two one zero, V-dag.” Dan scrambled up, pointed Im at the periscope—the Korean was already stripping off his skivvy shirt, to try to staunch the leak with—and ran aft.

  Then halted in the next compartment, just outside the galley. Water was sleeving down the radio mast too. He stared at it, then pickled the button. The hydraulics groaned, then cut off with a resounding bang. The mast itself didn’t budge, not a centimeter.

  He reversed his steps, sucking a long breath of hot oxygen from his rebreather, and ducked and stepped through the watertight door back into Control. This was his station, not aft. Kaulukukui and Oberg would have to take care of the induction leak. He had to figure out how to get them out of this. He walked through the spray, tasting salt, feeling trapped.

  That had been a Limbo round, and judging by the damage, the heavy antisubmarine shell had struck directly atop the after portion of the sail. Where the snorkel head valve, the radio mast, and the attack periscope were built into the trailing portion of the superstructure. He pickled the ’scope and got the same groan of overstraining hydraulics, the same echoing, steely bang as they gave up and tripped off as he had on the other mast a moment before.

  Losing the ’scope was bad but leakage through the induction valve was much worse. The typical snorkel system, which sucked in combustion air for the diesels when the boat ran submerged, had a head valve at the top of the sail and two induction valves, upper and lower, below that. Leakage at the lower induction meant both that the head valve, at the top of the sail, was sheared or blown off, anyway open to the sea, and that the upper induction valve was open or cracked as well.

  So that all they had left now holding back major flooding through a two-foot-diameter penetration was one damaged valve, probably warped or sprung at the hinge or the dogging mechanisms—the typical way valves failed under explosive shock. “Helm: alter course thirty degrees to port,” Dan snapped. “Rit, you okay?”

  “Bit by fucking tongue hal’ off.” But he was balanced on top of the watchstander desk, one-handedly helping Im hammer his undershirt into the scope housing. When Dan told him to belay that and get back on the stack he hopped down, but slipped on the wet deck, rolling instinctively as he went down to protect his broken arm, and crashed into a protruding valve wheel. Now his cheek was bloody too. Carpenter lurched back into Sonar just as the boat staggered too, booming hollowly as it settled down on what sounded like a hard gravelly bottom.

  Okay, they were in the middle of an oil field, taking water, nearly out of battery power and the high pressure air they’d need to blow the ballast tanks, with a poisonous atmosphere and no one knew how much longer on the rebreathers. He hit the bitch box. “How fast you taking water back there, Oberg?”

  “Wait one . . . fifty gallons a minute? Sumo’s guess. He’s working on the valve with a big fucking hammer.”

  “Don’t fuck with that induction! Get him off there! That cracks, we’ll flood solid in about two minutes.” Fifty gallons a minute they could take, for a while. He debated closing the watertight doors, sealing off the incipient flooding aft, but decided not to. Not just yet. If the engine room flooded they’d have to abandon.

  If they could abandon. He had no idea how to operate the escape trunk, and they’d be learning in the dark, in a strange boat, and maybe without enough hands even to operate the right cutouts and flooding controls and interlocks. He gave them a 30 percent chance of even getting out into the open sea, let alone making it to the surface.

  “Time to get out of here yet?” Vaught, hauling all back on the control planes, without obvious effect; that scraping went on and on. Im was leaning over the ballast panel, but his expression was grim. He kept punching the same button, but nothing seemed to be happening. Then he’d turn a valve this way or that, and try the button again.

  Dan pulled his attention from the interior and pushed it out into the night sea around them. That goddamned helicopter. It had radioed the frigate a line of bearing, which it had crossed with its own data to generate a good enough fix to fire on. Exactly what he’d have done if he’d been the scene leader. He’d kept the same course too long, let them get a solution. But he couldn’t keep weaving through an operating oil field. On the other hand, he couldn’t bottom the boat and abandon now, either. As soon as he stopped, the enemy would get another fix. The Limbo rounds would arrive seconds later.

  This bastard was good, he was fast, he was smart, he was accurate. “Why the fuck couldn’t we get somebody incompetent,” he muttered, rubbing greasy-feeling spray off his scalp. “Just this once.”

  But now what? He was running out of ideas. Along with everything else.

  He was standing there, getting ready to acknowledge the inevitable, when the intercom crackled. “Commander? Wenck here. Forward Torpedo.”

  “What you got, Donnie?”

  “What was that explosion? Are we sinking?”

  “Under control, Donnie. That all you wanted?”

  “No,” the distant voice said. For once it seemed to lack Wenck’s usual diffidence, his usual half-spacy, half-distracted air. “You might want to come down and see what we found.”

  “I could use some good news.”

  “You better come and see,” Wenck repeated, and signed off.

  The lights were broken in the torpedo room, too. Dan groped his way past the musty dead-mouse stink of the corpses. Whiplash from the hit had tossed the bodies about until they lay in tumbled disarray. He swallowed. One had its eyes open in a stubbled face already turning dark blue. Its gaze seemed to follow as Dan slid past, making his way toward a glowing centroid by tube number 3, where the beams of several battle lanterns interlaced.

  He’d left Carpenter in charge in Control, with orders to ping once, at the lowest power setting, confirm the intended direction was clear, then give Vaught the new course. Ping again, then zig back. At random, but with his overall course toward the southern boundary of the oil field. Assuming they got that far; it would be at least eleven more miles. Which might not sound like much, but he’d be surprised if they made it.

  Like a patient etherized on a table, the long narrow carcass of the Shkval lay opened up at the crux of the beams. A cover plate lay upside down, curved inner surface of polished metal dazzling in the focused light. Modules, some still connected by cables, others not, lay around on the skids or on the deck. Henrickson was holding a probe, watching code scroll across the screen of a piece
of test equipment.

  Dan took out the mouthpiece. Up here, at the far end of any air movement, the atmosphere was even thicker than aft. The actuators for the forward planes screeched and complained above him. He muttered, trying for shallow breaths, “What you got, Donnie? Monty?”

  “We wondered why the outer shell wasn’t painted,” the analyst murmured, taking his rebreather out, too. “Pretty obvious, once you know.” He put the mouthpiece back in again.

  “See you broke into that additional length. Find the transducers?”

  “Ardt any hra’ducers,” Wenck said around rubber.

  “What? Take a breath. Take that thing out. Then tell me.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “No transducers?”

  “It’s not acoustically guided,” Henrickson said. “Remember what Chone said, just about at the end, when we were talking to him in Newport? About magnetic guidance?”

  “That they couldn’t make it work. The local fields overwhelmed what they wanted to pick up, or something.”

  “Well, these guys tried it another way.” The analyst lifted another cover plate. “Steering actuators. Pretty straightforward design. A lot like the Standard missile, but built heavier to steer in water, not air. But, notice anything else different?”

  A detonation gonged through the hull. Then two more, so close together they were almost indistinguishable. Farther away than the last, but near enough to vibrate the beams of the battle lanterns. Dan wondered what the Iranians had fired on: the rush of gas flowing through a wellhead? A compressor? Or had Vaught zigged when they’d expected him to zag? He snapped, “We’re being actively prosecuted, Monty. Can you pick up the pace on the presentation?”

  “It’s all nonmagnetic.”

  “Titanium, plastic, bronze,” Wenck added. “The whole thing, outer shell all the way in. No ferrous metal.”

  “Okay, so?”

  “It’s magnetically transparent,” Henrickson said. “And all the power cables have magnetic shielding, to avoid Oersted effects. So there aren’t any local fields to interfere with the sensors. Then they tap off some of the envelope steam and use it to drive this little turbine. This thing here’s a generator. Six inches long, but look at the gauge of the cable coming off it. This isn’t a passive system. It generates its own magnetic field, then senses how it deforms in response to something ahead of it. Something big. Something steel.”