The Weapon (34 page)

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 silhouette 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.

Mangum shook his hand for a long while, at the bottom of the ladder in the engine room, then gripped his shoulder too, as if unwilling to let him go. “Take care of yourself, roomie.”

“Just be here when we get back, Andy.”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Where else would we be?” His classmate slapped his shoulder and abruptly faced away. “Turns for one knot,” he said to a talker, who repeated the order into his set.

Dan stuffed the fear into his belly and clambered up the ladder. With difficulty: He was burdened by nearly a hundred pounds of weapons, ammunition, knife, rebreather, and weights. It was a painful pull with his left arm, which he'd burned the shit out of one black night in the Arctic Sea. He reached the top and wriggled slowly through and up, into the transfer trunk.

A single bulb behind thick glass lit the white-painted sphere. Oberg and Kaulukukui sat bent over on the little circular shelf seat. The big Hawaiian looked even more enormous curled into the minuscule space.

Oberg leaned forward and tugged at Dan's Draeger. The LAR-V was a chest-worn black-plastic-coated oblong with a green oxygen tank the size of a sixteen-ounce Coke tucked
under it. Inside were a breathing bag, an air scrubber canister, and a first-stage regulator. There was a pressure gauge for the tank on top, where you could look down and read it; it measured from zero to three hundred. A recessed manual oxygen-add button on the front. Two corrugated rubber breathing tubes led to the second-stage regulator in the mouthpiece. The tank dug into his diaphragm as Oberg jerked on the cylinder straps, twisted the valve closed, open again. “Just a little buddy check, okay? We good to go, Commander?” he said, looking deep into Dan's eyes.

Dan cleared his throat, trying not to look as nervous as he felt. He had a lot of hours underwater, but sport diving and penetrating a hostile harbor by night were orders of magnitude apart. “Let's do it,” he said. He bit the mouthpiece into place and took a hit. Rubber and stale-tasting gas and a faint sting of alcohol.

“Only easy day was yesterday,” Kaulukukui joked. “Right?”

“Sure, Sumo Man.”

“It's gonna be just like on SCUBA, only there won't be any bubbles, and believe me, you won't miss them. Remember that bailout bottle on your leg. No reason to get hinky. You need more oxygen, hit the button. The bag collapses, suck in, you'll get more. This is a diverproof unit, long as you stay shallow. Always plenty of air.” Beside him Oberg was going on his Draeger, too. His hand hovered over a big push switch on the bulkhead, giving him one last chance to back out, Dan supposed; then thumped it like a faith healer invoking the Spirit.

Water gushed in. It swirled around their feet, rising quickly. It felt cold at first, as it flooded down his booties and up into his wet suit bottom, then warmed. He sealed his mask, tongued the mouthpiece, and flexed his arms, trying to relax. Deep slow breaths.

The water came up over his chest, then over his face. Deep slow breaths. The two SEALs were watching him like hawks.

He breathed out, then blinked, surprised. No bubbles. It
did
feel weird.

Teddy watched Lenson's eyes as the water came up. He looked tense, but the pupils weren't blasted wide, the eyeballs weren't jerking around the way they did when a diver was fighting the Monster. The last bubbles came up out of their wet suits and gear. They drifted between them, wavering upward, then vanished, sucked into the overhead vent. Up on the surface there'd be a seething slick, just for a few seconds; then it would drift apart, vanish in the chop. That was okay. A moonless night, forty miles off the coast, there'd be no one to see. Which a cautious periscope sweep had already made sure of.

He spun the wheel on the hatch. It swung out, into the hangar. Kaulukukui was closer, so he bowed, made a courtly gesture:
You first.
And got a lifted finger in return.

 

By the time Henrickson pushed himself through the hatch, gulping as he sucked on the mouthpiece of his Draeger, most of the others had exited. He kept breathing shallow no matter how hard he tried not to. This thing on his chest was supposed to take the carbon dioxide out. Hydroxide to carbonate reaction. But he had a headache already. He felt for the oxygen add button, then forced his finger away. He shouldn't need more this soon, should he?

Blackness, so dense and enormous he lost which way was up. They'd told him not to stop, that it was “just like getting on the bus.” But which way? He hovered, lungs pumping faster. Shit. Shit!

A hand grabbed him out of the dark. A hovering figure pointed him and shoved. Motioned to keep going. Instead he hovered, sculling slowly, oriented now, taking it in.

The lights were shielded, so they wouldn't glare upward. The effect was eerie, illuminating everything but only from above. Hoses drifted across where divers were herding a black flattened shape like a torpedo sat on from above. Another beckoned impatiently from the barely lit circle of the hangar opening.

Whoever was behind him—Im, he thought—bumped
him. He gulped and swallowed and made himself let go the edge of the hatch. He swam down the empty hangar and out into the open night sea, toward the looming shape that slewed slowly out to the side.

Turbulence jostled him. They were underway, slowly, and the current was pushing him aft. Toward a slowly rotating shadow he realized with a squeeze of his heart was the sub's massive screw. He shrank instinctively. But he couldn't back down. The rest of the team was behind him, Lenson was in front of him.

No, he couldn't back out now. . . .

 

Hanging in the dark sea, watching the lights creep here and there, Teddy felt heavy, which wasn't good. The Draeger wouldn't burn off gas like an open circuit rig. But you always felt heavy going in. It was all the gear. And all the straps, and slings, and hoses, and shit.

Some guys got all jocked up for a mission. He preferred to keep it light. He didn't carry a pistol, for example. Just another thing to hang up. He took an extra HK mag instead. Less weight, and you got thirty rounds instead of fourteen, or whatever you felt comfortable with in your handgun.

He was carrying the standard SEAL close quarters weapon, an ugly little Heckler & Koch nine-millimeter just barely controllable on auto. They had special trigger groups for a three-shot burst setting and waterproofing and lugged barrels for suppressors and the waterproof Surefire flashes with the lithium batteries.

His free hand roved, touching each item as he checked it off in his head. The rest of his first-line gear: compass, watch, his Glock knife, a Maglite with red and IR lenses. A wad of dummy cord. Bailout bottle, in case his scrubber canister broke through, or he took a bullet through it—it had happened, on an Iraqi oil platform, though he hadn't been in the water at the time. Grenades—all frags, he wasn't taking any flash-bangs on this mission. Five thirty-round magazines. A liter of water. His med kit. A claymore, in case things got really ugly. No night vision or bone radios this
time, they were supposed to be waterproof but tended not to be reliable after you spent a couple of hours at pressure, but Kaulukukui had the UHF SatCom in case things went totally to shit. And batteries for everything that needed them. They were all wearing unmarked three-color BDUs under the wet suits, in case it came to cross-country work. Though he couldn't see how this mission could turn into that. If they had to cross more than a couple hundred yards of Iran, they'd be already dead, their boots sticking out of the back of a truck.

Lenson was already aboard. Next up in the shadows was a small figure. Teddy still wasn't sure why they had a North Korean on the team, but Im kept his mouth shut and obeyed orders. He caught a flash of dark questioning eyes and pointed to the open door. Im grabbed the edge and hauled himself inside, his fins a flick of black flame.

Henrickson. The little guy moved slowly, but he kept going.

And Carpenter. When he was boarded Oberg stuck his head in to make sure they were taking the right seats. He wanted Sumo and himself nearest the door. They'd be first out, he didn't want some goatfuck developing where these guys got hung up on each other. They weren't Team guys and he wasn't sure how much dark-and-underwater they were rated for.

When it came to the door-kicking, he and his swim buddy would do that themselves.

 

Dan oriented himself inside the vehicle. He'd expected cramped, expected dark, but this was darker and more cramped even than he'd feared, and it didn't help that they were all packaged in gill to gill under water. At least his breathing gear seemed to work okay. He was used to open circuit SCUBA, but swimming with the rebreather was different. The gas was warmer and more comfortable to breathe. When he exhaled the bag swelled against his chest. Though the rebreathers produced no bubbles, they had downsides, too: they couldn't go as deep, and overexertion
could produce carbon dioxide faster than the system could scrub it out—which could have nasty consequences.

Still, they shouldn't have to swim that far, or fast, on this mission. If everything went as planned, they'd only have a few yards to cover on the rebreathers. Into the SDV, then up to the Juliet; back to the vehicle, and the return to
San Francisco
.

If.

A red interior light snapped on, and Kaulukukui mimed taking the regulator on its hose off the overhead clip, securing the mouthpiece on his Draeger, and replacing it with the onboard supply. Dan got the one above him and thumbed the purge valve to make sure it had air. He took deep breaths, flushing his lungs, then twisted the valve on his second stage and switched off mouthpieces to the onboard system, sucking in the familiar harsh dry cold of tanked air. He helped Wenck, sitting across from him, who seemed awkward with it. He patted the data systems technician's knee, then gave a thumbs-up to the Hawaiian.

A beam came on. It flicked from face to face as Kaulukukui searched each man's expression, waited till he got a thumbs-up from each. It went out, and a moment later a
chuk-chuk-chuk
came through the water and Dan felt the acceleration.

He leaned back, tilting his watch to the scarlet light. So far, on schedule. And a short ride in to objective—only three hours. Piece of cake.

If only this team held together.

 

Donnie peeked at his watch, then closed his eyes. Three hours! How was he going to keep it together for three hours?
Underwater?
He wished he had a Game Boy. Anything to take his mind off it. The SEALs didn't mind. They liked riding in undersea vehicles. And, yeah, it was cool. But he felt like he couldn't breathe.

Okay, he'd better start thinking over what he was going to have to do when they got there.

Which mainly was, download and suss out anything
novel he could find in the combat system, the idea being to vacuum up anything that would relate to the Shkval-K's still-only-rumored guidance capability.

Which he had his own opinions on, but whatever. According to what limited intel the team had been able to get their hands on, the Juliets had the Russian MGK-400 sonar and an Uzel MVU-119 fire control system.