The Weapon (47 page)

Could he do it? He bent again over the chart, wondering about tide. Could a counterflowing tide be enough to slow a frigate on the northward petal of this deadly flower? But he didn't know what the tide was. Or, wait, he did—they'd planned the attack for high tide, to allow room for the delivery vehicle to lie close alongside the Juliet.

Which meant the tide would be flowing out now, out through the strait.

“Sierra Two, incoming again. Pinging like a sonofabitch—switching to short range—”

“Bearing on the other one, Carpenter, Sierra One—”

“Sierra One bears one two five relative, starboard quarter—”

He clung to the periscope stand, mouth moistureless as baked cotton. Vaught was writhing his neck in a strange way. Im was nodding to himself, lips moving in some rapid speech that surely couldn't be a prayer. Dan's heart took an age between beats. The rushing grew, and mixed with it the
shik-shik-shik
of the blades slicing through the water, a sharp cracking as one, damaged or nicked, cavitated, trailing vapor bubbles that collapsed on themselves. The sonar screamed in their ears, exciting sympathetic vibratos in the structure around them, till it seemed the hull itself was crying and trembling under the lash that hit it once a second.

Thud. Thud.
Crack. Crack.
Thud. Thud.
Six detonations, evenly spaced, and again, the middle two directly above. Six: the universal signal for danger at sea, for being in extremis, for the last warning. The echo of the last was still thrilling away in fainter and fainter tremolos when Dan licked dry lips and said in a voice that sounded strange even to himself: “
All back emergency
.”

“All back emergency—”

“
Right hard rudder—
”

Hoarse murmurs answered. The hull around them lurched as the big screws aft went suddenly to full astern, clawing power into the water, reversed engines and suddenly tilted rudder spinning hundreds of tons of water into a whirl pooling density that could for a few seconds suggest to probing sound the presence of a tangible body.

Vaught choked out, as if his mouth was full of marbles, “Right hard rudder.”

Dan said over him, “All engines, ahead flank. Ahead
emergency
flank! Come right to one eight five, down planes,
steady
at sixty meters!”

An agonized groan came from aft as the spinning shafts twisted under the torsion of suddenly reversed rotation. Electric motors responded more swiftly than a surface ship's turbines, and Dan grabbed a handhold as the rush of water grew outside, then became a roar, varied by clatters and thumps. The periscope began to vibrate alarmingly. Dan glanced at it, but said nothing. The torrent-noise got louder. And louder.

“Steady on one eight five. Steady on sixty meters.”

“Make depth sixty-two meters.”

“Control, Electrical; we're really sucking down the power back here, I can see these needles dropping—”

Dan hit the bitch box button, it didn't matter now how much noise he made, and yelled, “Just keep it balls to the wall, Oberg. This is our chance to shake them.”

The SEAL gave him a “roger, out” as an ominous scraping came from beneath their feet. It rose, but Dan snapped to Vaught, “Don't touch those planes. Maintain your depth.”

“Short range pinging. Well astern.”

The Alvands were pinging on the “knuckle,” the ghost he'd left swirling in the disturbed water. But how long would it fool them? Sweat slid down his cheeks as he fixed his eyes on his watch. Twenty seconds at flank. Thirty. He fanned his face with his other hand. Vaught coughed hoarsely. At twenty knots, every thirty seconds was another three hundred and thirty yards, every minute, six hundred and sixty. The sweep hand jumped ahead. Again. Nobody spoke.

A minute.

Two. Im shook his head like a dog and a fine spray came off his black hair and hung in the light like a halo.

Three minutes. They'd gained a mile. It had to be deeper now, the bumping had eased. “Sixty-five meters,” Dan said in an almost normal voice. Three more miles and they'd be in the channel, in international waters. He felt giddy, as if he'd just stepped off a carrousel.

A tremendous detonation piledrivered the steel around them. The hull flexed, the lights flickered, dust and bits of cork flew off the bulkheads and frolicked in hazy air.
WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.
Three great deafening clangs like anvils dropping on them from a mile up. Vaught's shoulders quivered. Carpenter cursed in a gabbled shriek from the sonar stack. Im staggered into the ballast control panel and recoiled, clutching his face. Alarms began beeping.

“What the fuck was that?” Henrickson yelled from forward and below.

“Limbos,” Dan said through numb lips to them all. “Antisubmarine mortars. Two hundred pounds of explosive. Depth fuzed. Fired in salvos of three. Cut those alarms off!”

Again, closer, louder, three more savage battering blows, shattering bulbs inside their thick glass safety jars, cracking gauges, shaking down handsized flakes of cork and old paint. Carpenter gripped the jamb of the door from the sonar station, face slack. “They're not pinging. They're firing on passive bearings. Right down our sound spoke. It's too shallow to go this fast. We're cavitating! Putting out too much noise—”

“Slow down,” Im said, bloody hands over his face but his eyes wide above them. “Slow down!”

Vaught glared up, shoulders hunched as if against a cave-in, pupils blank. The rocketing sub brushed something, some bulge or bank on the bottom. It lurched and rocked. Dan felt a bloodcurdling sense of something huge and solid looming just ahead. He clung to his handhold, physically biting back the commands to slow, to rise, that his cowardly self tried again and again to bark out. Bolting through the deep, through the dark, they waited for the next barrage to arc out of the walled-off sky.

 

 

 

But the third salvo hit farther away, insofar as he could judge; only rattling already broken glass, knocking free a few more paint chips, the shocks rattling away through the frames and stringers of the missile housings. Dan kept his eyes straight ahead, not even wanting to look at the seething air. The hull jarred again, then smoothed, though the shears were still vibrating as if some giant dentist were trying to wrench them out by the roots. He wondered how fast they were going, how many minutes longer they could keep it up.

“Depth,” he grated at last, trying to keep his pitch going too high.

“Depth . . . depth . . . sixty feet. I mean, meters.”

“Steady on, Vaught. They missed us.”

The pilot didn't answer, flexing his arms and shaking his shoulders. Dan hoped he was getting a grip. He patted Im's back and pointed a finger at Carpenter. The submariner's cheeks gleamed with thick sweat; he cradled his arm. Dan checked his watch again and was startled.
Nine
minutes at flank speed. They had to be getting close to the channel. “Rit. You okay?”

“Arm hurts like shit . . . I might of broke it. Hit it on the console edge when I went over.”

“We'll look at it when we're out of this, but right now I need you back on that stack. Find me a single slow-speed screw out around two-seven-zero to zero-zero-zero.”

The sonarman nodded and vanished. A broken arm would hurt like hell, but Carpenter hadn't said another word. Dan paced, wondering if he should come right. Or go deeper. Or put the planes on full rise, back to 'scope depth, and check his six.

He smiled grimly. Why bother? He knew what he'd see. The same two Nemeses barreling after him. With the noise
K-79
was making, the scream of collapsing bubbles howling off her madly spinning screw, there was no way he could lose them.

He had to find a place to hide.

 

Im's nose was bleeding but he ignored it, only snuffling up the blood as it threatened to choke him. He clung to the handhold above the ballast panel, blinking through a headache that gradually became blinding. He peered through the smoky, dusty air, wincing as hot metal sizzled deep in his head. And suddenly he understood what was wrong.

The commander was staring off into space. He knew that whitened set of the lips. Had seen it on his own commanding officer, when they'd been under attack. Hearing their comrades go down around them, the crackling death-throes of heroes making the ultimate sacrifice. All to get them through. But they weren't going to get through this time if they couldn't breathe, and just breathing grew harder with each passing minute.

Sleepiness, fatigue, clouded judgment, headache: it seemed to be happening more rapidly than it should, given how few they were, but judging by his symptoms, carbon dioxide was building up in their air. Maybe Lenson could get them out, maybe he couldn't, but if it got much worse they'd just black out. He rubbed snot and blood from under
his nose and lurched forward to grab Lenson's sleeve. The commander flinched and stared down. “I light oxygen?”

Lenson blinked, then nodded. Im half-read his lips. “Good idea. Know where they are?”

He pointed to a knee-high metal box pierced with louvers. “Every compartment.”

“Great.” Lenson blinked again and dragged a palm down his face. “But not in the compartments we don't have guys in. Okay? Dog off the after torpedo, the engine room, unless Oberg needs to get back there. How long do those candles last?”

He thought he had that. Maybe his hearing was coming back? “Burn for six hours. Enough oxygen for a day. Maybe more.”

“Is there tanked oxygen? They've got to have some tanked, too.”

“No. Checked tanks.” He gestured, hands out, forgetting the English word. “Nothing.”

“Empty?”

“Empty.
Yae.
After candle, only breathing set.”

Lenson looked disturbed but said nothing more, just snapped back to his trance. Im headed for the box and lifted the lid.

Inside nestled a matched pair of two-foot-square yellow metal canisters. Exactly like the ones on his old boat. He stripped off the seals and pulled the igniter tab. The fireworks smell of hot perchlorate stung his nose but he bent in to whiff the thin gray smoke, and felt the fatigue lift and the headache lessen.

He checked the depth and looked at Vaught, then went aft. He lit one of the two candles outside the galley, and started to unseal the second.

Then hesitated. The commander had said, only the compartments the team was in. He looked forward, then aft. Finally he reached down and pulled out the cartridge he'd just yanked the tab on, intending to carry it aft and swap it out with one of the others.

Instead the whole bottom of the cartridge fell out. Burning
perchlorate and flakes of its rusty steel casing, neglected and corroded through, followed it onto the deckplates. A cloud of white powder rolled out. He beat at the hot chemical, coughing in the thick white smoke that mushroomed suddenly along the overhead as the hot chemical hit a greasy spot on the deckplates. He glanced around for a fire extinguisher. He dashed into the galley, found a flat tin, and got it under the heap of chemical smoldering on the deck. It smoked and hissed as he tipped it into a stainless sink, but it was safe now, under control. He blew out and backed away, dusting his hands.

Oberg looked in. His mouth made words but Im couldn't hear them. He smiled and held up his hands, pointed to the sink, smiled some more. Sweat rolled down his back, gritty with the powdered chemical. But the SEAL wasn't smiling. He looked angry. He was coming toward him. Im's hand, groping along the sink behind him, found the handle of a knife.

 

Teddy looked at the mess, at the grinning, shrugging Korean. The smoke smelled like the Fourth of July. “What the hell's this?” he said again, then all at once realized what was happening. The Korean was trying to—

A knife flashed, and without conscious thought, reflexes honed by hundreds of hours of drill, Oberg lunged. He got the blade away and braced himself to break Im's arm with his elbow.

Instead he got an elbow himself, in the face, that just about knocked him cold. He hung in the dark for a second watching distant planets flare before he came back and turned into him and wrestled him to the deckplates, both men grunting and trying for advantage. The Korean was smaller but strong and wiry quick.

“What's going on here?”

Henrickson, in the galley doorway. Teddy let up a little, breathing hard. “Son of a bitch was trying to set a fire. I never trusted him—”

“A fire?”

“Oxygen candle break,” Im spat. He got an arm free and pointed to the sink. “I put out. This crazy man!”

“Commander sent him to light off the oxygen generators, Teddy. To scrub this carbon dioxide out of the air.”

“Then why'd the fucker grab a knife?”

“I'd grab one, too, if you were trying to fuck me up! Let him go. We don't have time to screw around. Commander says, drop speed. Eight knots, below cavitation.”

“Go tell Sumo, he's on the console.”

“I'm telling you. Let him up!”

The SEAL pulled his hands off and held them up. “You fuck self,” Im spat at him, and pushed past.

Obie turned to watch him head aft, then snapped around. For a second Monty tensed, thinking he was going to attack him, too.

Instead he grunted something and headed aft. “Eight knots,” Monty called after him.

Im ignored the Americans. He was bent over a box, pulling a tab. A crack, and the same hot smoke-smell as in the galley filtered up into the choking air. He and Henrickson exchanged glances as they shoved past each other in the passageway.

 

Dan hung on the scope as its vibration ebbed, as the rush of water became a whisper again. Then gave Vaught a quiet order to come right. Waited.

Carpenter leaned his head out. And said sotto voce, “You wanted a low-speed diesel? Got one out around two nine eight. Sounds like the blade-tips are just about out of the water.”