The Weapon (54 page)

“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.”

“Like an aircraft carrier,” Wenck put in.

“That's still got to be a pretty weak return,” Dan said, touching his infected eye gingerly. The combination of carrion stink and bad air made him feel like the top of his skull was being pried off. “So it wouldn't work outside a fairly small radius. Wait, don't tell me. It runs out like the original flavor Shkval. Gyros, along whatever firing bearing the Uzel gives it. Like you were saying, minimal inputs from the fire control system. But at some preset distance this new system, this magnetic guidance, activates and homes.”

“But at two hundred knots. So the target has no chance to turn away or decoy it.”

“There's got to be some countermeasure. Magnetic mines, we degauss the hull. Reduce the magnetic signature.”

“If it generates its own field, this'll get a return even from a degaussed hull. As long as whatever's out there's
made of steel.” Henrickson sagged onto the skid. “The best countermeasure would probably be a false field of our own. The way we stream a noisemaker to fox a sound homer. But that's Chone's and Pirrell's job, once we tell them how it works.”

Dan contemplated the shining interior of the weapon, admiring despite himself the elegant simplicity of Dvorov's solution. In a tight strait like Hormuz, where the deep-draft carriers were confined to narrow channels, it would be devastating. Especially armed with the penetrating warhead. With it, Iran could close the Gulf to both military forces and tanker traffic; cut off the flow of energy to the West and Japan. Which would put it in a position to make
any
demand, enforce any claim or exaction.

Now he understood why the Iranians were pursuing him so doggedly.

He had to get this information back to TAG, at any cost.

But to do that, they had to escape. And he just didn't see how.

He looked again at the dismantled weapon. Muttered, “What's your guess on the guidance activation range?”

“The max range it could pick up something as big as a carrier?” Henrickson glanced at Wenck, who shrugged. “Depends on what kind of field the generator puts out, how sharp the sensors are. A thousand meters? Five hundred?”

Dan put his mouthpiece back in. The chemical air seemed cooler, wetter, and it didn't relieve his headache, the way it first had. Was his cartridge used up already? He rubbed his jaw, hearing the rasp of bristle, feeling sand and sweat and salt.

He was still trying to think when the intercom beeped. “Torpedo, Electrical: Lenson up there?”

“Here, Teddy. That lower induction holding?”

“Holding, but the leak's increasing. Spraying in around where it seats. Reason I'm calling, water's higher in the bilge. Doesn't seem like it ought to be rising that fast unless we've got another hole somewhere. Anyway, another foot
and it's going to start shorting out the batteries, electrical panels on the lower deck. Sumo and me are trying to put another pump on line, but we're not having any luck yet. Thought you'd want to know.”

He double-clicked and had just let up the lever when the box spoke again. “Torpedo, Sonar: Sierra One closing fast astern.”

“Rit, what's he doing?”

“Pinging hard and coming fast. Not maneuvering around anything, far as I can tell. Balls to the wall, like somebody stuck a cattle prod up his ass and hit the on switch.”

“What's the other guy doing? Sierra Two?”

“Holding his distance while his buddy comes in after us. But his bearing's slowly moving right. Looks like he's gonna play goalie. Repositioning to collar us if we make it out the south end of the oil field.”

Dan looked again at the weapon, touched his inflamed face again. “Uh, copy. How's the, uh, how's the arm doing, Rit?”

“Doesn't hurt my hearing.”

“Roger . . . out.”

“Sonar, off line.”

One terrier was crawling into the rathole after them. The other was guarding the back door. He couldn't bottom again. Couldn't wait them out, even if he found a wreck or abandoned platform to mask his magnetic signature. Their air was unbreathable; the last battery bank nearly depleted. When the flooding got above the deckplates, they'd be looking at either electrical fires or complete shutdown.

A flash went off. He flinched, then saw it was Wenck, leaning in to get a closeup of the generator. The strobe whined, recharging, then blasted out again, limning every dial, gauge, air line of the forward torpedo room, leaving pulsing scarlet afterimages floating.

“So, you want this back together?”

“What?”

The analyst waved at the weapon. “Donnie downloaded all the internal programming. We got good sharp pictures.
We can get it buttoned up in ten, fifteen minutes, slap the cover plates back on. Then hook it up and run it back into the tube.”

Dan stared at him. A moment passed while his slow-moving mind processed it. Before he realized what Monty Henrickson was telling him.

 

 

 

Back in Control, he checked with Carpenter. Face drawn, the sonarman was still hunched over the console. A stopwatch pendulumed from a hook at the top of the stack. The screens flickered like candles guttering down in a cave. When he saw Dan he took out his mouthpiece. Muttered, “Thirty seconds to next ping and course change. On one eight five now. Figure to come all the way to port to one zero zero. Won't take us much farther south, but the last two zigs were kind of shallow, I don't want to do another ten-degree turn.”

Dan kneaded Rit's shoulder silently—the right one, not the one with the broken arm—and leaned out again. Im returned his gaze from the ballast control panel. Dan couldn't see how, but the Korean had managed to regain trim; they hadn't touched bottom again since the Limbo strike on the sail. He silently extended a thumb. Im hesitated, then returned the gesture. Too late, Dan hoped it didn't have some obscene connotation for a Korean.

“So what's our next move?” the sonarman muttered, not taking his eye off the trace. “I heard what Oberg said.”

“That we're taking on water.”

“Yeah, and it gets to the batteries, there'll be chlorine all
through the boat.” He patted his breathing bag. “This is nice, but it's not going to stop chlorine long. That was the original poison gas. We take it off to talk, or vomit, and get one good hit—”

“I get the picture. But I'm not really sure—”

“Wait one, okay?” Carpenter interrupted him to crank rapidly on a knob, then leaned to flip up a safety and press a red button above the stack. The note pulsed and lingered, echoing eerily away into the sea. Bands of light leapt out of the waterfall, danced, faded. Carpenter hit more controls and changed the display, then cranked an index line over each return, making rapid notes on a pad of cheap ruled paper. Dan noted the returns got mushy, blurry, all but unreadable past seven or eight hundred yards. “Bears about one zero eight—two hundred yards—looks okay to starboard of that, and we'll have advance from the present course. Okay, V-Dag, bring her around, left rudder, one zero zero.” He reached up to zero the stopwatch, started it running again with another click. Then huddled, good hand cupping his fractured arm.