The Weapon (55 page)

Dan sat silently as the seconds ticked past. Thinking about what Henrickson had suggested. If that
was
what he'd suggested.

They had one Shkval-K aboard. If they got it put back together, should he fire it?

In one sense it would mean the mission was a failure. That was their tasking, after all: bring the new weapon home, for Navy labs to analyze and test and devise a countermeasure.

Without it, wouldn't everything they'd done be in vain?

On the other hand, Wenck had downloaded its programming, they had detailed photos of its internals, and Henrickson had deduced how it guided. Surely with that, the PhDs and the companies and universities the Navy research establishment had under contract could duplicate it. Dvorov was brilliant, but Komponent didn't have the only good engineers in the world. Given the intel Team Charlie had assembled, he couldn't see why Lockheed-Martin or Raytheon or Northrop-Grumman couldn't build their own Shkval-K.
Probably better, faster, and smaller, given the U.S. lead in high power density electronics and computer controls. And once they had that, devise a way to frustrate it.

But there was another question. The men after him, the officers and enlisted in those frigates, were only trying to recover their own property.
He
was the thief. Could he use their own weapon against them?

He smiled tightly. Twenty years ago he'd have agonized over that one. Maybe he was getting calloused. The way he'd thought certain of his seniors had been.

But this was kill or be killed.

If, that is, they could get the fucking thing to work. Which with a foreign fire-control system, an unfamiliar weapon, disassembled and reassembled by inexpert technicians without proper manuals or tools—yeah, it wasn't a sure thing.

The only other choice was to surface, hoist a white flag, and hope the Iranians respected it. Maybe they would, if it meant getting their sub back without too much damage.

He could surrender. He was past thinking of things in terms of his honor, or his career. It was what would happen afterward that made him dislike that alternative.

Team Charlie weren't combatants, adversaries taken in lawful combat. They were spies. Beneath contempt, outside the laws of war and Geneva. Tried for espionage, by a regime that had baited the Great Satan for years, the least his guys would get was life in some squalid hole of a prison. If they weren't just marched out into a soccer stadium and beheaded before thousands of cheering believers.

And maybe that was all spies and murderers deserved, but his job was to protect his men. So fighting back, slim though their chances looked, was the only chance they had.

He'd better start thinking about how he was going to do it.

Im's eyes were closed. Dan put a hand on his shoulder, and the Korean flinched. “What?”

Dan beckoned him to the watchstander's desk. He'd drawn the geometry on a sheet of Carpenter's pulp paper, as close to scale as he could. The field they were in, the obstacles
they'd mapped on their way through it, and their pursuers as he extrapolated their tracks over the next half hour. It showed Sierra One, now behind them, basically over their datum; and Sierra Two, now heading south several miles to the east of the oil field, directly in their escape path. As best Dan could calculate, there was no possible way
K-79
could make it out of the oil field before Sierra One would be within half a mile, that is, in Limbo range.

He watched the former exec of a North Korean submarine very closely as Im examined the diagram.

 

Im had wondered when they'd ask his opinion. For the first couple of hours, maintaining trim had taken all his concentration. Then he'd gotten the feel of the boat. Since they'd lifted from the long period on the bottom, though, during which the Americans had done their repairs, he'd been trying to use the least possible kilograms of air pressure. The boat was fighting him, wanting to go nose up, tail down, as she slowly grew heavier aft. Had Lenson even noticed?

But now, with the enemy close, they needed him. Which was why he concentrated, despite the pain and ringing in his ears, and his own fear. Oh, yes. No one showed fear in the North Korean People's Army Naval Forces. But that didn't mean he wasn't afraid.

The commander's lips moved. Im could hear only faintly through the howl of his damaged ears, but he followed the diagram. He stabbed a finger down on their principal pursuer. “Must destroy him.”

The commander's breathing bag puffed out; he'd sighed. Why? Then reached for the pencil.
One shot,
Lenson wrote in block letters.

He understood that. Bending over the paper again, gripping the pencil in a crabbed wraparound, he sketched in a truncated drilling platform. Pointed at the sonar shack, then to the little stick sketch. “Find wreck. Find old steel. Hide behind. Understand?”

Lenson nodded and said something. A tremor came
through the deckplates to Im's bare feet. He got better footing without the socks, but that wasn't why he'd taken them off. His soles were bleeding again from the shattered glass. But this way he could feel, through the boat's very bones, what was happening around her. She'd shivered at every distant explosion, and convulsed in pain when she herself was hit. He'd felt the trill of an incoming torpedo and the soft jolt as it detonated deep in mud and sand. And felt the steady beat of her screws gradually losing strength, speed, life itself.

K-79
was no longer a tiger, prowling the jungle. She was a hunted doe, quivering, bleeding, her life leaking away.

“What?” he said.

Lenson spoke again, his lips emphasizing the sounds. But Im couldn't understand. He grabbed the pencil again. Drew a submarine lurking behind something on the seabed. Lying in wait as the enemy drew near. Then surfacing, facing the pursuing frigate. He finished with a dotted line from their bow to the enemy.

He set the pencil down, watching Lenson. Would he have the courage? Americans did not value the readiness to sacrifice a warrior needed. They were not all physically soft. Oberg and the Hawaiian were as hard as any Reconnaissance Bureau commando. Some he respected for their knowledge—Monty, Donnie, the others back at TAG. Even the lax, undisciplined Carpenter had shown himself unexpectedly resourceful once he was aboard a submarine. But they did not seem ready to make hard choices. One day, they would put off a hard choice too long, and lose the riches and comfort they'd become accustomed to as their due; as something they didn't have to be ready to fight for, to the death.

Lenson was looking at the diagram. Turning, to speak into the sonar room. Patting him on the back, like a child. Im kept his face blank, though he felt like seizing the pencil and plunging it into the man's arrogant heart again and again.

Go forward to torpedo room. Help load tube,
he read.
Send Monty back here.

He studied Lenson's haggard face. Was he a man of war,
one to make the hard choice? With his privilege, his rank, his rich official wife?

What would the Iranians do with a Korean? Especially one who'd officially died as a hero defying the puppet government in Seoul? Would they turn him over to those he'd thought to escape? He patted the knife by his side. He'd given up once, and was still not certain he'd made the right choice. He would not surrender again.

Was he the only one aboard who'd rather die than submit?

 

Monty was levering the weapon forward when someone tapped his shoulder. “Want it? No problem,” he muttered, handing Im the chain from the hoist. “Donnie, we got somebody here who actually knows how to do this.”

“You go Control,” the Asian grunted. Face unreadable, as usual. Did the guy feel anything? He looked even more sullen than usual. Henrickson started to pat him, then thought better of it when the red-rimmed eyes glared. Well, they were all exhausted. Sucking air through the apparatus was an effort. It made his lungs ache and his jaws cramp. They weren't designed for extended wear.

In Control, Lenson was standing at the varnished plywood desk that looked like something out of a high school wood shop. He didn't look up for a moment. When he did his expression was that of an old corpse. His skin gray, where it wasn't swollen bright pink, and the lines around his eyes graved deep. “Monty. Got it back together?”

“The data cable gave us some trouble. The detents snapped off. But we got it taped in and I think it'll pipe bits.”

“Im show up?”

“Helping Donnie load.” He replaced the mouthpiece, got a couple of breaths, pulled it out again. “Thinking of firing?”

“Maybe. But it's not the optimal weapon for the situation.”

“It's an anticarrier weapon.” He breathed again while he thought. His throat was strep-raw, but each time he took the mouthpiece out black specks started streaming in from the edges of his eyesight, sucking together, like a black liquid that wanted to cover everything. “Uh, anticarrier weapon.
Firing at something small as a frigate, without that huge magnetic signature, this guidance will work only within a very short radius.”

“Very short. How short?”

“How much gauss is that generator putting out? At what frequency? What's the hull material on those frigates? I could work it out if I knew all that but I don't. Maybe two hundred, three hundred yards?”

Lenson chewed the mouthpiece, gaze locked on Vaught's back. “We'd have to fire at close range, before bearing error gets too great.”

“We get too close, they'll be on us with that fucking Limbo.”

“I don't think I ever heard you say ‘fuck' before, Monty.”

“I just don't have to use it ten times in every sentence, like some people.”

“I fucking heard that,” Carpenter called. “And I fucking don't use it
that
fucking often.”

Monty ignored him. “What we really don't know is what the software's going to be telling this thing to do. Looks to me like Komponent used off-the-shelf 65-76 guidance circuitry. Their biggest, newest wake homing torpedo. The way the 65-76 guides, it's got a stored model of the most likely target. When it picks up a return signal, it figures the relative coordinates between itself and the target, using the stored model and an iterative algorithm to generate a guesstimated position. Shkvals run at a preset depth. So it's only a two-dimensional problem. That cuts down on the computing demand, lets you run a simple program real fast, over and over, to keep up with the higher velocity this missile's traveling compared to a 65. That estimated position goes to the next module, which generates the steering orders.”

“So again, you're saying all we have to give it's an initial runout bearing.”

“No, what I said was it's expecting a
certain target
. Given what the Iranians wanted this for, a
huge
target. If it detects a smaller signal it's going to think that big target's farther away. So it's going to oversteer, is what I'm saying.”

“Run way to the left and right of centerline from us to the target.”

“Uh, yeah. I would assume.” Monty was nervous, knowing how much was riding on them getting this right, or at least, right enough to fire. If the thing
would
fire. He scrubbed his sweating palms down his thighs.

Lenson was still thinking aloud. “So we need him in close. To cut down on that angular error. Maybe . . . two thousand yards?”

Monty swallowed, not saying anything.

“And that's going to put us in Limbo range, with him getting firing data both from his own active sonar and from that fucking helicopter. We'll have to keep the bow pointed right at him to shoot. Which means we can't go evasive.”

“Go evasive how?” Monty asked him. “We can't go fast and we can't go deep. And what if we miss, or the fucking thing doesn't work?”

“I heard that, too,” Carpenter said from the sonar compartment.

“Vaught, you holding up?” Lenson asked the helmsman. Monty turned to stare as the man suddenly stood, leaving the helm unoccupied.

“V-Dag? Need a relief?”

“Yeah. I need a relief.” His tone was flat and he didn't have any emotion in his expression either. He put his mouthpiece back in and went aft.

Lenson looked nonplussed, but after a moment's hesitation crossed to where the pilot had sat and took the controls himself. “Rit, what were we on?”

“One niner five.”

“Monty, you and Donnie set up the Uzel. I'll give you a firing bearing. If it doesn't work, or we miss, I'm going to surrender.”

“Scuttle and surrender?”

“No, surface and surrender. Maybe if they get their boat back when we could have sunk it, they'll go easier on you guys.”

“On us? How about on you?”

“I can't let them question me,” Lenson said.

Monty didn't answer for a moment. Lenson had never spoken about it, but he'd heard the guy had been tortured by the Mukhbarat, Saddam's Gestapo. Maybe if you'd been through that, you didn't want to ever again. He didn't particularly want to be a hostage, a captive, himself, but it'd be better than dying down here. Wouldn't it?

Finally he said, “It's gonna work, Dan. And if it doesn't, the Navy could still show up.”

Lenson's bag deflated, as though he was taking a deep breath. He took his mouthpiece out again. Coughed, and coughed; stood from the bench and pressed the intercom switch above him. “Teddy, Sumo, status on flooding?”

“Over the lower level deckplates.”

“No joy on the pumps?”

“Had them going. For about eight minutes. Then the water hit the breakers and they tripped off. Sorry.”

“It's okay. How much juice we got left?”

“I don't know how that motor's turning over on what we've got. Don't count on more than three or four knots.”

Lenson's face sagged. He held down the button for a few seconds. Then let it up slowly, having said nothing at all.