The Weapon

by David Poyer

  “I’m not really interested in private contracting,” Dan told him. “Don’t get me wrong, Tor. But if I want to serve my country, I’ll do it in uniform. I’m not comfortable with the idea of doing it for the money.”

  “You cash your Navy paycheck?”

  “I see your point, but there’s more involved. Accountability. Tradition. Just . . . hiring out to the highest bidder, that doesn’t feel right to me.”

  “Even if the bidder’s the same government that pays you now? Every contract we take’s approved by State or Defense. When they’re not the customer, themselves. You’re not making sense, guy.”

  He hung fire, trying to figure it out himself. The obvious rejoinder was: But what if the highest bidder wasn’t the U.S. government? When did profit trump loyalty? And not only that. He’d seen, inside the Beltway, how cash bought policy. Once it could buy an army, too, what would America look like then?

  Schrade spoke into his silence. “The Navy’s most decorated officer, but over the years you’ve stepped on a lot of toes. Your combat record and command experience, the Congressional, your expertise in advanced weapons systems, that’s earned you—what? TAG Charlie? Here’s your chance to live well doing exactly what you’re doing, only without the brass and the politicians second-guessing you.”

  “They don’t second-guess you?”

  “They don’t even want to look.” Schrade barked a short laugh. “They really don’t. What they don’t know, they can’t be held responsible for. You know I ran for the Senate.”

  “I was at sea, but I read about it. Yeah.”

  “Well, I lost, but guess what: I’m glad I did. You know, when I was a boy, my dad took me into a doughnut shop. I was a chubby kid, loved the doughnuts. He told me I had three choices in life: Be the guy who makes the doughnuts. Be the guy who buys the doughnuts. Or be the guy who owns the store.”

  The thin lips recurved and Schrade sat back. “I have a major contract coming up in Africa. Put in your letter now and get in on the ground floor. This is going to be even bigger than cell phones.”

  Dan looked for a trash can. He two-pointed the empty Dr P and stood. “Tor, nice seeing you again. But screwed up as the Navy is, I’m going to stay with it.”

  Schrade paused a beat, maybe waiting for him to change his mind. When Dan didn’t, he got up and shook his hand, thanking him again for coming in. “Stay in touch. And the bird’ll be ready when you are, take you back to your troops. We’ll meet again. Guarantee you that.”

  Dan nodded, tried to smile back. But he doubted it looked all that convincing.

  2

  Little Creek, Virginia

  The main drag at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base led from the gray behemoths at their piers east to what Dan remembered had once been the main exchange. It and the commissary had relocated to a new complex, but Headquarters, U.S. Navy Tactical Assessment Group, was near neither. It was down a side road that headed off into what years before had been scrub pines, dunes, sea oats, and sand fleas, a wind-whipped waste with verdigrised cartridges still littering the damp sand where draftees had trained before shipping out for Africa in 1942.

  Now those bayfront dunes housed commands whose tenancy went unadvertised. TAG was housed in a low tan brick building that reminded him of a half-buried bunker. A Mark 48 torpedo and a Tomahawk missile pointed skyward on steel pylons before the entrance, and discreet bronze letters announced TACTICAL ASSESSMENT GROUP.

  He and Henrickson showed their IDs at the front desk. The rest of the team had taken the weekend, and would be in on Monday. They clipped on their badges and headed to the back, down a hallway past the Game Room and the mainframe. The big IBM didn’t get used much anymore; the crunchers used workstations that were faster and friendlier, but it was still there. It was Saturday but the offices were still full; a reserve unit came in on weekends. Dan punched numbers into the door lock and let himself into his office.

  Home, or as close to it as shore duty Navy got. His office was windowless and not much more luxurious than Schrade’s, but it did have central air. He skated his duffel next to the plywood cruise box that held what uniforms he hadn’t left at the house in Arlington. There was a bunk bed down the hall, but usually he stayed at the BOQ. He ought to get an apartment. But it didn’t feel right, to set up housekeeping when he hoped to get back to Blair. The complexes he’d looked at in Ocean View and along Shore Drive had been too depressing to consider.

  He slotted his cap into the rack and flipped on the coffeemaker. Unlocked his desk and checked that the Beretta Nine Mullaly had issued him when he reported aboard was still there. He booted up the terminal and went to the LAN.

  Forty-six messages. Some were from the Surface Navy and the Alumni associations, others from friends, others relating to the operation they’d just finished off Korea, one from a former West Wing subordinate asking for a reference. He was working through them when the IM popped up with a request for him and Henrickson to report to Captain Mullaly.

  Norman Todd Mullaly, TAG’s CO, was heavyset and balding. When Dan closed the door the commanding officer flicked his fingers at the chair and swivelled away the screen. He did it every time anyone came in. Monty was already there; the little analyst nodded to Dan.

  “Dan. Siddown. How’d it go? GrayWolf trains rough, I hear.”

  “Yessir, I dropped a few pounds. I think they usually get younger people, trigger-pullers. Cops, Marines, the spec ops folks. They seemed a little uncertain what to do with us.”

  “Well, you can’t tell everybody everything.” Mullaly looked back at the computer. “By the way, word is, Dick O’Quinn? He’s going to recover. Maybe not to a duty status, but he’ll walk again. Figured you’d want to hear.”

  Dan nodded. In the operation in the Korea Strait in which Im’s submarine had been sunk, O’Quinn—a retired captain—had nearly died trying to rescue a Korean sailor from a flooding compartment. It had been touch and go whether he’d regain consciousness. “That’s good. I’ll go by and see him, if he’s still at Portsmouth.”

  Mullaly nodded. He cleared his throat, then carouseled the screen to face them.

  Dan blinked. For a moment he couldn’t guess what he was looking at. An oblately pointed cylinder rested base down on what looked like a black felt drop-cloth. The upper portion was cut away to show interior details. A pop-out fin stuck out from either side. A projectile of some sort? But at the bottom was a bell-shape that suggested a rocket engine.

  “Some kind of terminal-guided munition?”

  “Looks like it, doesn’t it. But it’s not. You fire this underwater.”

  “Underwater?” Dan leaned closer, trying to make out the lettering, but his eyes were giving him trouble. The call-outs wouldn’t resolve into words. Then he realized why. They were in Cyrillic. “This is Russian?”

  “You’re looking at the VA-111 ‘Shkval’ supercavitating projectile. It’s not really a torpedo. Not really a rocket, either. But you could call it a rocket torpedo, and get the idea across.” Mullaly keyed another window and brought up a document of which the image was apparently a part. “We don’t have anything like it, which is maybe why the terminology difficulty. Thing’s completely new to us.”

  “Well, Norm,” Henrickson put in, folding his arms. Dan started before he remembered that a civilian analyst was perfectly correct calling their commanding officer by his first name. “Not completely new. I remember some work on cavitation envelopment back in the eighties. From NRL, I think.”

  “Monty, what we’re hearing is pretty appalling,” Mullaly said complacently, as if however appalling it was, it couldn’t be that bad. “It uses a shaped noseplate to create cavitation—a bubble of water vapor—that’s then fed with more gas to surround the body. Then the rocket motor kicks in, and it really accelerates. The Russians claim a top speed of two hundred knots.”

  No one spoke, as all three contemplated the tactical advantages of a weapon that ran four times as fast as the U.S. Navy’s fastest torpedo, and
five times faster than its speediest submarine. Dan rubbed his face. He’d had torpedoes fired at him, and the ordinary versions had been terrifying enough. “Wait a minute. You said they’re claiming this speed? You mean, like . . . advertising it?”

  “Advertising it, exactly. For government-to-government sale.” Mullaly tapped more keys and hit Enter. “I’m sending you the package on the secure LAN. A flyer from the ‘Komponent’ Scientific and Production Enterprise, Moscow. A Defense Intelligence Agency notice. Some open-source stuff from a Ukrainian scientific journal. And a classified evaluation from the Joint Chiefs of what a weapon like this means strategically.”

  “I thought the Russians were our buddies,” Henrickson said.

  “They’re buddies to anyone with cash. And they’re coming back as a problem set. They might see their national interest as to help out any of our regional challengers. North Korea, China, Iran, Syria—the usual suspects.”

  Henrickson said, “This is starting to sound familiar. The 53-65K. The wake-homer. They sold those to the Chinese.”

  Mullaly said, “That’s right. And we sent Team Charlie after them. That was back when Christine was the CO, right?”

  “We got three of them,” Henrickson told Dan. “Gave one to DARPA, one to DIS, and kept the one with the fewest bullet holes. Did fifteen instrument runs down at Tongue of the Ocean.”

  Dan said, through dawning apprehension, “Are you saying, Captain—are you saying you want us to steal one of these? Is that the sense here?”

  “Well, steal’s a harsh word,” Mullaly said. “But we have a tasking to get specs and if possible a working model or best of all, one of the issue rounds and associated equipment—software and so forth. Because this is causing some stir up at J-3, and over at Sublant. The Russians have actually been carrying these around for some time. At least, an early model.”

  He explained that the sub community suspected Soviet strategic ballistic missile submarines, like the Typhoons, had carried Shkvals as engagement breakers. As soon as they heard an incoming torpedo, they could fire into the noise spoke. If they could force the launching platform to turn away, that would break the guidance wire, after which both subs would be on equal ground, since the American would have lost the advantage of surprise.

  “Uh, wait a minute, sir. This thing’s surrounded by supercavitation, and going two hundred plus? That’s got to be way past the self-noise threshold for passive transducers.”

  “It is.”

  “So how’s it guided?”

  “You’re right, it can’t sonar-guide like a conventional homer. And it goes too fast and the turbulence trail’s too violent to wire-guide or wake-home, either. The consensus is that up to now it’s been a straight-run weapon. Like the old steam torpedoes, only a lot faster.”

  Henrickson said, “They just pick up a target bearing, and shoot down it? That’s not going to give them much probability of hit.”

  “With a nuke, you don’t need a hit.”

  “A nuke?” Dan tried to keep his face from showing anything, though just the word brought back images of charred flesh, smashed metal, the ripping snarl of radiation meters. USS Horn was now a deserted, radioactive shell behind barbed wire at Norfolk Naval Shipyard. “What’s the range, on this thing?”

  “A couple thousand yards.”

  “With a nuclear warhead? That’d destroy both subs.”

  “Maybe they thought their double hulls would take it. Or didn’t care, as long as they took down a Los Angeles class, too. But you’re right—being unguided made it less dangerous. But now there’s a twist. A kicker.” He glanced at the screen, which was turned away from them again. “I’ll summarize. Since this is beyond TS/SCI. There’s a source—a spy—in the Russian Admiralty. According to this source, one of their designers has figured out a way around the homing problem.”

  TS/SCI stood for Top-Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information. Which Dan had been cleared for in the past, on the White House staff. But either Mullaly didn’t know this, or his clearance had been revoked. He rubbed his chin, feeling as if he was being shadowed by something evil, like the Hound of the Baskervilles, or Hannibal Lector.

  “What way?” Henrickson muttered.

  “Our source doesn’t know. Either that, or he’s holding out for more money.”

  “Guided, that could be nasty,” Dan said.

  “It gets worse. This guided version—they call it the ‘Shkval-K,’ with the K for ‘Komponent,’ I guess—that’s the name of the design bureau—the Iranians are looking at buying it. And that has really got some knickers kinked.”

  Dan said, “Because of the carriers?”

  “Exactly,” Mullaly told him. “Something this fast, and terminally guided, the Iranians could close the Gulf, cut off our oil. If the Chinese get it they can take out our stalkers, use the Sea of Japan as a strategic haven—that would screw us up big time in Asia. We have to find out whether this thing works, and if so, how. That’s the Chief of Naval Operation’s tasking to us. Get our hands on a sample, so we can build countermeasures.

  “Read up on it and we’ll talk tomorrow about how you’re going to go about it.”

  Henrickson nodded. He got up and left. But Dan stayed. When the door was closed he cleared his throat. “Sir, we’ve got a slight problem.”

  “With Monty? Yeah, he can be kind of a know-it-all—”

  “No, no. Monty and I get along fine. It’s GrayWolf. I think the Army knows where I am.”

  “Well . . . it’s not exactly a secret,” Mullaly said cautiously. Dan frowned inside; he’d never really known how much his commanding officer knew about what had happened in the East Wing, and how convenient it might be for certain circles to be sure Dan Lenson would never give an interview or write a tell-all. “My understanding from Admiral Niles was, keep you outside the Beltway, and out of the country as much as possible. He even said to make sure you had a sidearm, which didn’t make me popular with the base commander—his security people don’t like firearms they don’t control inside the gate. There more to it than that?”

  Dan wondered if he, or maybe Niles, was being paranoid. Surely it was fantasy to think he might be in danger. This wasn’t Byzantium or Florence. No matter how senior, military men weren’t in service just for their own aggrandizement. He had to believe that, or he was in the wrong business and always had been. But he decided to push. “Has anyone asked? Any inquiries as to my whereabouts?”

  Mullaly shook his head and looked back at the screen. Vertical lines appeared between his eyes. “No. But if Niles wants you out of the country, this tasking will require some travel. Like I said, look over the package, think about it, and we’ll get together tomorrow. Let’s say, zero-nine.”

  He read through the material, then searched the classified Internet, using key words like “high-speed,” and “choke point,” and “strategic threat.” He found information on the State Scientific and Production Enterprise “Komponent” and on somebody named Yevgeny Dvorov, but very little detail. Which meant either this was all still below the radar, or else was classified tighter than Secret. He returned a call from Idaho, from the grandmother of a little girl whose mother had died helping to save Horn when Dan had been in command. The grandmother said the indemnity compensation checks had stopped. He made some calls to the VA. By the time he found the glitch and got a promise the checks would start again, it was time to knock off for the day.

  Before he left, though, he punched in a Washington area code. Clarice, his wife’s secretary, said she was on the phone, but if he’d hold she’d see if she could free up. He listened to Pentagon elevator music.

  “Dan. They let you out?”

  “Hi, hon. Yeah. Back in the Navy, and glad to be here.”

  He was tempted to tell her about Schrade. She could give him chapter and verse about his backers, his contracts, but he didn’t. The trouble with being married to an undersecretary of defense was that your wife was better plugged in than you were. Sometimes, even about thin
gs you thought you already knew. So much so that he found himself keeping things to himself. It wasn’t that great for intimacy. But they’d managed to build a relationship, then a marriage, around not being together for long periods of time.

  She sounded rushed, as usual. He checked his watch; she’d be there for two or three more hours. “You getting home anytime?” she asked.

  “Uh, not really sure at this point. Just had a sit down with Mullaly. They might have something overseas for me.”

  “Can you make it this weekend?”

  “I’ll see. He didn’t say when departure date would be. Or where we were going.”

  Her voice sharpened; he sensed the intense beam of her actual interest swinging his way for the first time in the conversation. “Something important?”

  “Might be. I’ll tell you about it if I can get back. How’s everything going?”

  “The bathroom’s still a mess. The floor’s gone, but I can’t get a commitment from the tiling guys. You really think you might have to leave before this weekend?”

  Her voice was softer now, as if it took a few minutes to melt her official persona. He knew the feeling, and suddenly missed her, and the quiet house in Arlington, and the new shelves he’d promised he’d build but hadn’t gotten to yet. “Like I said, can’t tell yet. But I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “If I can get up even for a day, I’ll be there.”

  “I’m looking at travel, too, but maybe we could get away. Go up to the Blue Ridge.”

  He jotted a note to himself to get the brakes checked on the Escort. Though if they went to the mountains they’d probably take her Lexus. She thought his car was too small to be safe. “That’d be nice. Oh, and Homecoming’s coming up. Interested in that?”