The Weapon

by David Poyer

  Once past Jazireh-ye Larak—the chart showed a nav light there, but again, he wasn’t about to pop the scope—they’d be in fifty meters of water. But almost at once, since the strait was so narrow, he’d have to decide which way to go. His choices were east, into the Gulf of Oman, and thence the Arabian Sea; or west, into the Gulf.

  East lay deep water and USS San Francisco. CTF 152 would have passed the word to Andy that Team Charlie was in trouble. But if he knew his classmate, Mangum would hold at the rendezvous point until he knew Dan was either captured or dead. The water got deep fast as you went first east, then south. The jagged mountains fell away on either hand and the Indian Ocean swelled like an expectant mother’s belly. Fifty miles on, the water would be a hundred meters deep; in ninety miles, there’d be two hundred meters under them; a hundred miles out, over a thousand, well beyond the most optimistic estimate of K-79’s crush depth.

  He stroked the chart, blinking at the blue-tinted contours with yearning, but also with dread. A naval officer equated water depth with safety. But was it, in this case? Sonar had turned deep water into a stage, where lights picked out a sub like a Broadway star. The frigates, or one of the old patrol aircraft the Iranians still operated, would pick them up in minutes. And even an old aircraft could drop a homing torpedo.

  He bent closer, examining the other half of the chart. Where the shallow, twisting strait writhed like an inflamed appendix among shoals and dozens of shaded outlines labeled WARNING that marked oil fields and oil loading terminals. Sidebars warned, “Numerous structures usually carrying lights, other unlit objects and submerged obstructions sometimes marked by buoys, exist in the oil and gas field areas. As these features are not all charted, special caution should be exercised. . . .” “Lights are unreliable . . . pipelines are not buried . . . flammable gas under high pressure. . . .” More such warnings edged the chart, printed in red. He tried to mark the boundaries of the major oil fields in his mind; they’d have to steer clear of their subsurface clutter of pipelines, discarded production equipment, even cut-down and abandoned platforms.

  A faint whistling began far off. It amplified quickly into a second pass by, or through, the washing machine they’d heard before. Dan closed his eyes and waited it out, heartbeat by heartbeat, as it dwelt above them, seemingly only feet away, and at this depth really there couldn’t have been more than ten yards between the frigate’s keel and the top of their (fortunately) retracted radar and periscope masts. He sagged against a cabinet.

  But once again it dwindled. He blotted perspiration out of his stinging eyes and stuck his head out of the nav nook, looked around a hydraulic assembly. He caught Vaught and Im staring at the overhead, lips parted, the very images of helplessness and fear.

  They’d drilled what he’d thought was every possible contingency. But this wasn’t anything they’d expected. They were underway in an unfamiliar submarine, trying to evade the Iranian Navy. Not a huge navy, but a professional one, and in its home waters, outraged and hot for blood. Always before he’d been on the other side of the ever-fluid boundary between water and air. This time he was the submarine rabbit, being pursued by the surface hounds.

  Was this how those he’d pursued had felt? This crushing horror, this dread of infinite enclosure, of being squeezed, and squeezed, until nothing remained but the terrified kernel of self? A terrifying conviction was fighting its way into the light, making his heart race and flutter, his breath pant in and out. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t, couldn’t do it.

  Sweat trickled down his chest and he suddenly, jerkily tore the wet-suit top off and threw it into a corner. He bent to the chart, searching for some other way out. But there wasn’t any.

  West, or east? The open ocean, where they’d be pinned and destroyed by the avenging angels whose wings already beat above them, long before they made it out to the rendezvous point and help? Or the shallow, sand-blown Gulf, with its mirages, its layers, its laggard, salt-heavy tides, its spiky forests of oil rigs, the wavering flare-offs that made the nights flicker, the net-draped dhows that slowly lateened, like rebodyings of Sinbad, from land-horizon to land-horizon?

  He stared down as drops of salty moisture blistered the thick paper. Walked the dividers across it, checking his watch, checking the distance, till there was no way he could be mistaken. Then he slammed his hand down and turned for the control room.

  They looked up as if he was their deliverer. He had to fit the mask over his fear once more. Sham that he knew what he was doing, when deep down he didn’t, and never had, and probably never would.

  “Right hard rudder. Come to two two zero.”

  “Two two zero, sir.”

  “Heading west,” Carpenter whispered, eyes slipping away as if Tefloned. “Away from the rendezvous? Away from San Fran?”

  “That’s right,” Dan whispered back, so those who eavesdropped might not hear. “We’re going into the Gulf.”

  23

  The first ping flicked the hull, purring like a stroked cat, then trickled away. It wasn’t one Dan recognized, but their pursuers were Alvands. He knew the type from when he’d been in the Gulf aboard Turner Van Zandt. They were British-built patrol frigates, Vosper Mark Vs, built by Thornycroft just before the Shah’s fall. The Mark V was small but heavily armed, with guns, torpedoes, a five-cell surface-to-surface missile, and Limbo antisubmarine mortars.

  “Surface ship sonar. Bearing two niner zero relative.”

  Carpenter’s voice, from the sonar cubicle to port. Dan put his head in. “Very well.”

  The sonar space was bigger than San Francisco’s, and not nearly so packed with equipment. The equipment looked dated, with gauges instead of touch-screens and switches instead of keyboarded inputs.

  Carpenter whispered, “Can’t figure out how to bring up the fucking displays.”

  “Can’t you use the earphones?”

  “The computer hears sharper than we can. But fuck, they’re practically on top of us.”

  He watched a few seconds longer, hoping the guy knew what he was doing, but not saying it. He didn’t need to add to the pressure.

  Rit Carpenter was going to hold their lives in the palm of his hand.

  Three compartments aft, Teddy was arguing with Kaulukukui over how to line up the diesels to start. Of course, they couldn’t now, not underwater, but at some point they were going to run out of juice. The needles on what he figured were the main battery bank ammeters were already lower than when they’d cast off. He’d figured out, though, what Carpenter had told him Im had done before they started the DC motors. He’d been declutching the main engines, so the electric motors didn’t have to drive them while they were driving the shaft too. And probably burning everything out.

  He coughed. “Hey. Sumo.”

  “Uh.”

  “My imagination, or is it getting hot in here? And fucking stuffy?”

  He considered the bitch box. He could call to Control. And get barked at by that fat son of a bitch. Carpenter had changed his tune since they got aboard a sub. Like now they were on his turf. But they were all breathing the same air. And the first one to whine about it certainly wasn’t going to be a SEAL.

  Dan checked the round meter on the bulkhead above Vaught. Im was keeping them steady at thirty meters. After that first shock, he didn’t want to touch bottom again. He’d been lucky not to bend a prop, or worse yet, a shaft. He was going to have to be very careful in the turns, too, in such shallow water.

  But to what end? The task force was steaming farther away with each passing hour. How was he going to get the team out of this? And if he couldn’t, shouldn’t he surface and surrender?

  He’d always believed that if there was no chance left, you didn’t sacrifice your men. (Unless, of course, it would save others.) But all naval history was proof that in the midst of the fight was the worst possible time to judge the chances of success. Some commanders had given up without firing a shot. Others had fought to the death in desperate actions. And both decisions
had subsequently been judged wise, in certain circumstances, and unwise, in others.

  His short-term course seemed clear. Especially as the frigates had not yet made a hostile move. As a former skipper, he knew the procedure. Report back—they’d have real-time communications with their headquarters ashore—outline the situation, that they held contact on the stolen boat, and ask for instructions.

  On the other hand, nobody was sure how the Iranian command structure operated. There might be two or even three different chains of command, depending on whether you were talking regular navy, religious, Pasdaran, or diplomatic.

  Which might operate to his advantage, if the tactical commander up above—most likely, the senior captain of the two ships who were after them—got back the same limp waffle Dan himself often had when requesting instructions in a tight situation.

  While he’d been thinking this the pinging had traveled overhead. A staccato series of high notes, shorter and not held as long as the typical U.S. sonar transmission, and sent—he’d counted—every six seconds. Now it faded to starboard. He studied the chart again, blinking. His eye smarted and itched. He had to keep reminding himself to keep his fingers out of it, not to rub in whatever fragments the near miss had left.

  He counted off the minutes since their last course change, double-checked the position relative to the shoals, marked the chart, and thrust his head out. “Right, steer two-seven-zero. Speed one-third.” He checked the chart yet again, feeling he was missing something. Would there be a layer here? A thermocline to hide under? He doubted it. There’d be a lot of mixing, this close to the mouth of the Strait. Still, if there was one they ought to try to get under it. “Increase depth to four zero meters.”

  Vaught rogered. Im stared. Dan found the best way to get it across was just to tap the depth he wanted on the gauge. The Korean nodded and pointed to the helmsman. Dan guessed that meant he had the boat balanced and he could change depths with just the planes. “Vaught? Forty meters. Down easy, we don’t want her nose in the bottom again.”

  “Four zero meters.” The nasal deadness had ebbed in the SDV driver’s voice. His right hand shoved the bow plane lever forward, followed it with the after plane control.

  The explosion was so close aboard and so unexpected Dan couldn’t stifle a yelp. He whipped around, trying to figure out where it had come from. That loud, it could have been within the hull, but there was no spraying water, no flying metal. “Carpenter! What the fuck was that? A depth charge?”

  The submariner leaned out, one headphone off his skull. “A grenade, Commander.”

  “Really? That was a grenade?”

  “Warning shot. And if you hadn’t turned, we’d have gotten it right on top of us.”

  He rubbed his mouth, considering. Vaught said, “A warning? To surface, you mean?”

  They ignored him. Dan’s palm came away wringing wet. The air was getting hotter and hotter. He looked around for fans, ventilation, then remembered: Machinery generated transients. Transients got submariners detected. Detections got them killed. No fans, he could live with that.

  Grenades . . . better than the Limbo charges, an ahead-thrown weapon rather like the old U.S. Hedgehogs. He wasn’t intimately familiar with Limbo, it was a Commonwealth system, but he knew they were mortar-launched, fired in salvos of three to strike the sea, sink, and detonate at close range, blasting in the thickest pressure hull. Two or three hundred pounds of explosive, if he was remembering what he’d studied years before. Range, maybe half a mile at the outside. And, of course, there’d be antisubmarine torpedoes. The original loadout would have been long expended. These guys would be carrying the Chinese copy of the U.S. Mark 46 called the Yu-2.

  But the grenade meant the Iranian Navy hadn’t yet determined to sink them. No doubt they wanted their sub and weapon back. Though it might be a final warning before they did try to sink them.

  Either way, he was boxed in. And the explosive would’ve come down right on top of them if he hadn’t turned. Which meant the frigates had a rock-solid track. With them passing overhead, he hadn’t been certain; it could have been happenstance as easily as targeting. But now he knew they knew exactly where K-79 was, and had probably already picked up on his turn and were working out their next gambit.

  “Four zero meters.”

  Vaught was reporting steady on the ordered depth. “Very well,” Dan mumbled, eyeing the chart again, scratching furiously through his wet stubble. This had to be close to as deep as they could go here, the keel only two or three meters off what the chart called as a mud and sand bottom.

  “By the way, we’ve got automatic depth control.” The SDV pilot pointed to a bulb on the plane boxes. It was illuminated. “Im showed me.”

  Dan didn’t answer, locked into a concatenation of dilemmas that looked more and more like a blind alley. No matter what he did, the frigates would nail them down and eventually kill them. Half a mile dead ahead a patch shoaled to 22 meters. Right, or left? To starboard would take them back toward to the Iranian coast. To port, out into the deeper water of the main shipping channel.

  With that, a hint leapt suddenly into an image. “Left, steer one seven zero.”

  Vaught repeated it tonelessly. A groaning from the hydraulics. Dan hoped they didn’t lose pressure. He had no idea what pumps they had on line or even where they were. Without hydraulics they’d have no control. They had no business being out here in a craft they didn’t know the first thing about. But there’d been no choice. Other than surrender.

  He still had that option. But he wouldn’t much longer.

  Henrickson came in from aft, face white, staggering. “You okay?” Dan asked him.

  “Yeah. Gosh, it’s getting stuffy down below.”

  “Everything marked? Russian to English?”

  “Everything I could make sense of.”

  “Teddy? Sumo?”

  “Trying to figure out the diesels.”

  Dan nodded. Figuring the diesels was good, but he had a feeling their fate would be decided long before they’d need to snorkel. A boat ran faster on diesels, but it was much noisier. Still, if their pursuers were pinging active, they were probably not listening well passive. He doubted active high-frequency sonar in shallow warm water would get a workable return much over two thousand yards. But sonar wasn’t the only way they could be detected. He might snatch a quick peep with the ’scope without being picked up, but raising the snorkel head would flare a huge pip on even the worst-tuned radar.

  “Stay down,” he muttered, kneading his neck till it hurt.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing, Monty. How’s Donnie doing?”

  The little analyst nodded. “I’ll go see.”

  One deck down and forward, in a dim long compartment that ran the width of the hull, lined with gray cabinets and the desklike extruded cliffs of fire control consoles, Donnie Wenck sprawled with spiky hair awry, trying to decode a tech manual in a language he didn’t speak. Fortunately there were schematics.

  “How’s it look?” Henrickson asked. “Lenson wants to know.”

  “Uh, this is where they were running the fire control program from. Doesn’t this say ‘Shkval’?”

  Monty glanced at the cover that Donnie turned to the light. “Right. But how are you going to get the system back up, with all the cabinets open?”

  “First I gotta know what they are. Then what they do. Then I start ’em up, the basic fire control system first, then the add-on routines one at a time. Okay with you?”

  “Fine with me.” Henrickson fanned himself. “Can you breathe this crap?”

  “What crap?” Wenck looked from the header on a page of schematics to the label on a cabinet, aligned the drawer, pushed it closed. He thumbed a button. A light flickered on. Then a whole row, then a double row, blinking in an arcane pattern. Wenck stared at the lights. He muttered, “She’s loading—no—fuck, something else’s wrong. What’s going on here?”

  “You read binary?” Henrickson said, ast
onished. “Were you just reading that? While it was loading?”

  “Uh-huh,” Wenck muttered. He pressed a button and a relay-driven reader head went clunk. He pressed another and tape reels rotated. He stared at the lights as they resumed twinkling, in mad, logical, strangely unrandom patterns. “Can’t everybody?”

  Rit turned the bearing dial slowly, watching the red-orange lines jump and waver, almost but not quite matching the buzzing crackle in his headphones. The console had automated analysis but he couldn’t read what it said, so he was going by eye and ear. Like the old days . . . a hell of a lot of ambient noise all around the dial. Like a freeway at rush hour overlaid with the crackle of a million short-order fry grills at noon. Very dimly, only now and then, he made out screw noises. But were they from the cans?

  Eyes sealed, he panned aft, tracking a whisker-tickle of a rhythm. It faded and then strengthened. One five zero relative. One six zero. One seven . . . crossing behind them, against the slightly fainter background clamor from aft. Plenty of biologics, but less of the freeway thunder he was beginning to suspect might be ship traffic through the Strait.

  He squeezed his already closed eyes tighter, as if by walling out light he could hear better. There. Just for a moment. A pair of four-bladed screws. Also, even less distinguishable, a higher-pitched whine, but it faded in and out and he couldn’t get enough of it to do a blade count.

  He punched a couple of buttons and was pleasantly surprised when the thing locked on and gave him a frequency split and a bar graph, the bars shaky and seesawing but no question what was going on. He hit the freq ID and set it in as , which Monty had told him meant “target,” and designated it 1.