by David Poyer
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.”
“You can tell that?”
“Be surprised what you can hear . . . four blades, big single screw, going around thirty times a minute.”
“Tanker? In ballast?”
“What I figure.”
Dan hung listening to Vaught’s wheezing, the auto depth control groaning as it adjusted the planes. Worrying now about his battery level. Till now, he’d figured they wouldn’t be out here long. The Navy would find some way to help. But if things were hitting the fan up Iraq way, he’d need to hoard every amp. As well as the CO2 absorber and the oxygen generators. Either that, or find some safe place to poke the snorkel up, figure out how to start the diesels and blowers, get some charge in the can and flush out the bad air. Which he wasn’t sure he had enough hands to do, not and keep all the other balls they were juggling off the floor.
A lot more to think about on a sub than he’d had to keep track of on a destroyer. “Bearing drift on that screw?”
“Steady for the last minute.”
He glanced at the chart, setting up the problem. A simple pursuit curve? If it was a tanker, it’d be headed in for a load from the terminals at the upper end of the Gulf. Its course would be west southwest, conforming to the north lane of the Inshore Traffic Zone. It would hold that course for at least ten miles, passing north of the Salih oil fields and then the light and racon beacon at Tunb al Kubra. “Rit, that contact, since detection, louder or weaker?”
“Two decibel gain over the last minute.”
“We’re gaining on her?”
“Be my guess, Dan.”
First time Carpenter had called him by his given name since they’d caught him with the Filipina. He allowed himself a smile, turned away from the sonar shack. “Very well.” Increase speed again? He wasn’t sure of their cavitation threshold. “Watch that contact, keep feeding me bearings.”
“Slightly louder, three zero zero . . . three zero one.”
“Right five more degrees, Vaught.”
Over the next hour he closed, very cautiously, altering course fire degrees at a time and adjusting his speed in tiny increments, until the screw-throb boomed through the hull, huge and slow like the heartbeat of a sounding sperm whale. The sonar gave them two six zero to the contact. Vaught was fighting wake effects on the planes. Dan guessed they were from two to three hundred yards behind the big slow-ticking screw. As close as he wanted to be in case the ship ahead slowed or changed course.
He went into the sonar shack. Carpenter went so white when he manipulated the arm that Dan concluded, yeah, it was fractured. They got a makeshift sling on it, which was all he could do at the moment. He warned the sonarman to yell if he heard the screw-beat or the angle change.
In the control room, he slapped Vaught on the back. “Doing okay? Need a break?”
“I’m okay. Auto depth’s doing most of the work.” A moment, then, in a lower voice: “Sorry I got nervous back there.”
“What? Didn’t notice. Were you?”
“A little.” Vaught checked his instruments again, then cleared his throat. “Does sound like it’s working harder, though.”
“What does?”
“The auto control. Cycles more often than it did at first.”
Dan nodded. He glanced at the scope again, but decided again to play it safe. Now they’d shaken the frigates, the mission was back at the front of the list. He hadn’t been sent to get a submarine. K-79 had no intelligence value of itself, it was just another obsolete Soviet-era diesel-electric. It was the Shkval-K they’d risked their lives for. They had documentation, circuit diagrams, and Wenck’s downloaded software, but no question, the missile would be the trophy head. If they could make it to friendly territory they could eject it, noting the location for later recovery. Then scuttle and abandon. Get ashore somehow, maybe hail a passing dhow, and use Oberg’s satphone to call for pickup.
He leaned into Sonar, waited till Carpenter lifted an ear-piece. “I’m going forward, check on Monty and Donny. Anything changes, give me a yell.”
In the missile control compartment all the lights were on and all the consoles had their guts racked out again. Manuals and unfolded schematics littered the deck with test instruments holding them down. But no Henrickson, no Wenck. Dan looked behind the consoles but found no one there either.
He fumbled to a leatherette-covered chair and hung his head between his knees, rubbing his scalp. Then stripped off his wet-suit bottoms for the camo trousers beneath. For the moment, no one saw. No eyes looked to him for guidance, for orders, for inspiration, for strength.
A terrible fear was growing, and not just the old one, that he wasn’t up to this. He’d thought they’d escaped, but had they? Those frigates would not give up. The Iranians could not let them escape. Where were they now? And where was the U.S. Navy?
A dull clunk and voices from forward. He climbed the ladder again and followed them through officers’ country, past the CO’s and XO’s staterooms, the junior officer bunkrooms. He found them all the way forward in the torpedo room, bent over the shining shape withdrawn from tube number 3. A work light dangled, jigging in the motion that up here he could feel was from turbulence outside. From the huge screw revolving slowly not far ahead of where they stood. He frowned at a smell like salt meat gone bad: the dead Russians. He cleared his thro
at and said, too loud, “Got the goods on the guidance yet?”
Henrickson straightened, flushed, thin hair awry around his bald spot. Beside him Wenck showed up no better; his pupils looked drilled deep into his skull, as if he’d been playing video poker for two days straight. “Little problem with that.”
“What?”
“There isn’t any.”
Dan stared. “What’s that mean? There’s got to be guidance.”
“Well, there isn’t.” The analyst waved at the weapon. “First off, this was the only Shkval aboard. So this is a test bed, right? Initial installation, see how it goes, maybe then they’ll buy big, right?”
“Okay, so?”
“So Donnie’s up there hacking into the computer? Figuring we’ll download the programming and figure it all out later, when we get back to TAG.”
“I know, but what are you telling me?”
“Well—usually, for a torpedo, any torpedo, from a surface ship just like from a sub, battery plot takes in your data from your inertial nav, your sonar, ’scope fixes, and plots own-ship location and generates your target data—bearing, range, speed, right?”
“Yeah, and . . . ?”
“Then the FCS outputs your guidance and run data to the torp. Now. For the original flavor Shkval, you’d need the same data set as for a straight-runner torpedo. Fire signal, run depth—well, maybe not even that, these are set for one depth and that’s it. Basically all it needs is the runout bearing.”
“We went all through the computer looking for new software. But that’s the only output we’re seeing,” Wenck said.
Dan looked from one to the other. “Just runout bearing?”
“Right. No homing data. Not intermediate, not terminal. And no target data either, what you tune it to look for in a multitarget environment. Or in case you got friendlies out there to watch out for, keep your blue on blue numbers down.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t home. Once it gets out there.”
“Right, which is why we’re down here, okay?” Henrickson ran a hand along the silver flank, then pointed at the stubby fins. “Remember what Dr. Chone was telling us, back at NUWC? Swing-out low-freq transducers, that home on the carrier’s screws. See anything looks like a transducer?”
“We scraped it with a knife. There’s nothing there,” Wenck put in.
“He said on the cavitator. Or the tail fin.”
“No, he said on the cavitator or on some kind of canards, the tail was too much in the flow. But we checked everywhere. Everywhere.” Henrickson pulled the work light close and scraped his fingernails along smooth metal. “Take a gander. Tell me we’re missing something.”
Dan peered, but saw nothing but polished metal shell. He moved up front and bent to check the slanted transducer plate, then the surface behind it. Muttered, “Donnie, what about it? Do they have to be external?”
“I had that plate off behind the nose. There’s no wiring coming back. There’s no transducers, Commander. There’s no guidance in this thing.”
Dan’s heart sank. “It’s a standard Shkval? Then why a dedicated sub, a Russian training team?”
Wenck shrugged, grinning without a reason. Henrickson shook his head. Dan stared at the sphinx in the cradle, brain spinning. Could the spy in the Admiralty be wrong? But Yevgeny Dvorov had announced the new version at ARMINTEX. He was taking orders, the Iranians and Chinese were buying. Russian weapons weren’t the most sophisticated, but they worked. Developing countries didn’t have the most skillful operators or maintenance technicians, either, so it was a good match, a value for value that led to relationships that lasted. Would Dvorov and Yermakov jeopardize their reputation, their markets, for a one-time profit? He couldn’t see it.
He stared at the weapon. Wondering again why something about it just didn’t look right.
He flung his arms open and bent over. As if embracing the deadly length. One hand on the razor-edge of the cavitator. The other thrown wide, scrabbling at the curved flank. Then replaced his right fingertips with his left and flung himself out again. The old Norse measurement. One fathom. Two. His fingertips curled at the end of the exhaust tube. Three. He closed his eyes and sighed.
“What’re you doing there, Commander?”
“Measuring it. Shit! Remember, we just about made Im even shorter than he is? When we ran this into the tube? That’s why. The standard Shkval’s fifteen feet long. This thing’s eighteen.”
“Crap,” Wenck said. Henrickson looked startled.
“Find out why.” Dan rapped his knuckles on it. “The transducers are in there somewhere. Or else it’s not acoustic. But it’s got something. Take it down to parade rest if you have to. But find out.”
A note warbled and they all flinched. It came from one of the brown boxes. “Commander? You there? Better come back to Control. Our guy’s looking like he’s heading south.”
The tanker they’d trailed for the last hour and a half did indeed seem to be altering course, though so far all Carpenter had picked up was a change in the frequency of the blade transients. From a dead astern angle they were now getting a higher doppler off the upper tips, a lower doppler off the lower ones. Fingering his injured arm, the sonarman explained: the plane of the spinning prop was altered in relation to the its listeners, hence, the ship that carried it was in a slow turn, in this case, to port. He said he was getting something else now and then, too, it came and it went.
“What’s it sound like?” Dan asked him.
“I’m not sure . . . tunes in, then fades. Can’t get a bearing.”
“Frigate?”
“No, not a ship. Maybe some weird biologic. Or submerged pipeline equipment, natural gas compressor, something like that.”
“Uh-huh. So where’s this tanker headed?” Dan untaped the chart and carried it in by the sonar stack where they could both pore over it.
“Shit . . . this thing fucking hurts. The Fateh field?” Carpenter suggested.
“Or this, to the south of it. Umm ad Delkh. If it wasn’t so shallow, we could follow her in to Abu Dhabi. There’s a United Emirates naval base there. Surface once we’re in territorial waters and radio for an escort.”
Carpenter eyed him. “Why don’t we do that? Run in awash, if we have to.”
Dan bared his teeth, trying to ratiocinate through the fog of fatigue. It seemed like ages since he’d slept. Fortunately he knew these shallow waters, these islands, the complexities of oil and sovereignty here. Had navigated them before, aboard USS Turner van Zandt. For a moment he felt chilled, recalling what had happened to her, south of Abu Musa. Then dismissed it; that had been years ago.
“Uh, two reasons. One: We don’t know, if the Iranians see us on the surface, they might come after us into UAE waters. Would the Emirates defend us? I don’t see why they would. Two: Donnie and Monty still haven’t figured out what we’ve got guidancewise. We turn the boat over to a third party, they’ll seal the hatches and call the Iranians to come get it. There’s a lot of disputes here over islands and oil fields, who owns what. The UAE navy’s just patrol craft and a couple of corvettes. They’re wary of pissing off the Ira nians and probably should be. We’ve gone through hell to get our hands on that thing. I’m not giving it back.”
“Keep heading north? And hope we can link up with the task force?”
“That’s all I’m coming up with, Rit. Remember, we never planned it this way. You got a better idea, let’s hear it.”
“I don’t have a problem with heading north, but have we got enough charge in the can to get there?” Carpenter looked doubtful. “Because I don’t think we can snorkel. Surface, maybe, and start the engines—but snorkeling’s tricky. There’s a lot can go wrong, you gotta be on top of the situation. You’re not, you go down. Subs aren’t like airplanes. You go up in one of those, you know you’re coming down again.”
Dan said they’d have to play that hand when it was on the table. He leaned into the control room, to find Vaught standing at his station, the seat-s
towage open where he’d been sitting, pissing into a green fiberglass mug. “Hey . . . we’ve got to come right, right now. About twenty degrees. Watch for the screw wash, it’ll blow you to starboard and we don’t have a hell of a lot of water over there. And pass the word back to Oberg—no, never mind, I’ll do it.”
“Uh, right . . . what shall I do with . . .”
“I got it, give it here.”
The urine smelled rank as he balanced it aft toward the galley sink. He reminded himself to get the men to drink more water. They needed food, too. Had to be some here someplace. From nowhere came the memory of the tumbled bodies forward, a rush of shame.
Kaulukukui was in the galley making himself up a sandwich out of meat from a can. The smell made the saliva spring into Dan’s mouth. “Want one?” the big SEAL said, sawing at bread.
“Uh, we all should get something. While we can.”
“I’ll cut a plateful and take it forward. Some kind of juice in the reefer there, you want any.”
“Thanks, Sumo. Monty and Donny are in forward torpedo, the others are in Control.”
He sank his teeth into half a sandwich and chewed as he went aft carrying another one and a mug of bug juice for Oberg. Even eating it, he wasn’t sure what it was, but their last meal had been late the night before and the sandwich went down fast.
The other SEAL wasn’t at the motor control station. Dan stood under the vent valves, feeling headachy and out of it again. More lights had been broken back here. The shadows were darker. The air smelled of ozone, and the steady, powerful drone of rotating electrical machinery tickled the soles of his dive booties. “Teddy?” he called in a low voice.
“Here.” A flashlight beam emerged, followed by Oberg, crawling up from the compartment below. His face was dirty under greasy hair, and he’d discarded all his clothes except skivvy shorts and booties. “Hey. Thanks.” He jammed the bread and meat into his face and followed it with half the mug of drink.