The Gulf

by David Poyer

  “Yessir.”

  “Good.” Shaker hung up.

  Dan stood irresolute. For the moment Shaker had been on the line, he’d felt better. But even if you were captain only for a day, your nerves seemed to extend themselves. Your senses extended themselves, became part of the metal fabric around you. He’d picked some of that up when he’d understudied for Bell. And this sense was telling him, more distinctly by the minute, that something was wrong.

  He considered calling general quarters away. But it wasn’t a good idea crying wolf unless you had at least a pawprint. He thought, I’ll see how the captain feels.

  In the passageways, scarlet light glimmered in pools on the decks.

  The only one awake in the CPO mess was the supply chief, Dorgan. He set aside a snatch magazine as Dan came in. Skipper wasn’t there, he said. No, he hadn’t seen him, and he’d been there since taps.

  Dan rubbed his mouth, momentarily at a loss. Where the hell was he? And why had he told him he was where he wasn’t?

  He decided he’d better find him fast. He remembered how Shaker had stood by the rail after the burial at sea. He remembered the captain of the Dickerson, some years before, who’d disappeared one night under way. He, too, had been going through a divorce.

  Then Dan remembered the bogen. That meant he wasn’t topside.

  He decided to start at the bow and search aft till he found him.

  Forward, through a passageway and a berthing compartment. Muffled snores came from the dark. Past that, the passageways ran on again, a familiar labyrinth, yet unfamiliar now, haunted, ruby-lit, empty. Steel echoed under his steps.

  He was standing at the dead end of the forepeak, the deserted warren of paint lockers, chain lockers, stowage, when he realized suddenly not that he’d seen something unexpected but that he hadn’t seen what he ought.

  There’d been no security guard at the missile magazine. No sailor named Thompson or Menendez sitting half-asleep by the scuttle leading down.

  He whirled and ran back. The logbook was there, lying on the folding chair. But there was no sign of the guard. The scuttle was dogged but unlocked. He hauled it open, and looked down two decks into the ready service room.

  He squinted in the sudden glare. Below him, the white lights were on.

  “Hey!”

  “Hey, what,” came Shaker’s voice, sounding surprised, and then, in the same breath, guarded.

  “It’s Dan. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Is something wrong?”

  “No. Just wondered where you were.” He hauled the heavy scuttle up the rest of the way and latched it. He had his boots on the ladder when Shaker’s voice floated hollowly up from below.

  “Stay up there, XO.”

  “Captain—” He let himself another step down, cursing under his breath at a stab in his shoulder.

  Shaker’s voice reverberated oddly in the compartment below, distorted by the maze of piping and duct work that cooled and dehumidified the missiles. “Dan. I said, don’t come down.”

  He was debating whether to obey when he heard the clang of a pistol slide going forward. It froze him where he was, hanging by his right arm, crouched against the ladder. His heart began to hammer with sudden apprehension.

  “Captain, what the hell is going on? Where’s the guard? What are you doing down there?”

  “Well…” The captain’s voice was muffled, as if he was inside a closet. Though he couldn’t see him, Dan figured he had his head up inside the rotary magazine. The ready service room had a scuttle leading up into it. He couldn’t think why. All you could reach from there were the booster sections. It was a twenty-foot wriggle straight up after that, between the smooth white tubes of the Standards and Harpoons, to get to the blast door and the main deck. Dan had managed it once, barely, but he doubted Shaker could.

  He wondered for a horrible moment whether the captain was contemplating doing something irregular, destroying them, or trying to launch one. But that didn’t make any sense. He could launch missiles whenever he liked, just by giving an order. The only weapon they carried that had any restriction, any special procedure on it, was—

  He suddenly felt cold.

  “Ben,” he said again, and this time his voice came out strange, high and tense.

  “Shove off, Dan,” came Shaker’s voice again. He sounded angry, but at the same time preoccupied.

  Dan moved down a step—very quietly—then another.

  “Lenson!”

  He looked down, to see Shaker, foreshortened, glaring up into the vertical tunnel of the magazine trunk. The painted steel deck he stood on was the inner hull. He was hatless, and there was a balding spot on the crown of his head. Strange, he hadn’t noticed it before. The guard’s .45 was in his right hand.

  “Where’s Thompson?” Dan asked him.

  “He wasn’t feeling too good. I took over for him. Let him go to the head. Thought I’d look around down here while I was at it. This space is scuzzy, Dan. Lot of rust down here. I’m surprised at you letting it get by you.”

  He said nothing. After a moment, the captain went on. “Okay? Satisfied? Go get some sleep. You need it, you’re getting antsy.”

  “Not till you tell me what’s going on.”

  “Just did. If you can’t sleep, go back up to the bridge. We could be attacked anytime. One of us ought to be up there.”

  “You ought to be there, sir. Instead of here.” He paused. His arm was getting fatigued; it was a cramped position, clinging to the ladder. “What are you doing to the missiles, Captain?”

  Shaker looked over his shoulder, as if he’d left a piece of work half-finished. “Won’t butt out, huh? Then I imagine you’ve figured it out.”

  “I think so. But, Ben, you can’t do it. You can’t touch one of those Mark IAs without permission.”

  “I might have permission. Ever think of that?”

  “I didn’t see a message.”

  “You think Stan Hart would put something like that in writing? Now get out of here and let me finish up.”

  He disappeared from the square of light.

  Dan almost believed it. Then he didn’t. Not that it mattered whether COMIDEASTFOR had approved it or not. Special weapons required National Command Authority release. Or if there was no President anymore—if Washington was a smoking hole—then it could be ordered by one of the CINCs. In their case, CINCCENT, a four-star, General Cannon.

  For anything aboveboard, there would have been a message. Because there was no way you could launch a nuke without one.

  “Captain,” he said again, in a low voice.

  “Jesus Christ! What?”

  “You said, you ‘might’ have permission. That’s true. But do you have permission?”

  “Why don’t you let me worry about that?” Up to now, Shaker had sounded reasonable. Now he reappeared at the foot of the ladder, staring up. His face was shiny with sweat. “God damn it, I told you for the last time. You’ve got your own career to worry about. Get your tit out of this wringer while you still can!”

  “I don’t think I can do that.”

  “You’ll do it, God damn it! You said you’d support me. Well, support me!”

  “I’m not supporting you in this, Ben.”

  Quick as that, the captain half-lifted the automatic. He didn’t actually aim it. But he’d started to. And Dan, just as quickly, had tripped the latch, dropping the scuttle—two inches of hardened steel—between him and the man below.

  Now Shaker was trapped. Sealed below. But he couldn’t keep him there forever.

  Dan crouched there, trying to think. He was scared now. Christ, he thought. Christ!

  The Mark IA, a 1960s-era weapon, had what was called a “Permissive Action Link” in the fire control system. Dan saw the PAL keys themselves only during the monthly inventory, when three people—CO, XO, and Weapons—had to sight and sign for them. The captain kept them in his stateroom safe. Inside the sealed pouches were perforated disks, perhaps two inches in diame
ter, made of a plastic that would shatter if it was drilled or punched.

  Even with the PAL, though, Shaker still couldn’t fire. The circuit board in Combat into which the disk had to be plugged also had a keypad lock. The combination was not aboard Van Zandt. It had to be received from the CINC and decoded.

  Only after both elements were present—the PAL disk and the correct combination—would the Mark 92 Fire Control System initialize a Mark IA for launch.

  Now, if Shaker had orders to fire, say as the result of a plot between him and someone higher in the chain of command, then he’d have the combination. And he already had the disk.

  But if that was so, then he’d have no reason to be in the magazine with the missiles.

  Was there any other way he could fire a nuclear weapon?

  Even as he thought it, Dan realized the answer might be yes. It stemmed from the way the older warhead had been adapted to ride a new missile out of an even newer class of frigate. And that was, by applying an electrical impulse directly to the missile booster itself.

  The problem there would be the booster suppression system. This was a pressurized water tank piped to a nozzle located directly beneath each missile. If one of the boosters fired by mistake, either from circuitry error or a conflagration in the magazine, a fusible plug in the nozzle melted at four hundred degrees. The water spray blew the engine apart and cooled the nearby missiles until the fire burned out.

  However, if Shaker, down below, disabled the suppression system … cut off the water, or pinned out the trigger valve … then he might be able to fire the booster, and then the sustainer, without going through the internal logic in the Mark 92 computer—of which the PAL was a part.

  So far what resulted was a complicated way of committing suicide. One booster burning in the magazine would cook off the others. They’d lose the whole forward half of the ship.

  How could the missile be launched without the launcher? It sounded impossible. But as soon as Dan visualized it, he could see a way. If Shaker—or somebody in CIC, at the weapons-control console—rotated the magazine to the proper position, the missile, boosting “illegally” yet unsuppressed, would shear its umbilical and fly vertically up out of the missile-loading hatch. It would bypass the launcher rail, and it was the launcher, he realized suddenly, that fed it targeting data.

  Without data, the missile—a modern Standard airframe, but an old-fashioned Terrier warhead, with semiactive backup homing in case its primary guidance circuitry failed—would beam-ride Van Zandt’s radar wherever it pointed. And detonate on command, the moment it was switched off.

  It would be complicated. It would require careful timing, to acquire the missile before it left the cone of the guidance radar and self-destructed. He didn’t think Shaker knew the system well enough to do it. But theoretically, at least, there was a way he could fire a nuke on his own.

  Dan looked around quickly. The only thing of use he saw was the sound-powered phone by the guard’s chair. He turned the dial to the weapons liaison circuit and spun the crank.

  After three cranks, Shaker came up on the line. “Yeah, that you, Terry?”

  Terry. Dan suddenly couldn’t breathe.

  The man whose father had died in a war that wasn’t fought to the limit.

  The man with a master’s degree in electrical engineering.

  The black man whose friend the Iranians had just shot down and killed.

  Van Zandt’s weapons officer said in his ear then, “Combat, Lieutenant Pensker.”

  “Terry, that you? Did you call me?”

  “No. The growler just went off up here. Wasn’t me, Captain.”

  “It wasn’t me, either. Listen. The XO ran across me in the magazine. He’s got me bottled down here. Can we fire yet?”

  “Pretty soon now, sir. I’m through rewriting the program. Just have to enter initial fly-out bearing.”

  “Okay. Set it up.”

  “Captain,” said Dan. “Listen. Don’t cut me off. I’m going to tell you something very important.”

  A pause on the line. Then: “I told you to get lost, XO. You can’t stop this. So just stand clear. I’ll say you were asleep, you didn’t know what was going on.”

  “Who’s that?” said the black officer.

  Dan ignored him, speaking directly to Shaker. “Where are you targeting this missile, Captain? They’ll hang you for this.”

  “It’ll be worth it. You know where we’re sending this little love note, Dan? To Bushehr. The biggest base in Iran. They’ve got frigates there, Dan. Gunboats. Fighters.” Shaker paused; his breathing was labored. “There … got it. Suppression valve’s closed. By the way, that’s where the missile that hit Strong came from. Bushehr.”

  “Ben, this isn’t right. You know it isn’t. Knock this off and come out. I’ll let you out and we’ll talk about it. I give you my word, I won’t report it if you come out now.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You about ready down there, Captain?” The weapons officer’s voice came through.

  “I think that’s it. You can rotate the magazine now.”

  A whir of electric motors came through the deck below Dan, through the steel of the locked scuttle.

  He looked around again. He couldn’t go into the magazine. He doubted whether Shaker would shoot to kill, but he wouldn’t do much with bullets in his legs.

  He couldn’t go back to CIC, either, and stop Pensker there. It would take him two, three minutes getting there through all the dogged-down doors. By then, the missile would be on its way.

  His eyes stopped. He stared at a red cylinder beside him. At a red, T-shaped toggle.

  “Aligned,” said the lieutenant’s voice.

  “Launcher vertical.”

  “Launcher vertical. Bringing up CWI.”

  Dan reached out and pulled the toggle. A bell began to ring below him, inside the magazine.

  “What’s that bell?” Shaker demanded.

  Dan said into the phone, “That’s the CO2 flood alarm, Captain. You’ve got sixty seconds to get out of there. Then the space will be flooded with carbon dioxide.”

  There was a pause on the line. The bell rang steadily on. It had to be hellishly loud in the enclosed space. At last, Shaker said, “Lenson! God damn it! You mind securing that racket before I go deaf?”

  He said evenly, “Ben, have you got a breathing device down there with you?”

  “What? No, God damn it. Turn that thing off!”

  “I’m not going to turn it off.”

  “Pensker! The fire-fighting system. Can you secure it from up there?”

  “No, sir. You can trip it from DC central, but the only place you can turn it off is the guard station. Where he is.”

  “Christ!” For the first time he heard fear in Shaker’s voice. Then it hardened. “Dan. Listen. You’re making the wrong decision here. Maybe I’m out of line. But you got to admit, it’s the kind of thing somebody should have done long ago.”

  Dan sat hunched on the folding chair. Thinking.

  About loyalty, and about honor, and about the duty to obey.

  “Why, Ben? Explain it to me.”

  “Because it’ll save American lives. Just like the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. You know that’s the only way we’re going to end this war.”

  He waited.

  “Dan, listen. The Navy used to operate under the control of its commanders. They left it up to us, to decide what action was necessary. Now we’re micromanaged from halfway around the world.

  “And those people are wrong! They’ve got domestic politics on their minds. Whether they’ll be reelected. A peacetime mind-set. They can’t see, even if it’s obvious to us, that there are times and places you’ve got to stand up to the enemy and show him what you’re made of. Or there’s no point in being there.”

  “Ben—”

  “No, listen. Nobody under fifty remembers what it’s like to see America win. They need to. That’s why I’m right, XO. And you know it.


  “Now, close the valve to the CO2 flood.”

  For just a moment he felt like doing it. Because part of him agreed with Shaker. He’d seen the mess politicians made when they tried to direct military forces in contact with the enemy. Vietnam. Beirut. And once, personally, in Syria. And what he said about America—maybe that was true, too.

  But this wasn’t the way to protest. Shaker was asking him to abandon civilian leadership. Abandon the law. As well as murder who knew how many civilians. A beam-riding missile … it would be a miracle if it hit anywhere near where it was aimed.

  At last, he said, “I can’t go along with it, Captain.”

  “Okay, Terry, you heard the man.” Shaker suddenly sounded tired. “Launch it anyway.”

  “Aye, sir. Stand by for ignition.”

  Dan said quickly, “Hold it, Terry! You’ll kill him if you do that!”

  “I know that. And I accept it. Lieutenant Pensker!”

  “Listen, Ben. You’ve got one chance to get out of there alive. Terry, are you still there?”

  “Yeah, XO, but—”

  “Just listen!” Dan looked at the dial on the red bottle. He had to talk fast now. “Captain. The scuttle to the rotary magazine. Climb through it. There’s not much room up there, but you can squeeze in. Get up there, right now, and dog it behind you.”

  “No way.”

  “Ben, listen.” He tried to sound friendly and reasonable. Actually, he was scared shitless. “Where you are, in ten more seconds, it’ll be pure carbon dioxide. If you get up in the magazine, there’ll be air there.”

  “Sure! And then the booster will cook me alive!”

  “Only if Terry fires it,” said Dan. “But he isn’t going to. Are you, Terry?”

  He could hear the lieutenant breathing. That was all.

  “Pensker! Listen. Fire the fucking missile!”

  “You’re still in ready service, sir.”

  “That’s right! And I ordered you to fire. Fire!”

  “I can’t,” said Pensker, his voice suddenly hopeless. “I can’t do that to you. Do what he says, sir. Get in the magazine and close the scuttle. I’ll get a blower and clear the ready room. We’ll talk to the XO and do it later.”

  At that moment, the bell stopped ringing. The muffled thump-hiss of releasing gas was clearly audible. Dan shouted, “Captain! Get out of there!”