The Weapon (42 page)

Shouts from the pier. Dan risked a glance over the coaming. “Uh, Russian . . . can Monty read them?”

“Monty's up on deck with you. Isn't he? Is that rudder going over, sir? Is it showing up on your indicator?”

Dan put the light on it again. “Yeah.” He poked his head up again, but things were too hot to leave it up. Still, not only was there more water between the hull and the camel, maybe fifteen feet now, but the pier was starting to move aft. Which meant the sub was moving ahead.

Which meant the bell was taking effect. They were getting power to the screws. The bow was swinging faster now as the rudder took hold. Both forces, wind and rudder, were pushing her toward the center of the basin. Get out there, hang a left turn, and if judged it right, they should be lined up for the exit and after that, the open Arabian Sea.

“Donnie? We're underway. Slack rudder to right twenty degrees. Right, twenty degrees rudder.”

As the computer technician repeated the order Dan gripped the indicator, sucking air with the faintest taste of hope. They couldn't extract? Too far, too many troops, too many patrol boats? Now they were protected by a steel hull nothing short of a five-inch shell could even dent. They'd just steal
the whole fucking submarine,
and worry about what came next when they were outside territorial waters. At which point the U.S. Navy would be there to protect them.

But the clatter of fire was even louder. He shifted to the cover of a retracted antenna mast and looked over again, lifting his head gradually till only his eyes were above the coaming.

Tracers arced through the night. Fresh headlights from armored personnel carriers. Massive, tracked machines, they trundled like dinosaurs onto the pier. A crewman swung a long-barreled gun and cut loose. Its blows made the rifle bullets sound like a gentle rain. Sailors and troops lined the pier, blazing away as
K-79
slowly withdrew. Some were leaping down onto the camel, running along it after them. Sirens whooped in the destroyer nest. He looked out into the basin again, to lights weaving back and forth between them
and the exit. Patrol craft? Harbor craft? They were clustering right where he had to steer to escape.

It wouldn't be easy. Maybe the whole idea was stupid. Maybe they just should have surrendered. But he didn't pass down any more orders. Just ducked, clinging to the antenna mount, listening to the tolling of the heavy rounds as they walked up the sail toward him.

Maybe it wouldn't work.

But he was sure as hell going to try.

 

 

 

The motion was uncannily smooth compared to the vibration and bow wave of a destroyer, or the turbine-drone of a frigate.
K-79
precessed out into the basin, filtering between the gust-whipped curtains of dust-laden wind, the beams of hazy light that searched for her, noiselessly as the Ancient Mariner's uncanny barque. The only clue they had way on was the steady march of lights. The racket aft continued, augmented by more heavy machine guns, Dan assumed from the rest of the armored personnel carriers. He kept his eyes front, but the five or six square inches of the back of his skull felt totally vulnerable. He wouldn't have any more time to think about it than it would take for one of those slugs to traverse his cranium and paté his brain across the shattered windshield in front of him.

Tracers rainbowed overhead, burning through the murk. It took a moment before he realized they were coming not from behind, but ahead. From flashes low to the water, dead on the bow.

“Commander. We moving?”

Carpenter, from the control room. Dan bent to the speaking tube. “Yeah, we're underway. Heading for our next turn.”

“To port?”

“Correct, to port. But not just yet.”

Okay, Dan thought, trying to organize what had to be done next when all he wanted to do was clamp his hands over his head and cringe. The answer came up in red flashing letters: communicate. Get the word out to CTF 152 that TAG Charlie needed help, the extract had gone to shit. They needed air support and surface units, and somebody to get them off this sub, a helo or at least somebody with a small boat capability.

They had to get on the horn ASAP, but he couldn't cope with the SatCom, too, right now. Not on top of everything else. “Rit, where's Monty?”

“Not down here, sir. Isn't he with you?”

“Up here? No. He was on the camel—”

With a horrible sensation, he realized exactly what he'd just said. He twisted and stared back. The pier was two hundred yards away, and lined solid with muzzle flashes.

“Monty,” he screamed down the trunk, stripping his throat raw.
“Monty!
”

No answer. “Oberg!”

“Yeah!”

The response had come from forward. He climbed the pelorus and leaned over the coaming. The SEAL looked up from a slouch against the radar housing that made up the leading edge of the sail. Ahead of him the sea was foaming as the still-ballasted-down bullnose, so near the waterline it was nearly submerged, pushed through the water. “Tell me Henrickson's down there,” Dan howled.

“Henny? No, he ain't here.”

“Fuck me,” Dan muttered. He felt like fainting, like throwing up. The last time he'd seen the analyst, Henrickson had been prone on the camel. Firing back. Not looking like he was enjoying himself, but putting down fire. Covering the others, as they cast off.

He looked aft again. No way on God's green earth they could head back into that dusty wind, that hail of lead. Where Henrickson was probably still huddled, head down, listening
to the fire going out over his head, watching
K-79
get smaller, fading into the night.

But he couldn't just steam away. Leave him at the mercy of the Iranians. He might if he'd been sure Henrickson was dead. But could he say he thought that?

He slammed his fist into steel, cursing Fate. What had Niles Barry said, when he'd assigned him to TAG?
Don't get any more guys killed.

“Fuck it,” he shouted. “Rit. Rit!”

“Still here, Commander.”

“Right thirty degrees. Steady on zero nine zero.”

“Right thirty, steady on zero nine zero,” he heard Carpenter pass to Vaught, presumably the one actually on the helm. “We out of the harbor already, sir?”

He didn't answer, looking over his shoulder. Back at the ruddy winking of heavy machine-gun fire, the green arcs of tracer. There wouldn't be much room to do this. He'd have to judge it carefully. A tight turn to starboard, at exactly the right moment, to put her port side along the camel. Get everybody topside except maybe Rit and Vaught, lay down as much fire as they could, and somehow snatch Henrickson back aboard. Then thread the whole gauntlet over again, this time with alerted patrol boats waiting.

He doubted they had much of a chance.

“Henrickson!” he howled, despairing.

“What?”

He stood rooted. Frowned, cocking his head. The answering cry hadn't come from the trunk. Nor from forward. The new rudder order was taking effect. They were starting to plow around. He shouted again. “Monty?”

“What?”

He poked his head above the coaming, puzzled. It sounded like it was coming from aft, from the pier itself, from which the fiery verdigris trails, like vertical shooting stars, were still floating up, despite the range growing long, at least for the small arms. Most were going high, though some furrowed up the water to either side, and an occasional
lucky pull still clanged off steel, blowing off chunks of rubberized coating. It had been Henrickson's voice, all right. He couldn't be imagining it, could he? But where the fuck was the guy?

Dan was wondering if he was going mad when he noticed a porpoise close alongside. He threw his muzzle over the coaming and triggered the SureFire. The illuminated circle lit not a porpoise, but a man in a wet suit, arms shot out straight ahead, being towed along on one of the spring lines. Then it twisted, and the beam lit Henrickson's upturned face, contorted with the agony of holding on despite the massive force of the water rushing past.

The indicator slammed over to CTOII. Dan yelled down, “Shift your rudder! New course, two eight zero!” Then leaned over the opposite side of the cockpit. “Teddy! Sumo! Hear me down there?”

“Copy, Commander.”

“Port side, aft of the sail. Henrickson's towing alongside. Get him aboard. Get any other loose lines in, before they foul the screws. Then get him on the sat phone, or no, Oberg, you get on. Clue Honest Houston what's going on. We need backup ASAP. We need air support.”

“Copy,” Oberg said.

Grinning, suddenly as lighthearted as he'd felt despairing ten seconds before, he aimed the HK astern and fired out the last magazine, aiming above the now receding gun-flashes to allow for drop. Probably not hitting anything, but why carry the rounds? They wouldn't need them anymore. “Honest Houston,” Commander, Task Force 152, aboard USS
Antietam
, would have carrier air over them in half an hour. They'd run out to deep water, meet up with Mangum, pull the Shkval, and scuttle
K-79.
Let the Iranians sort out what had happened.

Below, Sumo was hauling Henrickson up, grabbing an arm, gaffing him aboard. When the analyst wobbled and collapsed, Kaulukukui scooped him up and carried him forward, out of sight.

Okay, back to getting the fuck out of here . . . the reversed rudder was taking effect, they were swinging back
toward the breakwater . . . he knobbed the EOT indicator to
, which he figured meant something like “standard.” He shivered again at how close they'd come to losing Henrickson. Then shoved it out of his head; he had to bear down and get them out of here. Holding that thought he tried to judge the turn, just by seaman's eye, without knowing her tactical diameter or how fast she'd answer the rudder, and trying to remember what the photos and intel had showed of the breakwaters and the shoals on the way out. He bent and yelled into the tube, “Vaught! Left twenty degrees rudder. Come to course—call it—one nine zero.”

“Left twenty, steady one nine zero. These courses you're giving me, that magnetic, sir? I'm not sure what we got here is a gyro or what.”

“Doesn't matter, long as we're looking at the same dial. Mark your head.”

“Passing two six five.”

“That's what I've got here, we match, good to go. Make your new course one niner zero. Let me know when you're lined up and I'll adjust by eye.”

He aligned the sonar fin on the bow with the pelorus stand and watched it slowly tick around to port. The rudder kicked to starboard ten degrees before the lubber's line hit the new course and he grinned; Vaught would finish the turn exactly on course. He groped around and found a pair of binoculars dangling and focused on the breakwater. He lined up the bullnose between the beacons marking the channel out. Passed down a course correction—he'd turned a fraction of a minute too early—to 200.

They rogered from below and Dan looked at the EOT again and then straightened and twisted to put the field of view of the glasses on the frigate nest, directly astern now.

His heart fell again. More pier lights had come on, a muddy red-yellow sodium-vapor haze, and deck lights, too, whiter and lower to the basin level. The glasses showed lines being cast off, men boiling on the forecastles, the pale rectangles of lit pilothouse windows, running lights snapping on. He turned the indicator another notch forward. Maybe
fifteen knots. Considering her hull form, and that her bow was still ballasted down, dragging through the water, he didn't think she'd go much faster no matter how much power they cranked on.

The frigates, turbine-engined jobs, would make thirty, thirty-five knots. The patrol boats nested cheek by jowl three deep would make even more. He had a head start, but not much of one. He looked at the indicator again, then cranked it over all the way. Ahead flank.

Then he saw the boat. Lights off and low in the water, so he hadn't made it out in the confused light and blowing dust. Maybe just coming in from patrol, maybe going out, maybe scrambled as the ready response, but there it was, crossing from starboard to port and turning into them, crewmen pointing, swinging weapons. Swinging a twin gun mount on the long forward deck.

Bigger than a .50. An automatic cannon, Russian or Chinese, like the ZSUs he'd seen in Bosnia. He stared frozen as the barrel came around and steadied on the oncoming sail. Steadied right on him.

Dan realized he was aiming the HK and pulling the trigger even though it was empty. But only for a moment, because the still-turning bow of the accelerating submarine smashed into the patrol craft. It rolled, the cracking and screeching of the fiberglass hull splintering apart coming clearly up to him even over the roar of fire from aft. The crew went flying. He lowered his weapon, watching men struggle to the surface of the dust-scummed water as the silent runaway swept past, watching bodies float up face-down, jostle as the bow wave foamed over them, then sink away.