The Weapon (46 page)

“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, astonished. “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.

“Sierra One, frigate, two screws, bears one eight five. Looks like she's on diesels.”

“Where's the other one?” Lenson demanded.

“Don't have him yet.” He opened his eyes and cranked the dial and searched ahead, then to port. Ought to have a team plotting what he was calling out. Computing fire control solutions. But they didn't have enough guys and even if they did, what was the point? He went back to the screen on Sierra One and picked out one of the tonals and scanned for that. No good. Tried again and got something to port. Call it as Sierra Two? He tried to lock on but it wavered and roved, the circuits couldn't pull it out of the mush.

“Got the other guy yet?”

Sweat ran down his neck under the earphones. He felt lightheaded. “Might have something to port. Around three four zero, three four two. I could ping 'em—”

“No pings,” Lenson snapped.

Rit tried again to lock on the second contact but again the computer slipped, skidded, could not get its fingers around it. Passive sonar gave bearings, but not range. If he could ping, he could range them. Lenson was right, though, going active was a loser idea. Their only chance of getting out of here was to hide.

Where, was another question. It was just too fucking shallow. Barely enough water to get a full-sized boat all the way under. Only good thing about it, it wasn't deep enough, at least yet, for the guys who were after them to fire a homing torpedo. And all the reverberation and bottom return would make it harder for them to hold a track, or regain it, if they did shake them off somehow. From the courses he was running, Lenson was trying to get them out to the Strait. But it wasn't a hell of a lot deeper out there. All the deep water was to port, out where
San Fran
was waiting.

He suddenly yearned for the familiar spaces and smells of a U.S. sub. Hot dogs in the red-lit grill, turning on the
polished rollers till you picked them out and tucked them into snug, soft, freshly baked buns . . . Rocky Road at midnight, more than you ought to eat . . . popcorn and steaks.

The unfamiliar computer in front of him, still trying for the second target, flashed a red light. He cranked the dial back, but it was gone. “Jesus fuck,” he whispered, blinking salty fluid out of his eyes. “You little bastard.” He hit the button to go back to Sierra One.

The screen leaped into bars of light. The pinging dented his eardrums. He wheeled on the rotating chair, pitching his voice to carry only to where the others waited out in the tense silence of the control room.

“Sierra One. Screws to full speed. Coming right up our ass!”

 

This time after the pings and the washing machine three detonations spaced out three seconds apart.
Blam . . . blam . . . blam
. They sounded different than the first, with less reverberation, less intensity, close but somehow flatter, more like a taut drumhead being whacked than an explosive going off. The middle one was the loudest. Dan didn't need Carpenter to tell him what that meant:
K-79
was tacked down like a beetle on a display board. They knew exactly where he was and how deep. “Shit,” he murmured, leaning on the 'scope stand and trying not to return the worried looks he was getting from Vaught and Im. Sweat dripped off his chin. Even the Korean, usually stone-faced, looked distressed. “Rit.”

“Yeah.”

“Bearing to the nearest screws that aren't frigates.”

He waited, hanging from a pipe in the overhead. Something went
tick tick tick
very rapidly aft. He tensed, but it stopped.

“Can't give you individual screws. Heavy ship traffic up ahead. Low freq. Big screws. Tankers?”

“Probably. Bearing?”

“Wide bearing spread. Basically smeared all across the horizon.”

Dan tried to think despite the dread. The charges were an
order to surface. Standard procedure for an unidentified sub caught in someone's territorial sea. Their pursuers must be uncertain exactly who they were. At no point, so far as he knew, had anyone ashore gotten a clear look at them and survived. They might think renegade Iranians were conning the stolen boat. Or possibly, that the instructors—the men Oberg and Kaulukukui had killed during the takeover—might have been suddenly ordered by Moscow to decamp for some unexpected reason.

Trying to figure out what the commanding officers up above were thinking, though, might be a waste of processing time. Whatever they guessed or didn't, no government could let one of its warships, much less one armed with a potent new weapon, be snatched away with impunity. Not to mention all the dead and wounded troops they'd left behind. At some point, presumably one rapidly bearing down on them, warnings and orders would give way to attack.

He checked the chart again. Should be past the fifty-meter line now. “Depth, fifty,” he muttered. Hoping they didn't hit any lumps or bumps, any wrecks or unevennesses in the bottom. “Speed: bare steerageway.”

The speed order went aft in a quiet voice over the brown plastic intercom. “Depth: Fifty,” Vaught muttered, toes nudging a red pedal before he adjusted the plane levers. They waited, looking at nothing in particular. Was that something whispering along the hull? Dan tensed, but it didn't recur.

Four miles. So near, yet so far. Half an hour's run at eight knots. Two hours, at the two knots they were slowing to now. But if he had to dogleg and circle, it could take much longer. He was hugging the bottom. If there was a layer, he had to be under it.

“Rit. Where now?”

“Sierra Two, ahead of us, drawing left. Sierra One to starboard, steady bearing.”

Drawing the diagram in his mind, he realized they were cloverleafing. An attack pattern that let two ships double-team a submerged adversary.

Both frigates were passing overhead, in turn, in opposite
directions. As soon as one was clear, he put his rudder over and described a loop out and away before closing again to repeat the maneuver, but from the next point of the compass.

Passing information constantly, the “on” ship held contact with active sonar as it approached, dropping its ordnance as it went over. The “off” unit maintained contact at arm's length with passive sonar, in case the attacker lost the target in its own screw-wash, the reverberation of the explosions, or the despairing twists and turns of the steadily more desperate submarine. Until the inevitable end.

He saw it clearly, including the slow pinwheel of the pattern to port. Had applied it in dozens of exercises, and once or twice, in earnest. How often, leaning over a plot table, he'd tried to put himself in the sub commander's place! The irony was too bitter to be funny. He sucked the heated too-thin air, forcing his thoughts through the steel wool and jagged glass stuffing his skull.

The hell of it was, there was no way to escape a cloverleaf properly executed. Not unless you could escalator up and down, and the chart still gave him only fifty-five to sixty meters, though it deepened to the southward.

His sole chance lay in the counterclockwise rotation. If his attackers got out of synch, turned a trifle too early or too late or with too large a rudder angle, a pie-wedge of shadow could flick open in the pinwheel. In that moment, he'd seen a very savvy sub commander suddenly vanish. Usually he was picked up minutes later, but for that fragment of wheeling time he was impalpable, intangible, returned to the ghostliness of a subatomic particle that might or might not exist depending on whether an observer was present; while Dan had found himself chasing what he'd thought had been the sub, but which slowly faded, a mirage, a phantom.