The Weapon (10 page)

“Works for me,” said the attaché.

The barge smelled of paint and old fish, but the buffet made up for it, though the wind kept snuffing the flames in the chafing dishes. The menu leaned to Asian cuisine. Few of the spectators, muffled beneath overcoats and mufflers, partook. The Stoli booth, though, did a brisk business, the bartender dispensing shots by running the lip of the bottle down a meter-long rank of glasses, finishing the last with the final drop; then tossing the liter bottle into a bin with an ear-shattering clank, reaching for another, and going the other way left-handed. It was the most skilled and graceful performance Dan had yet seen in the whole country. The reek of raw alcohol reached him and he turned away. He didn't get the craving often anymore. Thank God. And when he did, there were ways to cope. He'd been doing it one day at a time so long now, there were whole weeks when he didn't think about a drink at all.

A video crew was setting up on the embankment. Amid shouts and the clatter of wind-tossed canvas the crew on the outer barge was snapping tarps off equipment, consoles,
racks of compressed-gas bottles, a maze of piping around a ten-meter-long bronze gleam.

“Torpedo tube,” Henrickson muttered. Dan turned to see if de Cary or Siebeking was taking pictures, and found himself face to face with a dark-skinned man in a gray topcoat it took him a moment to recognize.

“Commander Lenson.”

“Uh, Captain . . . Khashar. Great to see you, sir.”

The Pakistani took his hand, but with reserve. He and Dan had “co-captained” an ex-U.S. frigate years before, on its turnover voyage to the Far East. They'd clashed on the bridge, and Dan had finished the voyage restricted to his stateroom. “It's, uh, great to run into you again, sir. Are you still in the Navy?”

“I'm now the deputy chief of naval operations. And you?”

“Oh, still in, yes sir. Congratulations.”

The wind was growing bitterer. He and Khashar caught up as de Cary and Siebeking took pictures and Henrickson made notes. Then the techs moved to the far side of the barge and took off a last tarp, and Khashar moved away, and the rest of the spectators quieted and aimed binoculars.

“That's our baby,” Henrickson muttered.

Dan frowned. The dull green taper was shorter than he'd expected; not much bigger than the lightweight torpedoes U.S. Navy ships carried. A white plastic or nylon split ring circled the tapered nose. Hard to judge its diameter at a distance, but as best he could estimate, maybe eighteen inches. Its skid was floored with small wheels, the same sort of transport cradle he'd seen in torpedo magazines. The rapid clicking of cameras sounded like a meadow full of crickets. Another video crew Dan hadn't noticed up to now gunned their boat's engine, out on the river, moving up on the barge, and were waved back by guards brandishing AKs.

To a shouted command, the techs put their shoulders to the skid. A second shout sent the cylinder gliding forward. The supervisor's fingers guided the white ring, which Dan guessed was a sabot, into the bronze tube. Foot by foot the vehicle was lost from sight, except for a cable. Dan squinted
and murmurs rose behind him as the supervisor clipped this into a receptacle inside the door of the tube. A moment later the
whump
of the door sealing came to them.

“Wire guided,” he muttered to Henrickson.

“Not necessarily. Could just be launching commands, swim-out power.” The analyst blew on his hands and shivered. “See in a minute, I guess.”

The test supervisor spoke into a radio. Shading his eyes upriver, Dan saw boats taking position, strung from shore to shore. About two miles north, where the Moskva took a bend to the right, a red flag fluttered from a third barge. He made out a white panel atop the black hull, no doubt to make it more visible to the distant spectators. As the banner stiffened in the wind, the guard craft wheeled and made for their respective banks. Aside from the target barge, the river lay empty.

Beside him Siebeking peered down, adjusting his Nikon. One of the men in overcoats pushed through the crowd distributing handbills. Taking one, Dan saw a layout of the test site and another diagram of the weapon itself. The latter was the same graphic Mullaly had shown him the first time he'd mentioned the Shkval. Turning it over, he ran his eyes down paragraphs of maladroit promo prose. There was also a diagram of the barge. It showed a heavy plate mounted from just above the waterline down to the turn of the bilge. It was marked
HY 80 30 CM.

He frowned. HY 80 was a shipbuilding steel. High yield strength, 80,000 psi to be exact. It had been used in U.S. submarine hulls for years. And thirty centimeters was nearly a foot thick.

The black overcoats linked arms and began herding the guests away from the buffet. Some around the Stoli booth resisted, but were shepherded back toward the gangway. The crowd turned and began streaming up onto the embankment, Dan and his associates with them.

“Not a risk-free launch,” Henrickson muttered.

“I'm thinking, this isn't the real thing,” de Cary put in.

“What do you mean?” said Dan.

“That's not the Shkval. Can't be. It's only half the size.”

“Demonstration vehicle?”

“Reduced scale. A test bed.”

Dan had to admit, it made sense to demonstrate on a reduced scale, especially in the middle of a city. No Western capital would have permitted live ordnance testing smack in the middle of its downtown, where an errant turn could send a couple of tons of high-speed weapon up a slanted bank and down a commercial avenue. He looked around for Siebeking, but the attaché was gone in the crowd.

The audience spread out along the riverside, staring down at the launch barge. Which the techs, too, were leaving, jogging across a quickly lowered, bouncing gangway, taking their prospective customers' places near the buffet. Putting a few more yards between themselves and the launch platform. Where now only the supervisor, and one orange-suited tech remained, the latter at a stand-up console, the former a few feet aft of the tube, talking into a cell. Then he flipped it closed and stuffed it into a pocket. He swung himself onto the gangway and jogged shoreward.

A prolonged hooting came from the distant guard boats. The spectators fell silent. The orange-suited tech clamped on a hard hat, ear, and eye protection. He looked over his shoulder, down the river, then crouched. His arm moved once, to the right, then suddenly back to the left.

With a sudden deep thud, then a hiss of released air, the whole barge recoiled. A cloud of vapor shrouded the tube, cloaking but not quite obscuring the burrowing splash of something long and heavy wallowing deep into the river. The water closed again in a clashing swirl of foam. A half-ring of white plastic skipped across the surface, somersaulting through the air in slow motion. For a moment there was nothing more.

Then something ignited, deep below.

The light came up like a glowing apparition beneath the river, turning the chill gray a murky, tropical, opal-hued
green. Within it a lance of pure white radiance burned beneath the Moskva. Dan felt heat on his cheeks and forehead, and only just kept himself from stepping back. Instead he leaned forward, straining his eyes for every scrap of information he could gather.

But the heat-pulse lasted only a second. The white-hot light began to move. Then from one instant to the next vanished, absorbed by the turbulent river as the angle between it and his gaze increased.

A creamy froth surged up, boiling and spiking queer peaked pyramids of water that blew apart, showering the barge. The wind picked up the spray and carried it over the audience, which recoiled from the river's edge, shouting and slapping at their coats and faces. Dan and Henrickson and de Cary stood without moving. He sniffed, trying to extract information from the mist, but it just smelled dank, like steam and river. No; there was an undertone. For a moment, almost like coffee beans. Then hot iron. Metallic? Or more like dirty old socks? It slipped away even as he sniffed again, the freshness of new sensation vanishing as nerve endings accommodated.

The spectators surged again, aiming cameras and field glasses up the river. Dan blinked through the spray. But so far, nothing. The river rolled on. The barge, the red flag stiff in the wind, the motionless boats, the distant golden spires, all were the same.

He lifted his Seiko and caught the sweep hand. A little over thirty seconds. He raised his eyes to the river, then returned them to the watch. He did this again, then lifted his head, and stared at the faraway barge.

A brilliant point ignited, so overpowering his legs dropped him into a hunch and his arms jerked up to shield his face. All he could think was:
nuclear
. De Cary flinched, too. Behind them others cried out as a double crack like the earth splitting rolled over the city and then echoed, rebounding from hundreds of buildings, and across the whole center of Moscow birds whirled up crying and darting as if to escape the sudden advent of an apex predator.

“Holy smoke,” Henrickson muttered. “That wasn't RDX.”

Dan straightened to see distant specks of debris raining down over a two-hundred-yard-wide circle, above which a white mushroom hearted with orange fire rolled upward. It lofted like a balloon till the wind took it, driving it off the river and off over the city, still rising, still milling, but rapidly thinning, so fast he suddenly grasped what it was: not so much smoke, though it contained smoke, as a cloud of superheated steam, condensing into microscopic droplets as it hit the cold fall air. And beneath it, behind it, no trace of the barge, the flag, the panel, whatsoever. Only that roiled foam, rocking and steaming.

A murmur ran along the embankment. As one, the faces, swarthy, dark, pale, turned back to the guest barge.

Aboard which, at a word of command, the techs stood aside. A middle-aged brunette with wind-blushed cheeks stepped to a microphone and began reading from a clipboard. Russian first, then what sounded like Chinese, Arabic, and other languages. She seemed to be fluent in them all. Then she got to English.

“You have just witnessed live demonstration of underwater missile weapons system. The warhead detonated is small demonstrator model. Full size ‘Shkval' export model double this size with much larger warhead. Komponent Corporation offers underwater missile for sale or lease. Discuss with us terms. Full system is available with credits through special program Ministry of Defense.

“New announcements from Komponent, maker of advanced underwater weaponry for national defense. Shkval-K is armed with shaped-charge warhead designed to burn through submerged armor, backed with rods of depleted uranium as incendiary. You see effect of quarter-sized warhead on moored ship today. Full-sized warhead will burn through one meter steel or five meters reinforced concrete, not counting fracture effect, with shaped charge penetrator permitting entry of uranium rods two meters long. These combust upon contact with air, water, or petroleum fuel. Optimally effective weapon against even the most difficult target at sea.”

Beside him Henrickson sucked a breath, de Cary stiffened. A cold wave propagated up Dan's spine.

Depleted uranium was the heavy metal left over when fissionable isotope was extracted for use in weapons or reactors. Relatively inert radiologically, though there were those who disagreed, it was twice as heavy as lead. The U.S. packaged it in antitank rounds, in place of conventional explosives. When a “magic bullet” slammed into a tank, it, it burned its way through solid steel, then sprayed apart inside the turret in an inferno of phosphorouslike flame that ended any possibility of life.

But what she was describing wasn't a tank killer. This combination of speed, penetration, and terminal effect could only have been designed to penetrate the carefully crafted, highly classified combination of heavy underwater protection—mainly of HY-80, though other steels were used, too—and empty voids evolved over decades to protect U.S. Forrestal-and Nimitz-class carriers from torpedo attack.

Up till now, modern carriers had been so fast and maneuverable, well defended, and heavily armored, that nothing short of a wave of supersonic cruise missiles, or a nuclear weapon, could achieve a serious probability of kill. But being hit with three, or two, or maybe even one of these warheads—he'd have to run the numbers, discuss this with Monty—even the newest carrier would be crippled, if not destroyed from within by unquenchable fire and the toxic smoke and fragments that had made U.S. ordnance so effective against Saddam's tanks.

He tuned back in to the translator as she announced it was possible to upgrade existing contracts for earlier versions to the new K version, for only a modest additional sum. And that one customer had already done so. Dan wondered who. China? Iran? This was sounding worse and worse.

“We're gonna have to crunch some numbers on this thing,” Henrickson muttered. “This could really be—this could really be something.”

Dan just nodded, aware, as Henrickson probably was,
too, of all the nearby ears. From the murmurs around them, the same conclusion was dawning on other minds. Minds not well disposed to America.

He stuffed the flyer into his pocket. Threading among the earnestly talking buyers, he plowed toward the gangway down to the barge. Behind him he heard de Cary. “Commander! Wait.” But he didn't slow, just kept on. He got to the brow and was halfway down it before one of the overcoated heavies caught up. He shook the guy's hand off and kept going.

But not for long. Strong arms seized him. “Stop, you. Wait in line,” one of them growled in his ear.

And it was true, a queue was forming. A sign-up line, it looked like. Aboard the barge the guys in orange suits were getting a chance at the vodka. They looked relieved as they tossed back shots. A few feet from the brow, flanked by more guards, stood several older men. One was Academician Dvorov.

De Cary, at his elbow. He murmured, “We operate carriers, too.”

“Yeah?”