The Weapon (32 page)

The DDS's walls were high yield steel, built to take as much pressure as the submarine hull itself. Breathing fifteen times a minute, Teddy hung in the main compartment, or hangar, all the way aft. Forward of it was the transfer trunk, an airlock that mated to the after-torpedo hatch. And forward of that was a hyperbaric chamber, in case a diver had to be depressurized.

The black shape they were maneuvering out into the
blue-gold shimmer on its track-and-cradle gear was a “Gator”-class submarine delivery vehicle. It looked more like a swollen, blunt torpedo than a submarine. But its smoothly faired aluminum was sausage-stuffed with ballast and trim tanks and pumps, fathometer, gyro, ahead-looking sonar, even a small inertial navigation system.

Starting two hours before, they'd flooded the hangar and equalized pressure. Wearing open circuit SCUBA, the DDS team had undogged the huge exterior door and extracted the tracks. Now they were slowly working the vehicle out of the hangar.

This was a drill, of course. Lenson and the SDV team commander had insisted on a run-through before they headed in to the Strait. This DDS was brand-new, just delivered, and longer than previous models, to accommodate larger teams for longer missions. They wanted to make sure nothing would go wrong. Not that you ever could . . . He had to admit, it was a lovely sea for a dive. Seventy degrees, so they didn't really need the wet suits.

He only knew a couple of the SDV guys. All SEALs operated with SDVs, but these were the West Coast team.

A grinding scrape dragged. He couldn't really tell where from, it was difficult to localize sound in the water. One of the divers pointed to the stern. He mimed getting a grip and pushing. Teddy finned around till he could brace himself against the inner wall. He grabbed the crossbar on the rudder and applied force. Not too much; underwater you just wanted steady thrust on something that weighed this much. With massive deliberation it hesitated against his gloves. Then began swinging the other way.

A few minutes later he clung to the outer lip of the shelter, watching the vehicle leave. The screw rotating so slowly he could make out each blade, it shrank gradually away into the blue. A single ping rang through the sea, jabbing a pick into his right ear.

He watched till it disappeared, then jackknifed, pulling himself back inside. Joining the line of other handlers, pulling himself down the length of the hangar into deeper blackness.
A circle of light showed the hatch to the transfer trunk. He waited patiently, the dry gas hissing in through his regulator, bubbles roaring in his ears as he breathed out.

 

Sixty feet forward, Dan perched on the single chair in the captain's cabin. With two men in it, both taller than average, there wasn't much spare cubic left under the curved overhead. He kept expecting the air to be close, but it smelled like white bread. Andy Mangum was sprawled on his bunk in blue coveralls, hands behind his head and one foot propped against the door. Andy and he had been classmates at the Academy. The year before, they'd met off South Korea, during a multinational exercise that had turned into the hunt and engagement of a covert strike force. Now Mangum was humming “Take My Breath Away,” and staring at the overhead. Dan waited.

The sub's skipper said, “Those boots work out for you?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” He looked at his feet. “Still wearing them, actually.”

“You know, from what you say, this is an illegal operation.”

“Covert's the official word.”

“But you say there was no finding? You never got written orders?” Mangum shook his head. “We do black ops in the sub force. But there are orders. They don't travel outside the chop chain. But they're there.”

“Do you have orders for this operation?”

“Matter of fact, I do.”

“Who from?”

“SUBPAC.”

“So what's your worry?”

“I guess I don't have one,” the CO said. “Warm up that coffee?” He pressed a call button on the bulkhead.

“What do they say?” Dan asked after a moment.

“What does who say?”

“Your orders.”

“Oh. Pretty bare bones. Like always. Pick up a DDS and a task element from SDV Team One in Pearl. Proceed to
Diego Garcia and pick up elements of SEAL Team Three and TAG Team Charlie. Transit to Point X-ray and debark. Remain on station until SDV returns; high-speed transit to Diego Garcia for offload.”

“That's all?”

“All that's my business.”

“Nothing on our objective?”

“I don't need to know your objective. All I have to do is get you there, and pick you up when you're done.”

Dan scratched his regrown beard, looking at his classmate's deliberately incurious face. He felt tempted to tell him. But he reluctantly concluded he had to act like a naval officer, even if sometimes he didn't feel like one. “All right,” he muttered.

“Pretty clever, what the Iranians did. The spot market and all.”

“What's that?”

“You don't follow the market?”

“The stock market? Not that close. Blair's got mutual funds, but they're in a trust or something. Since she's in a policymaking position.”

“Get her into energy. Everything revolves around energy. Remember when they announced they were closing the Strait? Going to lay mines?”

“And then the next day said no, it wasn't closed.”

“Right.” Mangum sat up and pulled his notebook over, booted it up. “I had it here someplace . . . the
Wall Street Journal
Online . . . heck, this battery doesn't last very long . . . never mind. First they announced they were closing the Strait, warning mariners, threatening to sink tankers. The next day they say, oh no, our mistake. The actual effect? Can you guess?”

“To put the fear of God into us?”

“Better than that. The National Iranian Oil Company quietly bets long on millions of barrels of oil futures. Then, after the announcement, the spot price of crude doubles. They start selling. They ride the spike up to the peak, unloading
all the way. They sell future deliveries of their own production in Europe and Japan.

“Then suddenly, hey, we're sorry, there'll be no mines, somebody in the Pasdaran got overzealous. But by then all the futures are snapped up, and they sold two years' production in advance, too. They figure the total take at around sixty billion dollars.”

“A nice payday.”

“Enough to fund their naval expansion plans for years. The North Koreans, now the Iranians—they're learning how to whip us without firing a shot.”

Dan shook his head in mock admiration. But maybe it would recoil on them, maybe they'd been
too
clever. Because after that he hadn't heard a single doubt or problem about his operation, and every piece of equipment and resource he'd asked for had suddenly been his.

Someone tapped at the door. Mangum took his boot off it, and a young man in the same blue coveralls as Dan and Mangum thrust a hand in with a carafe. “You remember Cus,” Mangum said. “Cus, you remember Commander Lenson.”

“Yessir, sure do. Honor to have you back aboard, sir.”

“Damn it, you didn't need to tell them all that stuff about me,” Dan said when the door closed again.

Mangum looked at his watch, then at the bulkhead readouts. “Let's see how they're doing with the drill,” he said.

 

The Task Element Commander for the SDV team was older than an O-4 should be and though he didn't wear insignia other than his dive pin Dan figured he was former enlisted. He hailed from Pasadena, but he didn't act or talk like a surfer. In fact it seemed like an effort for him to talk at all. Dan didn't know much about the special ops side of the Navy, but he knew the SDV teams had split off from the SEAL teams in the eighties, half of what had been the Underwater De mo li tion world specializing into the operators ashore and the other half into the micro-subs. The TEC stood dripping at the bottom of the ladder, stripping off his
gear. Dan smelled rubber, salt, urine, and the iron bite of compressed air.

“Everything go okay?”

“Went all right.” The TEC frowned at his guys as they clambered down the ladder, shedding gear and water. One was bleeding from his nose but no one remarked on it. The bleeding guy spat onto the gratings.

“Don't spit on our boat,” said one of the engineers. The divers and the sub crew looked at each other, then away.

“So it went okay? No hitches?”

“Pretty smooth,” the TEC said. He scratched his wet scalp, then added unwillingly, “We ran the mission profile. Eight miles out. Shut down. Reboot everything, then eight miles back. All the instruments work. We have solid nav with the inertial. We'll have more weight with all your folks aboard, and the drag from the towed body, but since we stripped out that number three battery we should hit neutral buoyancy. But that brings up another problem, Commander.”

“Sure,” Dan said. “What?”

“Let's go back here.”

He followed the TEC through the engine room till they were as private as they could get aboard a 360-foot sub with nineteen more guys aboard than there were bunks for. The lieutenant-commander looked at a set of weights someone had bungeed to the grating. Not meeting Dan's eyes he said, “We don't have the capacity we thought. We can't take all your people back with us, Commander. Not with the tow you want me to calculate for. So you can't take them all in with you, either.”

“Is this a SEAL issue?”

“How do you mean?”

Dan didn't feel like being stubborn, but he wasn't about to let a single seat go. “These guys have been drilling right along with Oberg and Kaulukukui. They've had CQB training. Oberg ran them through a SCUBA refresher. If you're telling me because they're not SEALs you don't want to take them in, forget it.”

“Training ain't but training. If they freeze up, or freak out, they'll get people killed.”

“I don't know your people either, uh, Chibbie. But my guys have been in on this mission from the get-go. How many drivers do we need?”

“They're pilots, not ‘drivers.' And we need two.”

“How many personnel's the vehicle have seats for? It doesn't matter if they're in each other's faces. It's only for two hours, three tops.”

“It'd be more like face to buttcrack, but we can get eight bodies in. That's not the problem.”

Dan rubbed his face, thinking it over. Oberg, Henrickson, Kaulukukui, Im, Carpenter, Wenck, and himself. Seven bodies.

During the planning phase they'd considered various methods of insertion—by helo or combat raiding craft, by submarine, even high-altitude, low-opening parachute insertion—but the known emitters around the Bandar Abbas base had indicated such heavy antiaircraft defenses as to rule out any insertion by air. Plus, once you inserted, you had to extract. The next iteration had Team Charlie inserting at night, via “combat rubber raiding craft”—CRRCs in SEALspeak; rubber rafts with waterproof outboards. But a careful plot of coverage of Iranian surface patrols in the Strait had pushed them off that square too and onto the last one—a covert, submerged penetration of the Iranian harbor.

The insertion itself should be fairly straightforward; what happened afterward might not be. Preparing for this had entailed three furious weeks of planning and training.

One major complication surfaced early: Juliet-class submarines had no torpedo loading hatches. It seemed strange compared to American practice, but there it was. To load, they ballasted down at stern or bow. The crew opened the outer and inner doors on the tubes and fed the torpedoes aboard through them, in effect reversing the launching procedure.

Eventually Dan had decided this was an advantage. Once they had control of the boat—assuming they got that far—all they'd need to do was ballast down forward, open the forward door, and let the weapon slide out, underwater, onto
what a survey dating from back when U.S. ships had used Bandar Abbas, in the Shah's time, said was a soft sand-and-mud harbor bottom.

It wasn't what he'd call robust, but it was a plan. According to Hines, the Iranians didn't stay at high readiness. It should be possible to get in without being observed. But to get out again, they'd have to do so submerged.

So the extraction would be via SDV as well. The vehicle would settle to the bottom a few yards off the bow. The assault party would exit, using Draeger rebreathers, and take over the Juliet while the handling party—the two pilots—stood by. When the Shkval dropped out onto the mud, they'd wrap it in a buoyant jacket and attach a tow cable. The assault team would exit the target, swim back down to the SDV, and all hands would extract back to
San Francisco
safe from any Iranian lead that might be flying around by then.

Meanwhile, while they'd been thrashing this all out, the NUWC model shop had been building a sheet-metal-and-wood full-sized dummy Shkval. When it was done they crated it up, labeled it “wind-tunnel body,” and flew it to Norfolk. Dan and the rest of the team practiced with it aboard
Spadefish
at the destroyer-submarine piers, coached by a master chief torpedoman from SUBRON Six who was the only soul allowed in the torpedo room with them when they were practicing. Hines had turned up one day with photos of the interior of a Juliet-class; Dan had no idea where he'd gotten those.

They'd eventually learned to move the thing around pretty rapidly. The question would be, of course, how well they could do it in a strange torpedo room, working with non-U.S. equipment. Dan hoped they'd find the Shkval already in the tube. That would make it simpler, faster, and so, a whole lot less dangerous. The less time they spent smack in the middle of a hostile naval base, the better.

He felt someone next to him. When he turned his head it was Mangum. “Problem?” the captain said.

“Not sure yet. What exactly are you asking me?” Dan asked the TEC. “I thought the plan was, nine guys go in. That's two
helmsmen, or you're calling them pilots; and my seven guys, the assault team. While we hit the sub, the pilots stand by on the bottom. The shooters take the sub over and shit the thing out the tube, where your guys are waiting. Right?”