The Weapon (37 page)

But the paint looked faded, the moving parts on the hatch worn, the equipment looked like it was 1963 again. The smell was nothing like the nuke's: a deep gravy of unwashed bodies, diesel fuel, ozone, and—he sniffed again—burnt gunpowder. Nothing he didn't expect. But something in here was wrong. Missing. What was it?

“Dead guys,” Carpenter called softly.

When he went over he caught the reek of blood and emptied bowels. “What happened?”

“Just clearing the objective, Commander,” Oberg said.

Dan started to react, then put it aside. He headed forward, frowning and rubbing his mouth. Something
else
was
wrong. The dead staring eyes were disturbing, but neither the first he'd seen nor, he suspected, the last.

Then he stopped. Turned back, and peered again. There were the racks, complete with rails, rollers, chain hoists.

But no torpedoes.

Nor were there any in the compartment he was in. Bunks, workbenches, test equipment, handling equipment, yes.

Don't
tell me this, he thought.
Don't
tell me they took them all off and stowed them ashore. “Find the fucking Shkval,” he snapped. “Monty, check aft. Rit, Im, let's take a look at these tubes.”

He stood back, waiting as Carpenter and Im began checking. To him the tubes looked just like the ones aboard
San Francisco
. Probably they all descended from the same design, way back with Holland. Each heavy bronze tube and its dished-out inner door was festooned with drains, valves, hydraulic and pneumatic lines, gauges, and indicators like ivy grown tight around the trunk of an old oak. He looked at Carpenter, who was rubbing his head. “Rit? Know what you're looking at?”

“Oh yeah. Torpedo tube's just a big gun, with a lid on the end of the barrel. You open the inner door and load. Then flood, to equalize pressure, so you can open the outer door. Blow the fish out with compressed air. Close everything again, drain, and you're ready to reload. What we got to be careful of is the interlocks.” He reached in to point out several levers painted bright red. “What we really don't want to do is open those outer doors, same time you've got the breech doors open.”

“Are the muzzle doors closed now?”

The heavyset submariner bent and inspected all three port tubes, going up from the bottom to the top, then turned and did the same to the starboard ones. “Affirmative.”

“Any way to tell if they're loaded?”

“Well, ours have a sight glass on them. But no glasses on these. And we used to hang a card on them, so we knew what was in each tube. No card, no load. No cards on any of these.”

Dan bit back a curse as Im cleared his throat. He rounded on him. “Yeah? What?”

“What is bad, Commander?”

“Nothing's bad, Yeong-min Im. Just tell me this looks familiar.”

“Is familiar.” The Korean started pointing. “This indicator outer door open, shut. This hinge. This here you need wrench to fit and turn, unlock inner door locking ring. Wrench is on bulkhead . . . yes.”

“Can you open these inner doors?”

He shrugged. “Sure. I open. Which one?”

“Open them all,” Dan told him. “Just don't sink us.”

While they got busy he took a deep breath and moved his personal indicator to the next task. But first, he reviewed the team's positions. Oberg: topside, watching the pier and road for unwelcome visitors. Henrickson and Kaulukukui—the latter with plastic explosive, for safes—were going through the staterooms and work stations, looking for manuals, circuit diagrams, anything with “Shkval” on the cover. Donnie Wenck, with the little computer he'd brought in a sealed Pelican hard case, would be in the control room, downloading the programming from the fire control system.

Which left Dan to deal with the ballast tank. He went through the shelves under the workbench and found a hack-sawed-off stub of copper pipe in a scrap metal bin. He balanced it on the smooth steel surface of the workbench, waited a moment, adjusted it. Good.

He walked aft, searching the valves and indicators hanging from the curved overhead. They projected through what looked like cork, painted white on the inside. He came to a green handwheel a foot across, reached up, and started cranking. It moved stiffly, as if it hadn't been lubed for a long time, but it turned. He cranked it all the way open, listened, then went aft.

The control room, starboard side. He found the “Christmas tree,” the bank of indicator lights that showed valves open or closed, and searched around it until he found another
panel with black Bakelite knobs with red and white arrows. It was marked
and
and
was pretty easy to spell out: “grupa”—group.

Forward group, midships group, after group. He clicked the upper and the lower knobs over. The upper would be the hydraulic vent valves on the two forward tanks. The lower would be the valves on the bottom of the tanks that admitted water. Something went “clunk-clunk” up forward and a light on the panel went from white to red.

So far, so good. He noticed a speaking tube and uncorked it. Put his ear to it, and heard only the wind. Murmured, “Teddy?”

A clank, a scrape. “Commander.”

“Everything quiet up there? Where are you?”

“Top of the sail. Good observation position. Nobody moving. Where are you?”

“Control room.”

“Hear me all right?”

“Yeah. I'll leave this open. Going forward now.”

Dan headed back forward, ducking through the doorways, and stood under the green wheel. The indicator on the remotely operated valve, beside it, had moved.

The piece of pipe on the table suddenly began to roll. He caught it before it hit the deck, tossed it back into the scrap bin, and reached up to crank the green wheel closed again. He'd flood down the rest of the way as soon as they had the Shkval ready to offload.

First, though, they had to find it. As he got to the forward torpedo room again Carpenter was grunting, “Okay, pull.” Im leaned back on the handle and the upper-left tube popped open. It was painted red inside, scuffed, with a black rail to guide the fish.

“Empty, sir.”

Im finished spinning a crank on the next tube down. Carpenter reached forward, tripped the interlock, and unsealed the door. It, too, opened on nothing but an echoing tunnel.

Dan gnawed his lips. Tube two, port side, down almost in the bilge; Im had to hop down off the deckplates and crouch to crank the inner door unlocked.

It, too, was empty. “Son of a bitch,” Carpenter muttered. He glanced over his shoulder at Dan. “Maybe it isn't here. Anybody check aft? After torpedo room?”

Dan felt a sudden jab of uh-oh. Then remembered. “No way. Shkval's a twenty-one-inch weapon. Tubes aft are smaller on Juliets. Fifteen inches, I think.” He hoped that was right. He was getting tense, more rattled than he liked to be. Had to chill. Take deep breaths, think about something other than how little time they had left. He checked his watch: only thirty more minutes.

Then the patrol would be back. They'd wonder where their sentry was. And take a look aboard.

They could kill them, too, certainly. But then their headquarters would wonder why there was no patrol report.

The upper-right tube thunk-popped open. Nothing but a little water in the bottom, glimmering in the light of their flashes. “Shit 'n' Shinola,” Carpenter muttered. “Did we miss something? Or is it our crappy fucking intel again?”

Dan didn't answer. He headed aft, swung through the door, past the torpedo racks, giving them another worried scan just in case; but they were still empty. Then nearly collided with a pale, sweating Henrickson. “Monty! You okay?”

The analyst lowered a seaman's duffel bulging with angular objects. He said in a hurried voice, “There's two bodies in after torpedo.”

“And move up forward, Monty.”

Henrickson pulled sweat off his face. “I've never, uh—seen one before. Ha, ha! You'd think—well, never mind.”

Dan squeezed his shoulder. “Mind on the job, Monty. A guy told me once there's plenty of time to think about it, after it's over. But—I've got to see Oberg. I don't know if they, if this was necessary.”

“I think he likes to kill.” Henrickson avoided his eyes, lowered his voice even more. “Sumo, I don't think he enjoys it. Oberg does.”

“Let's not overreact. Stay focused. What's in the duffel?”

“Manuals, test equipment. There's more, I just cherry-picked what looked portable.” Henrickson looked past him. “Any luck up forward?”

“Not yet. Any of the stuff you got Shkval-specific?”

“Yeah, there's Shkval stuff. Like I said. Manuals. Tapes.”

Dan grimaced. “So it was aboard at one point—”

“What?” The analyst went even paler. “It's not
here?
”

“Commander,” Carpenter called, voice echoing. “Better look at this.”

When he got back up to the tube faces it was hard to say which submariner looked grimmer, the North Korean or the American. Dan exhaled, ready for the bad news. “Okay. What've you got?”

Im put his hand on the grip for number three door. “Torpedo tube three.”

“Yeah? And?”

“Open it for him,” Carpenter said.

The door swung open in greased silence. It revealed something Dan didn't at first make sense of. A black rubber plug, pierced with scores of tiny holes. He stared. “What the hell's that?”

Im and Carpenter reached in. Their fingers hooked over opposite sides and they gave a coordinated yank. The material came back and out of the tube. When Dan bent and pointed his light in, the spot of brightness showed him a six-inch-diameter tube running forward to some larger body he couldn't make out, since it filled the cylinder it nestled within. All he could see was one large hole, circled by eight smaller holes around its perimeter.

Carpenter said, “It sure as shit isn't a torpedo.”

Dan peered in again, not sure
what
it was. “What's this rubber thingy?”

“Probably a pressure plate. Protects the nozzle, then drops off after launch.”