The Weapon (38 page)

“Can you get it out of there? Or, wait. Check the lower tube first. See if that's the only one.”

“Already,” Im said. “Number one tube empty. This only tube with . . . thingy.”

Carpenter was chaining up the bunks, throwing pillows and personal gear into the bilges. Im hurried to join him. Dan glanced at his watch as they pulled rails off the bulkhead and pinned them together, and helped them rig a chain hoist from the overhead lifting point. Im half crawled into the tube, head and shoulders vanishing in the maw, to attach a wire rope as Carpenter hooked a comealong to a padeye on the aft bulkhead. With a ratcheting click, he started throwing the lever. Inch by inch, the projectile emerged, shining with a thin coating of grease.

It was half an an inch smaller than the tube diameter, so tight a fit Im's little finger wouldn't go into the gap. Its greased length rode on lands on the interior of the barrel that fit it so tightly there was no play as it extruded smoothly into the light. Smooth, unpainted, polished metal, with a red stripe halfway up it. When they had five feet of it out Dan put his hand on it, hesitantly, as if it were a dangerous pet. Im glanced sideways at him, like a Christian trying to blend in at a Shabbat service; then put his hand on it as well.

It was greasy and cold, but Dan couldn't restrain a fierce smile. Their work and risk had not been in vain. If they could get it home, the Navy would be on the way to protection against a grave danger.

Carpenter was touching it, too, all three hands on it, only his moved in a slow up and down rubbing that Dan thought, with a flash of first irritation and then sardonic realization, had something almost masturbatory in it.

 

Rit caressed the thing's flank, way back in his mind now, to when he used to load Mark 37s aboard the old
Tiru,
before he went to the sonar shack, and he was single and didn't have to worry about anybody finding out things she didn't need to know. He got a thrill handling a torpedo he didn't get from anything else. Almost as good as a woman. No, not quite. Nothing as good as that. But it was close.

This arrangement was like U.S. boats, but the tubes were
different. The castings were bigger, rougher, the parts weren't as well machined. They used plain steel or bronze where a U.S. boat would have stainless. You could tell what everything was, it was even more or less in the same place, but there weren't as many interlocks and it looked as if it'd be easy to bypass the ones there were.

Right now though he had to figure out how to handle this. They'd discussed it and he and Im had brought some gear but the thing was different than he'd expected. He said tentatively, “Fucker's
tapered.
Nobody said it'd be tapered.”

“We didn't know what it was shaped like. Only that it fit a twenty-one-inch tube.”

“Tapered,” Im repeated. Rit showed him with his hands. The guy seemed to know his way around, but communication could be a problem. They had to get this done fast. He didn't need Lenson looking at his watch every five seconds to know that. He didn't want to spend the next ten years in an Iranian prison. If they didn't stand them up against a wall and shoot them, yeah, that's what they'd do, for the fucking SEALs killing the guys they'd found aboard.

“That a problem?” Lenson asked.

“Could be . . . here's like a sabot . . . here's the nose. Jeez, look at that.”

A sudden flash made him almost jump out of his skin. The commander had leaned forward and gotten a picture with a little camera he hadn't seen before. “Jeez, how about a warning before you do that.”

“That plate on the nose is the cavitating disc. Can you get it out of the tube?”

“It
is
out of the tube.”

“I mean going out, Carpenter. Can you reverse direction and slide it on out the bow end?”

“On it, Commander. Can you finish up getting us ballasted down?” He turned to Im, but the Korean already had their tool-roll unlashed and was laying gear out. They'd figured to find most of what they needed in the torpedo room, but there was one thing the Iranians probably wouldn't have.

The tube of super-special Teflon lubricant he'd come up
with off an obscure Web site that catered to private investigators and paranoids. Not only was it Teflon, embedded in it were tiny nylon balls. It was supposed to be practically zero friction. Im handed it to him, and Rit handed it right back.

“Not me,” he told the Korean. “It's for you.”

 

Im peered into the tube, then back at the Americans. He understood what they wanted him to do, but still wasn't sure what was going on. The commander was studying his watch again. He looked angry. The fat American looked angry, too. He looked into the tube again, getting angry himself.

Because he had no choice.

He'd never had a choice, not since that moment on
S-13
when his captain had decided to spare his men and surrender, rather than killing them all. Since then he'd been a puppet. The Great Leader had always said the South Koreans were American puppets. Now he knew what he meant.

Raging, but keeping his face like stone, Im pulled off his wet suit top, shirt, and finally his undershirt. He kicked off his shoes. Carpenter meanwhile had taken the tube back and cracked the cap. The fat man squeezed the compound into his palm and began slathering Im's shoulders and chest with it. His flesh crawled at the man's flabby touch. He grabbed it and began rubbing it on himself.

“Hurry,” Lenson said. “We should be back in the water in fifteen minutes.”

“Just let our boy here grease those lands up,” Carpenter said, giving him a push.

“Do not push.”

“Get in there, guy. Quit stalling. Move it!”

He bared his teeth, but with face turned away. He bent and squirmed between the sharp plate at the nose of the weapon, on the temporary loading rack just aft of the tube, and the tube itself. Got angled right, hunched his shoulders, and forced his upper body into the opening.

The bronze walls were smooth and cold. Fortunately he was not fat like Rit Carpenter. The lands, the four straight
rails that lined the inside to right and left, top and bottom, dug into his shoulders and back. He was face down staring at the lower one, right arm extended in front of him. He couldn't bring it back down. Nothing but dark ahead, with his body plugging the tube. He wished he'd brought a flashlight. But he'd have had to carry it in his teeth. He might drop it and jam the weapon. No, this was better.

Thrusting with his legs, he drove himself up into the tube. They were the same as on
S-13,
which the Russians had also built. They were 533 millimeters wide and almost eight meters long. Which meant, since he was only a little over one point six meters tall, he had a long way to crawl. He wriggled ahead, using the tips of his stockinged toes against the pebbly cast-bronze interior.

He progressed several feet in, before he came to something unexpected.

In the blackness he encountered a collar or fitted inner sleeve of what felt like smooth plastic. He explored it with his fingers. His nails found a thin seam, then another, opposite the first. It was a sabot, to support the forward body of the weapon within the straight sides of the barrel. Once it was launched, the halves would drop away into the sea.

Im hesitated. How far did the sleeve extend? To the inner door? But he had to remove friction, so the missile could slide out once the tube was flooded. They'd discussed ejecting it in the usual way, but decided that would be unwise. Even without an engine firing signal, a torpedo could run a hundred yards on launch impulse alone. In a murky, unfamiliar harbor, it would be all too easy to lose.

He exhaled, and forced himself ahead once more. Into the sleeve.
Within
the sabot. Now his greased shoulders were bound all around by the solid cold grip of the dense smooth plastic. He wriggled another inch forward, pushing with his toes. Then another.

He pushed again and didn't move. His toes skidded on the rough metal, and he felt nails bend and then tear off as he kept digging in, trying to force himself forward. Then he thought better of it, and tried to back out.

His toes scraped, but found no purchase. His arms were locked inside the narrow bore.

He tried again to push ahead, and couldn't. Tried to back out, and didn't budge.

He was locked in, a greased plug of muscle and flesh and bone.

He lay unable to move, barely able to breathe, right arm stuck out in front of him into the dark. His heart squeezed on itself, then fluttered in his chest. He started to struggle, but made himself stop. An officer of the North Korean People's Army Naval Forces did not panic. Not even a traitor to the Homeland.

A faint shout outside, ringing, as if he was trapped inside a bell. He couldn't make out the words. He dug his toes in again, but succeeded only in tearing another nail. He could feel the tube around him tilting, too. They were flooding the forward tanks, putting her bow down.

He felt something move against the soles of his feet and instinctively drew them up. But it kept moving and in another second he felt it again. For a moment he didn't know what was going on. Then he did, and screamed shrilly in the closed lightless plastic that enclosed him.

They were forcing him up into the tube, using the missile as the ram. The resilient smoothness against his bleeding toes was the rubber plug that had been behind it, and now was ahead. Preventing the sharp edges of the cavitation disk from cutting him; or more likely, protecting it from his kicking feet, if he panicked. He screamed but it kept pressing against his feet, as both he and the sabot, locked together, slid slowly deeper, following his choked cry, into the echoing darkness ahead.

 

“I don't like this,” Lenson said, but he was looking at his watch again so Rit read it as:
I don't enjoy listening to hear him scream, but it's okay if you shove his ass in there.
Rit almost made a crack about it, but didn't. He was in deep enough. Maybe if he could bring this off . . . they'd practiced
this back in Norfolk, him and the Korean. Im hadn't had any problem then; all he needed now was a little help.

“How are you going to get him back out?”

“Just pull the torp back out again. I mean, the Shkval. Only now, he's got the lands greased, and with the down bubble you're putting on the bow, we flood to sea, open the outer door, and out she slides.”

“But how are you going to get
him
out? He's crammed down there.”

“He's not ‘crammed,' there's plenty of room. We used to crawl inside to grease the tubes all the time, boats I was on. Yeah, it's uphill, going backwards, but that's why he's got that line around his ankle, Commander. We can reel him back out again.”

What he didn't say was that there was a chance, not much of one, but still a chance, that if the air pressure rose as they were essentially shoving a piston down the cylinder, the outer door might pop. Air could leak out around it; they were designed to hold against outside pressure, not from inside.

In that case, Im might get a little water in his face. Rit didn't think it'd be enough to matter. But if it was, just put a strain on the line, and he'd pull right out.

“Put your shoulder behind this, Commander,” he said, getting ready to shove again. The nose and the first quarter of the missile was already inside the tube. “Sooner we get him down there, sooner we can get him back.”

 

Im's doubled knees were scraping the inside of the tube. The rough bronze was flaying him alive. He tried to fight, to push back with his outstretched hand, but could not brake the steady force against his lower torso. He shouted and it rang in his ears. He screamed again, tearing his fingernails now as he tried desperately to stop being wedged deeper in with every second. A sharp edge of something unseen sliced into his chest. His feet were being pushed over what felt like rusty metal rollers on the bottom of the tube.

Now he couldn't breathe. His lungs had no room to expand in the crushing embrace of the sleeve. He fought desperately but the inexorable pressure increased.

Something hard yet flexible jammed itself against his sideways-turned head. The tube of lubricant. He'd dropped it in his struggle. Now he couldn't bend his arm back to pick it up again. He skidded forward. The grease on his shoulders was stripping off as he advanced. He twisted but couldn't move. He screamed but only deafened himself.

They couldn't hear him now. The whole length of the weapon was between them. He was more buried than in a coffin, entombed not beneath dirt, but solid bronze and steel and plastic, tons of metal and explosives plugging him in.

They shoved again and his outstretched hand came up against something curved and solid, and even colder than the plastic that locked him in.

He panted shallowly. At least he could go no farther. The smooth outward curve his outstretched fingers glided over was the outer door. Beyond it was only the sea. In a moment they'd start pulling him back.

Then the thing under his feet shoved yet again. He fought, but it was useless. His head was slowly forced against his curled up hand. His elbow locked against his cheek and the tube wall.

The pressure was still increasing, and suddenly he realized why. They were ballasted down forward. The bow must be nearly beneath the water. And the whole weight of the weapon was pressing against his feet; compressing him against the inner door. He fought like a trapped cat to keep his weight off it, to keep from pushing it outward, but couldn't get a purchase.

A thin cold spray tickled his face. He panted, eyes straining into the utter dark. Waiting for the next shove. For the spray to increase, and spread around the circumference of the seal.

A faint whine penetrated the metal around him. After a moment he recognized it as the prop of the swimmer delivery vehicle, outside. It ran for several seconds. Then
descended the scale, like a portable drill winding down as it ran out of charge.