The Weapon (39 page)

He had more pressing problems. He lay for several seconds, feeling the tantalizing tickle as the spray played over his closed eyelids. He tasted it. Salt. Sea. Rubber. The same dank smell as the exposed, mucky banks of the Yalu he'd waded along years before.

Something tightened around his ankle. It was the retrieval line. He flinched, then hastily searched around with his head. His lips contacted the tube of lubricant. He bent his right wrist back as far as it would go, then farther, and finally got his fingers on it. The cap was off. He splurted a glob where he judged the lower land should be and rubbed it over every metal surface he could reach with the side of his wrist.

The smooth rubber that had been pressing on the soles of his feet retreated. He could move his toes now. The air was cool on them. The line tugged again. His leg extended, pulled by it. He panted, eyes closed. In another moment they'd start pulling him out.

Another yank, and the bight of the line slipped over his ankle, and, before he could react, over his foot and off.

He lost control then and fought the walls around him. His back flexed against it and he screamed and screamed. But no one could hear him. No one could reach him. He was trapped. They'd leave him here, face downward, in the slowly flooding tube.

He stared into the dark, no longer feeling the stinging spray in his wide-open eyes, trickling down his face, slowly building toward his mouth, his nose, as he lay helpless.

There was no point in screaming anymore.

 

Dan looked at his watch again. Sweat broke under his wet suit top. Maybe he should get the others in the water. Stay here himself with just Carpenter and Im. If the patrol came, at least some would get away.

“Oh, shit,” Carpenter muttered.

He looked up to see the loop of line drop out of the tube.
It glistened with lubricant. Carpenter bent to stare inside. “Uh, Commander—”

Dan pushed him out of the way and aimed his Maglite up the lumen of the barrel. Dimly, at the far end, twelve, fifteen feet in, he could just make out the bottoms of Im's feet. The white cotton socks were stained dark. Blood? He couldn't be sure, not enough light was getting that far down the tube, the bronze walls soaked up the beam. “Who tied that knot, Rit? Was it you?”

“A bowline. I know, you're gonna say why not a slipknot. But a slipknot slips.”

“Let's not argue. We've got to get him out of there.”

“Commander?” Henrickson said, from back by the hatch to compartment two.

“Not now, Monty. Look around. We need something like a boathook. Something we can snag his feet with.”

But even as he said it he realized nothing short of a gaff hook, stuck through flesh, would get the Korean out of there. Even as he thought this he was feeling behind the missile, fingers looking for the cord. When he came up with it he felt instantly why it had slipped. It was greasy as hell. He unlocked the bowline and started to strip the knot out, then changed his mind and swapped ends on it and put a slip knot and a keeper in the other end and left the bowline where it was.

They couldn't leave Im in there much longer. He must be going nuts.
He
certainly would be.

Then he realized, even as he stripped his skivvy shirt off, that there was only one way to get him out.

“Commander.
Commander!
”

“Give me the other tube of that shit, Rit. It's the only way.”

A voice behind them said, “You're not going to get him out, Commander.”

Dan turned his head to Kaulukukui, who looked grim. The big Hawaiian held a silenced pistol. “Stand aside, sir.”

“You stand aside, Sumo. I'm not fucking
shooting
him!” Dan finished greasing his shoulders and positioned himself in front of the opening. He held the slip knot up in one arm, then raised the other up, too. “Run the weapon in and push
me in front of it. Just like we did with him. Only don't use the plug! I'll hook my foot over the cav disk and you can pull me out. Then we'll take a strain on his line.”

“What if it slips off again?”

“We'll do it over. Until we get him back out.”

He felt frantic, imagining himself in there as Im was, hopeless as Im must feel. Carpenter, Henrickson, and Kaulukukui were all protesting. He said over his shoulder, “Get ready to extract. All the pubs, all the software. We just can't take the fucking hardware, that's all. Let's just all get back without getting caught, all right?”

They were still talking, trying to get their hands on him, when he put both arms into the opening. He had to get the Korean out of there.

Then he stopped. Overcome by a sudden memory. Another time he'd pushed his way into a dark tube. A cable tunnel. In Baghdad. Under the Tigris River. With guys in front of him, guys behind, water in the lowest section . . . Five had gone in, four had come out. . . .

No. Not this time.

Gathering every ounce of courage he owned, he climbed in.

Only he didn't. He got his arms and upper body in, only to hang up. “Fuck.
Fuck,
” he muttered. He hung there, kicking. How ridiculous he must look, ass sticking out into the torpedo room, but the thought was followed by a panicked horror.

Hands on his belt, hauling him out. He staggered and felt the razor edge of the cavitation disc slice his back open. Carpenter was yelling in his ear, “Wait, sir. I got an idea. The outer door.”

“The what? The outer door?”

“Yessir. We're ballasted down. That outer door's about fifteen feet below the waterline now.”

“So?” Dan rubbed his shoulder where the lands had bitten, feeling blood slick on his back. “What about it?”

“That's seven pounds per square inch. Differential between outside and inside?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Henrickson. “But won't that—”

“Shut up, Monty. What are you saying, Carpenter?”

“I'm saying, if I open the outer door, it'll blow him back into the compartment.”

“You're shitting me,” said Kaulukukui. “It'll
drown
him.”

“He'll die in there if we don't. If he can hold his breath for two seconds he'll be back here in the torpedo room. There's no place else for him to go.”

“Can't you blow him out with air?”

Carpenter said, “Sure, we could blow him out. Eject him. But then he'll be out there in the dark, under the pier, with his eardrums blown in and his orientation shot.
That's
when he drowns.”

“I think he's right,” said the SEAL.

Dan frowned. “But isn't opening the inner and outer doors at the same time, uh, interlocked? Impossible?”

“I can jam this fucking kluge no sweat, Commander. This isn't like one of our setups, where it's idiotproof. Butt end of a wrench right”—he pointed—“right here'll do it.”

“And that won't flood the torpedo room?”

“Shouldn't.” Carpenter spread his hands. “If we only crack it a smidgeon, use the hand crank, not the hydraulics, and close it right away. But if the fucker jams, yeah, it might.”

Dan rubbed his shoulder. A desperate measure, but he had no choice. No. He had one. To let Kaulukukui shoot the Korean.

Screw that. “The rest of you, back to the control room. Get your shit topside to extract. Just Carpenter and me.” He turned to the submariner, who was staring at the interlock, rubbing his hands. “Okay, Rit,” he said. “Do it.”

 

Im was lying in the dark, holding his head up against the top of the tube. His mind was a bright moth fluttering against a darkening window.

Then he heard the grinding. He opened his eyes, but only got more spray in them. He blinked, helpless.

Another fine cold spray tickled the other side of his face.

He blinked it away and listened to the grinding, like something turning and turning next to his ear.

The next moment his whole body convulsed. A last despairing effort to unlock itself from the grip around it. But he still couldn't move, not a millimeter.

They were opening the outer door. The grinding was the transmission shaft slowly revolving outside the tube. The grating of the worm gear going around, that drove the segmented arc that pivoted the door outward, at the same time the shutter door slowly retracted—

Pinned, helpless, he took one last breath.

With terrible suddenness the water drove around the disengaged edges, past the gasket, and struck him in the face. Its power was overwhelming and it propelled him backward so fast he couldn't register what was happening. Skin and clothes tore on the lands. Two red-hot needles drove into his brain as his eardrums imploded and water drove into his skull.

Then in a gush of water and light he was staggering backward from the tube, a weird high keening in his ears like the angry spirits that haunted graveyards. Hands grabbed him. Water poured from the open tube. The Americans were slamming it closed, twisting valves. He made sounds but couldn't hear himself. His legs jerked. The commander was shouting, mouth open, but nothing came over the keening. It went on and on. Iron spears were forcing their way up behind his eyeballs. He clapped his hands over his ears and suddenly everything inside him wanted out. He bent over and vomited into the water.

 

“Get him aft, Sumo, aft,” Dan snapped.

“You want me to crank this outer door shut? Or leave it open?”

He stared at the foaming flood that was pouring in, two feet across, trying to compute what to do. They had the pubs, everything out of the safes. Wenck had the fire control software downloaded. If they had pubs and software, maybe
they could do without the missile. That was what Chone and Pirrell needed to fox it. So: forget running it out through the tube, forget the tow line to the SDV. If they got out now, they just might beat the returning patrol.

He opened his mouth to snap orders, but one more thing occurred to him. He'd thought of planting a charge on one of the torpedoes, to sink the sub and cover their action. But there weren't any torpedoes here. Just letting it sink wouldn't be quite as final, but it'd still take the threat out of circulation for months, if not years. And maybe by the time they raised the bodies they'd be so decomposed . . . Not a nice image, but it might cover their tracks.

“Want me to close this outer door, Commander?” Carpenter asked again. Dan came back to see the analyst and the sonarman staring at him. Sumo and Im were back in the other compartment, with the SEAL giving the Korean first aid aft of the watertight door. The water was foaming beneath the deckplates. Unless he was mistaken, the deck was taking on an even more ominous lean.

“Leave it open. Sumo! How's he doing?”

“Deaf, but he'll live,” the SEAL yelled back.

The water roared in faster as the bow sank and the pressure increased. The solid pillar of froth and murky sea jutted out into the room, streaming over the weapon, which vibrated as it hung on the chain hoist. We can still pull this mission out of our ass, Dan thought. Im might be deaf, but he wasn't dead, and eardrums grew back. All they had to do was get out. He took a breath to give the order.

“Commander. Commander!”

Wenck's head poked through the watertight door. He looked shocked. “What, Donnie?” Dan yelled. “I told you to get topside. Get your gear on. Sumo! We're extracting!”

“Oberg's calling down from topside, sir. On the voice tube.”

“What?”

“Bad news, sir. The pilot of the SDV says it's dead.”

Dan was looking at Im, how he sat slumped, eyes leaden, plucking at his ears. Blood was trickling down his neck,
from his chest, from his feet. “What are you talking about?” he snapped.

“The battery, he can't get power. And he says . . . Obie says . . . he says . . .”

“Lights on the pier,” Kaulukukui shouted from the control room. “Headlights, coming down the pier.”

“Did you copy me, sir? What I said?”

Wenck's voice shook. Dan stood kneading his cheeks, watching green water surge and boil up through the deckplates, flooding toward the watertight door where he stood.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “I hear you. I hear you both.”

The first thing Dan did was snap at Henrickson to close the inner door to tube 3. He slapped the ballast wheel. “Close this, too.” Then bent-and-hurdled through the watertight door heading aft, thinking, through some obscure chain of reasoning, of Rumpelstiltskin.

The control room. He found Kaulukukui in the navigation cubby, fins slung over his back, gloves on the ladder into the sail. “Where you headed, Sumo,” he muttered, noticing only now Wenck had followed him aft.

“SDV's tits down. V-dag can't get the prop to turn over.”

“V-dag,” for some reason, was Vaught, the vehicle's pilot. “The battery?” Dan asked him.

“My guess. But who knows.” Kaulukukui looked up into the inverted well of the trunk. “Gotta get up on deck. Obie says there's a truck headed our way.”

“If our vehicle's hosed, we're going to have to extract overland.”

“That's the plan.” Kaulukukui took two rungs. “I'll report back.”

Dan nodded, then grabbed his bootie before he got out of reach. “Can we swim out of this harbor, Sumo?”

The SEAL didn't look down. “Obie and me could. I don't
think your guys would make it. In the dark. With them dropping antiswimmer explosives, boats swarming all over? You think so, Commander?”

He let the foot go.

 

Thirty feet above, Oberg crouched in the cramped cockpit atop the sail, hand on the open voice tube. But he wasn't speaking. He was frowning down from his eyrie toward a point half a mile away. Where one after the other, three trucks followed their headlights, turning slowly at a crossroads or traffic circle to the northeast. They'd come out of what intel had labeled as a housing or barracks compound to the east of the base a few minutes before. Stopped for a time, stationary, then rolled again.