The Weapon (43 page)

Forget that, stick to getting out of here. The flank bell was taking effect. They were tearing along now, pushing a big bow wave, though still with that eerie absence of vibration. He gave Vaught another course correction. They were in the narrows. A sand spit spread to starboard, the peninsula to port.

Yeah, there were troops, personnel carriers, too, and they opened up all at once, muzzle flashes and then a solid wall
of tracers, rising and then descending like a flight of arrows. He turtled violently, slamming his forehead into a helmet rack. He was loving the splinter plating until something paper-punched it with a clang like a cracked bell and pounded a big dent into the far side of the cockpit too before falling to the grating, spinning and skittering before chattering away down into the sheer void.

He backed into the aftermost corner, putting a radar head between him and the incoming, and screwed his face into the binocs again. The breakwaters beckoned, outstretched arms fading into the dimness. Half a mile ahead the lights at their ends glimmered tangerine and turquoise, haloed by the blowing dust. He twisted the telegraph knob again, just to send the message he needed all the power they could give him, and flicked switches on a darkened instrument that might or might not be a fathometer repeater. The hydrography had shown shallows along the breakwater, but he couldn't remember where. If they ran aground, they were finished.

The fire grew more accurate. Slugs slammed into steel so near his head it felt like taking jabs from Evander Holyfield or Mike Tyson, but he centered the bow between the lights, adjusting till they ran as if on tracks down the midline of the channel, the gray rock and concrete of the breakwater equally distant in the blowing dust on either hand. Then retreated into the trunk, clinging to the rungs of the ladder as another banging whanged and jarred and echoed, like someone flailing on steel with an I-beam; more projectiles walking up the sail. White flashes jagged his vision, the clamor was beyond deafening, but unlike the splinter plating, the trunk's walls were thick as the pressure hull; nothing short of a major caliber shell would penetrate it. He clung, eyes squeezed shut, enduring. If he could get outside the breakwater, get some air cover, the fighters could keep the destroyers off their backs long enough for them to rendezvous with
San Francisco
. After that, the Islamic Republic of Iran could have its sub back and welcome to it.

He counted a hundred, then popped his head up again. The bluegreen pulse of the eastern light strobed gray wet
rocks, breaking surf foaming at their feet. Past that was the darkness of the open sea.

Open sea! Out there Mangum and
San Francisco
waited. The air assist would be here soon. They were going to make it. He gave Vaught five degrees to starboard and retreated to his rabbit hole again, wishing he had water. The dry wind, the gritty dust made his throat feel like a washboard road.

A minute later someone tugged at his bootie. Dan looked into Oberg's upturned features. “Commander? You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Carpenter's got the scope up.”

Dan looked aft. He hadn't heard it extend, but the mast loomed above his head. “Yeah?”

“He's looking out ahead of us. There's two flashing lights out there at about one-zero-zero. One's farther away than the other.”

“Two in line? That's the buoyed channel.”

“Uh-huh. Anyway he's on the scope. So you can take cover, if you want.”

“I'm fine here, Teddy. But have him look aft. See what those cans are doing. Vaught okay on the helm?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Did you get hold of the task force? Tell me they're launching F-18s.”

“Well, Honest Houston answered right up. Guarding the freq. Brought them up to speed on what happened and what we had to do.”

Dan sucked air but choked on dust. “Great. When will the air cover be here?”

Oberg averted his gaze. “Maybe you better get on the horn, all right? Apply some of that commander power. 'Cause what they're telling me is, there isn't going to be any.”

 

Standing in the cover of the sail, the SatCom handset tight to his ear, he could just make out words over the hiss of sand-laden wind. The hollow ringing voice was that of a task force staffer three hundred miles to the north. She was saying, “That's correct, Quick Snatch. The Iraqis shot down two Brit
Tornados enforcing the no-fly zone. We hit the radar sites, but now they're preparing a ground force to push down the road and clobber the Shiites again. Maybe even with gas. The UN's approved pushing the zone all the way to Baghdad. The Air Force is scrambling out of Prince Sultan. Over.”

A stray bullet clattered on thin metal. Somebody back there was still firing, though their target was past the breakwater. He screwed the phone tighter into his skull, perspiration greasing the plastic with a gritty paste. “And that's got what to do with us? Over.”

“The battle group's being pulled up to Kuwait. Getting in range for backup strikes. We're cranking on knots even as we speak. Over.”

“But you're on standby for us. You've got orders to—”

“Negative.”

“What do you mean, negative?”

“I mean, we don't have actual orders concerning your mission. Not through our combatant commander. We never did. Just back channel Navy, far as I know. Over.”

The deck was canting, picking up a roll. Dan leaned past the sail and looked back through the darkness. He couldn't see clearly through the scudding dust, but behind them, inside the basin, lights were separating from the piers. The frigates were backing out, turning to follow. Reacting faster than he'd hoped they would. One set of red and green and white already seemed closer.

A flash lit the dark. A detonation rolled across the water. Something banshee-howled over their heads. It exploded ahead with a flash and seconds later, the distinctive crack of high explosive.

He swallowed. One of the frigates had managed to man up a mount. The first shell had been long, but hadn't been that far off in azimuth. Drop a few degrees, they could do that with whatever optical sight they were equipped with, and the next projectile could burst on the sail itself. The dust was obscuring things, but all those gunners had to do was catch them with a searchlight, and sooner or later a shell would arrive with their Social Security numbers on it.

“Uh, this is Quick Snatch. We're in trouble here. Operators need backup. You need to kick this up to TF Actual and get somebody detached to give us some support here. Over.”

The voice turned apologetic. “Understand, will re-present, but we're already running north. Try to hold your Indians off until we can clarify the situation. Honest Houston, out.”

Dan glanced at the faces around him. No way they could outrace frigates. They'd be on them like pit bulls, and in not very many minutes, either. “Uh, Houston, stand by. This is Quick Snatch, Quick Snatch, stay on the line, Houston. Indians in hot pursuit here. We need air support. Air support! Do you copy? Houston, do you copy?”

The only answer was a hiss like the sand-freighted wind.

Dan fought a blankness in his head, an absence where thought should be. Disappointment, stress, and the incredible noise seemed to have stopped his neurons firing. But this was exactly when he had to become an icy Jacques Futrelle thinking machine. He peered ahead, picking up a steady flash on the horizon. If it was the channel marker, it was pretty far off to port. Belatedly his brain kicked in again. The channel out into the Strait angled east to avoid a large island. Lorok? Larak? Anyway it was shallow here, real shallow, and they couldn't afford to touch.

He ducked inside and slid down the trunk.

 

In the control room, keeping one ear out for the next order from above, Rit stared at markings in two different languages, neither of which made any sense. “Okay,” he mumbled. “Let's look this cocksucker over.”

It was obviously the ballast control panel, but not like any he'd seen. The lights were white and red, not red and green like on U.S. boats. Okay, let's say red still meant an open valve. Red was the color of danger, and, aboard a sub, a valve open when it shouldn't be was as dangerous as it came. Then white would mean closed, safe, good to go.

Right? He glanced at the leather-sheathed bench where Vaught perched, nudging the rudder control once in a while. Im stood tiptoe behind him, keeping them on course. Those controls weren't like the wheel and plane arrangements he was used to, either. They looked more like what you'd use driving a tank. But the guy seemed to be coping. He was on the right course, anyway.

Lenson slid down the ladder two-handed from above, landing both boots at once with a thump that jolted the floorplates. “Carpenter!”

Fucker sure was noisy. “Here, sir.”

“Can you take us under?”

Vaught's head snapped round. Rit grunted, not surprised, he'd been figuring they'd get to that sooner or later, but not feeling too hot about it. Not in a boat he didn't know, guys who didn't know the systems, labels he couldn't even fucking
read.
“What's the matter, sir? Thought we were going to meet up with some backup out here.”

“There's not going to be any support. Not for a while yet.”

Lenson explained about trouble at the far end of the Gulf, the task force pulled off to bail out the Air Force and the Brits. His eyes kept magneting to the periscope, though, so Rit stepped to it and pulled the handles down. But the commander didn't go to it, instead snapped his eyes away. “Can you take us under?” he repeated. “We figured out the ballast tank controls, didn't we?”

“Well, yessir, got that doped out. The manual controls. But we can't run this boat manually. Not with eight hands aboard, and none of us qualified on—”

“Can you activate the hydraulics? What do we need to do to submerge?”

He cleared his throat and hitched up his wet suit bottoms. “Uh, well, got to have two things to submerge, sir. Ballast control and plane control. You can get your head under with just the tanks, but you want planes too. Or you're always running back and forth, too heavy or too light, you never get the bubble just right, you'll broach.”

Vaught put in, “I think these are the planes.” He patted two yellow boxes at his right hand as he sat on the steering bench.

Rit frowned. “Don't look like 'em to me. No markings for angle down, angle up.”

“Yeah, but watch.” Vaught rotated a forward lever that looked as if it had come off an old Ford tractor. A hum, a rattle of fluid pressure ratcheting against resistance. They waited. No question, Rit had to admit the deck slanted a little more.

“Okay, then that lever like it just aft of it—”

“Stern planes. What I figure.”

“We have two tin cans coming up our ass—”

“Lemme work on it, Commander, okay?”

Lenson went forward, and Rit went back to the panels and gauges and lines that covered the whole starboard side of the compartment. Gleaming brass, paint in six different colors, cables, valves, switches. He murmured to the Korean, “It's like some fucking nightmare, you know? Where everything looks familiar but when you look close it's not what you're used to at all.”

Im pointed at his ear and Rit nodded, like yeah, I know, high suck factor, right? But then the guy pointed at the panel with the big black switches to the right of the BCP and mimed each of them going over, one after the other, then did with his hands like they were going under, like a kid playing submarine in a pool.

He studied those switches, sweat running down his back. It wasn't just the wet suit, either. The voice of his old chief of the boat was bitching in his brain. A veteran of three war patrols in
Tirante
who, if there wasn't an officer around, would bounce your forehead off a valve handle if you did something stupid, to make the lesson stick. You didn't crack a valve, you didn't know
exactly
what it let flow and how fast.

He pinched his lip between thumb and forefinger, frowning. Gotta think here . . . the black switches had the exact same squigglies as the light banks. Okay. To the right of the switches was a single box with one big red button. The
squigglies on it were red, too. That had to be the “chicken switch,” for emergency blow. And back of that, the spaghetti piping for the old manual-style HP air banks. He put his finger on the red button and mimed blowing out his cheeks, looking up. Im nodded enthusiastically.

“We're gonna do this,” Rit called to Vaught. “He wants us dived, we're gonna dive.”

“Just keep it fucking real, all right?” the SDV driver said. “It's only about thirty fucking meters deep out here. Stick us in the mud and the camel jockeys are gonna run all our cards.”

“Yeah, yeah. You're the asshole on the planes. Stand by to fucking dive.” He jogged to the forward door and stuck his head through. Lenson was talking to Wenck, making quick motions with his hands. “Commander! Wanna give this a try? We still got guys topside!”

Lenson came aft fast and yelled up the ladder. Rit winced again. They were really going to have to quiet the commander down, if they were going to run submerged. He muttered, “Make sure they dog the hatch tight when they come down. There's gonna be a light around it someplace. Make sure that light goes green—I mean, white. Or whatever color it goes to once they get it dogged.”

He was watching the panel and when the light went from red to white he nodded, bingo, and marked it with his finger and looked around. Im handed him a china pencil he'd found somewhere and he blocklettered in “CT ACCESS HATCH” under the squiggles as the two SEALs and Henrickson dropped down the ladder. “Okay, sir, here it is.”

“Talk to me.”

“We don't have a diving officer so I'm gonna be Chief of the Boat, got it? That means you tell me what you want to do and I figure out how to do it, okay? I'm gonna keep Im here with me and I'm gonna keep Vaught on the helm. But we're gonna need guys back aft on the main motor switchboard and the electric panel.”