The Weapon (50 page)

In the sonar compartment Carpenter was watching a screen and making a plot on a tablet. Monty showed him the graph. He glanced it and grunted. “Not much of one.”

“Enough to hide?”

“Depends how good the stack operators are topside. And how lucky we get . . . tell the commander.”

Lenson was slumped on the bench behind Vaught, eyes
closed, sweat running down his face. They both looked dead. “Dan,” Monty said.

“Yeah.” He opened his eyes, and Monty showed him the paper. He blinked and cleared his throat. “Rit? What's our bottom depth?”

“Here? Sixty-seven meters.”

A shaking hand smoothed the chart. Lenson checked his watch, touched his eye, which lurked deep in inflamed, puffy skin, and slowly made a pencil notation. Monty saw they were headed west, past an island with an oil loading terminal and pipelines leading inland. Beyond it the Gulf opened out, but the depth numbers still weren't encouraging: 75, 88, 68. The deepest parts lay closest to the Iranian coast.

“Come to sixty,” Lenson muttered. The planesman didn't react for a second, but then seemed to hear. He shook himself, reached out, pushed the plane controls forward. Then racked them again, forward and back, like someone who wasn't used to a manual transmission trying to make it shift.

 

Dan tried to focus past the headache, but it was difficult even to see. Heading west, five knots . . . “What's wrong, Vaught?”

“She won't hold depth anymore. Like the planes are locked up, don't want to move.”

Dan remembered what Oberg had said about the hydraulics. He felt as if he was in a hydraulic ram himself, being squeezed smaller and smaller, with fewer and fewer options. “Where's that frigate, Rit?”

“Still closing.”

“Control, Electrical.”

“Control, go.”

“Reading zero on aux hydraulic pressure.”

“Copy. We've lost the planes up here.” Dan pressed the switch again. “You've got to get it back, Teddy. We're not going anywhere without the planes, without the rudder.”

“We need time. And somebody back here to translate these schematics for us.”

Dan lurched up. Headed for the sonar room, but almost fell before he got there. He clung to the periscope stand. His vision swam. He panted. Got a little strength back, and went on.

Carpenter was hunched over the screen. A curious pattern of numbers lay traced across three sheets of his tablet, which he'd torn out and taped together. “We've got to find someplace to put her down, Rit.”

“Might have found a hidey hole.” The sonarman tapped the paper. “Down to sixty-plus-some meters. Two hundred yards to either side, it's thirty meters. Looks soft, though. A couple of sharp returns that might be rock, but mostly mud and sand.”

“That's not on the chart.”

“But it's there. Half a mile back. Bearing zero nine five. Would have called you, but I kept hoping for something deeper.”

Dan caught the web of his thumb in his teeth and chewed it. The headache made it nearly impossible to see. He kept wanting to sit down and drift off. Some demon in his brain kept whispering that it didn't matter what they did. He panted, trying to force oxygen into his sluggish blood.

“Losing depth control,” Vaught called. “Rising.”

“Right rudder,” Dan called.

“Losing rudder control.”

He hit the bitch box. “Electrical, Control. Teddy: we need hydraulic pressure.”

Oberg sounded drugged. “No shit, Commander. But I got to figure what's wrong before I can fix it.”

He wanted to give up, sit down, drift off into the peace. He bit painfully at his own flesh. “Then we'll maneuver with the engines. Left motor ahead standard. Right motor stop.”

“Port ahead standard, starboard stop, aye.”

“Still going up. Passing forty meters.”

“Im! Get us heavy. Get that across to him, Monty. Help him out on the ballast control.”

He dragged his attention back to the gyrocompass. It was rotating only gradually, ticking off degrees like a roulette
wheel coming to rest, but it was rotating. He did the math in a brain that seemed to be only able to light up one room at a time. The others were going dark one after the other. Assume a turning circle of a hundred yards. Half a mile back to the depression. He dragged sweat out of his eyes, then jabbed the inflamed tissue with a fingernail. He nearly screamed, but the world sharpened. “Steady . . . steady on . . . uh, one-zero-zero.”

“I'll try, but—”

A thud, then another. Im, flooding the forward and middle groups to counteract their surfaceward drift. The air racketing away down the lines sounded weaker. They were using the last of it. Would they be able to blow the tanks, when the time came to surface? Another faraway clunk as the valves closed. Dan watched the depth gauge. It hovered, then slowly reversed. He blinked back blackness, checking the pencil mark on his chart where Carpenter's valley must be.

“Passing zero nine zero. Rudder doesn't respond.”

“Electrical, Control: both ahead one-third.”

“Ahead one-third.” Sumo, with Oberg muttering in the background.

“Descent rate, one meter per minute,” Im announced, too loud. Henrickson made a shushing motion.

“Electrical, Control: starboard ahead standard, port engine stop.” Dan checked his watch, let twenty seconds tick past. “All stop.” The Hawaiian repeated the order. “Rit, get a ping. See that depression yet?”

“Dead ahead. Two hundred yards.”

“Secure active sonar. Flood forward.”

Hiss. Thud. A chuckle of water far away. The harsh rapid breathing of frightened men.

A slithering, like a great python winding through a sandy forest. A lurch. A bump. Then scraping, lurching. Stones rattling past. The nose tilting down. His eye was epoxied to the depth gauge. Forty-eight meters. Fifty. They kept sliding, the rattling intensifying. Fifty-two. Fifty-four. Fifty-eight.

The rattling, hissing, and lurching ebbed. Dan stared at the gauge, willing it to keep going down. The higher the
walls of this undersea valley rose above them, the less detectable they'd be.

Sixty.

Sixty-two.

The hull rocked and came to rest. He reached up and tapped the gauge. Something creaked up forward. The needle rested.

Sixty-three meters.

Utter silence, save for a faint crepitation as the live load of the sub's steel transferred from the ballast tanks to the keel.

A hum from all around. Then a rapid, continuous beat. The whish, whish they'd heard twice before, as the frigate had gone over.

They crouched in the dimness. Not a man spoke. Im rubbed his stomach, squinting. Vaught slumped, staring at the useless controls. Only Carpenter, frowning as he listened, seemed still to have something useful to do. “It's that prick with the nicked blade,” he whispered.

Sumo and Oberg slipped into the control room and hung from piperuns on the overhead, ears cocked.

A ping slashed across the hull. Every man winced, but no one moved otherwise. The sound repeated itself. It traveled from ahead to overhead and dwelt, growing louder. Dan took one deep breath after another, trying not to scream.

The sound dwindled. It receded aft.

“Moving away,” Carpenter muttered.

They stirred, exhaled, looked blankly at one another. Dan cleared his throat. “Didn't see us. Not on that pass. Maybe we'll get lucky.”

“So what's the plan?”

“Wait for local sunset, by the clock. Then surface and pretend we're a fishing dhow headed for home.”

“Headed where? The task force?”

“No,” Dan whispered. “Straight in to Abu Dhabi. If the Iranians don't like it, at least we'll get everybody off alive. But we're not out of this yet. We've got to get the hydraulic system back, get steering and depth control, before we go
up. Find where they stow these oxygen candles and light more of them. And keep working on the Shkval.”

They sat for a few moments, each alone with his thoughts. Then slowly hoisted themselves to their feet, and got to work.

Teddy rolled out from under the pump, too exhausted even to curse. The fatigue was weird, he'd never felt anything like it, even at basic underwater demolition school. His chest felt like it was in a vise, and he had to stop too often to get his breath.

He and Kaulukukui had been on the hydraulics for hours. First finding what was wrong—a stoppage somewhere upstream of the main supply and return manifolds. Locating what turned out to be a clogged filter, then figuring how to get it out. Cleaning and replacing it, recharging the pressure tanks, then getting wise too late that they should have closed the valves above and below the housing. With them open while they were cleaning the filter, air had leaked into the lines.

With Monty on the manual, they'd had to open the bleeder valves one at a time, first in the power generation system, then through the whole ship, tracing each line and cracking each valve, which were almost always snugged tight against the overhead, and venting air till they got a solid squirt of oil. Which was why he reeked of hydraulic fluid, old bilge water, and sweat.

“So that's it?” Monty asked him.

“Find out in a minute. If the accumulator charges and everything downstream cycles. If it doesn't, there's more air in the system we didn't find.”

Behind him Monty closed the manual, which he'd been translating, sentence by sentence, to the men turning the wrenches. He caught a cough in his fist, glancing at the overhead, which was dripping with condensation. Then shuddered suddenly. He'd been doing that for a couple of hours now, his rib muscles and long muscles bunching and ticcing.

They'd been at it the whole time they'd been on the bottom, with two short breaks in the control room for sandwiches, hot strong tea, and tense discussions of air compressors, pneumatic-hydraulic accumulators, and battery cooling systems. Fortunately they'd found more oxygen candles in the after torpedo room. Along with a rack of bulkhead clips, half of which were filled with machined aluminum cylinders thirty inches long and seven inches in diameter, painted chrome yellow with black stripes.

Opening one cautiously, Kaulukukui had found it lined with soft rubber. A smaller, sheet-metal cylinder nestled inside. And inside that, when he pried the spring-loaded top open, a stack of soft olive-green biscuits. Since the rack was beside an ejection tube, they'd agreed the green cakes were some kind of bubble-type countermeasures.

They'd lit off the candles, and for a while it had helped. But the steadily worsening headaches, their irritability and stupidity and sluggishness were due not to lack of oxygen, but too much carbon dioxide. Unfortunately they hadn't found any carbon dioxide absorbent at all. They'd traced out the air circulation and found where the sodalime canister should have gone, but there was none there or in any of the storerooms. Either they'd never been put aboard, or had all been used up and not replaced.

Monty coughed again, his heart racing and fluttering. Unfortunately what killed people in closed spaces was usually not oxygen deprivation but carbon dioxide poisoning. Which they were all on the edge of—the big Hawaiian worst of all, for some reason. Kaulukukui's face was flushed, his
hands twitched uncontrollably, and when he had to lift something he all but choked. Monty felt disoriented and panicky. Although it was hard to separate out symptomatic panic from the very real dread he felt whenever Carpenter would whisper that another ship was approaching.

If they stayed down much longer they could look forward to convulsions, unconsciousness, death, no matter how much oxygen they generated. They had to flush the boat, get fresh air in here, or they were finished.

“Okay.” Teddy wiped his hands on a piece of rag. “I'm gonna go forward, see if this fucking works.”

Sixty feet forward, Dan pressed the button that controlled the periscope. With the faintest whir the steel column began to move. It faltered halfway up, then smoothed out. Of course, he couldn't see anything, the objective was still many fathoms down, but still he smiled. “Seems to work.”

Teddy fitted a wrench to the vent fitting on the unit cylinder on the 'scope. A jet of froth spurted. When it turned to fluid he twisted it shut again. “Good to go. V-Dag, give the rudder a shot. Full cycle, all the way left, right, back to centerline.”

“Where's Sumo?” Dan asked him. They were all whispering.

“One of the torpedo room bunks. I told him to get next to one of those rebreathers and lie down. Got her cycled? Do the planes next. I'm gonna go back aft. Monty, what have I got left to bleed?”

“Control cylinders, change valve, telemotor pump, then all the lines from the telemotor to the control cylinders. ‘Cycle again and repeat until no further air appears.' Remember the change valve has to be set to this word—”

“You show me, I'll set it.”

They headed aft. Dan, left with Vaught and Carpenter and Im, cycled the scope again. It worked perfectly.

He leaned against it, waiting for his heart to stop palpitating, thighs to stop shuddering. The headache was constant now, a black wedge driven between the hemispheres of his brain. He made himself review the situation step by step. No
one topside: the frigate's screws had faded to northward hours before. Since then they'd heard only the distant rumble of tankers, passing to the north and east, and now and then the tapping whine of the motorized dhows ubiquitous in the Gulf, fishing and trading from Oman to Iraq. Pneumatics and now hydraulics back on line. He checked his watch—2034 local, the last light should be fading into the dusky rose of a Hormuz sunset—and cleared his throat. “Rit. You sure there's no other way to get this stuff out of the air?”

Carpenter leaned slowly out of the sonar shack. “What?”

“I said, no other way to purge CO
₂
?”

“We been through this, Commander. If we don't have scrubbers, got to ventilate the boat. That'll take fifteen minutes, if we have the blowers lined up when we break the surface, pop both hatches, and blow from forward to aft.”