The Weapon (6 page)

Pirrell occupied the next forty minutes plodding through papers, trials, and projects dating back to 1940, when a Nazi scientist had proposed a supercavitating air-to-sea missile. He went on to an Aerojet General study on hydroreactive gas generation from 1962 and ventilated-cavity studies and enveloping-vapor-flow simulations someone had done around 1969. Henrickson asked a couple of detail questions; Dan and Chone were silent.

The younger scientist went on to more recent ONR and DARPA studies. Dan sat forward when he got to a program that had actually built a ten-inch-diameter supercavitating vehicle with an eye to testing it as an antitorpedo torpedo. The CAV-X had been dynamically simulated and then “in-water test-bedded,” as Pirrell said, there in Newport. In two years they'd fired it three times. Twice the vehicle had self-destructed. The third time it had run, but in an erratic corkscrew that ended by burying itself in the mucky bottom of Newport Harbor. The development team thought lengthening the body would stabilize it, but the program had been run in parallel with a high-power fuel/oxidizer combination being developed for a prospective Air Force antisatellite missile. When Congress terminated the Air Force program, funding for the Navy research had been insufficient to continue. Meanwhile, the undersea warfare community had focused on reducing signatures and using advanced digital signal processing to detect enemy subs early, so torpedo countermeasures were less urgent. Like so many other projects, it had been boxed up and shelved.

“Okay,” Dan said. “What I'm hearing is, the Russians have put together various pieces of technology, some of which we
might've developed, to build a two-hundred-knot supercavitating torpedo. But we don't have anything like it, or any program to develop one. Correct?”

Neither scientist seemed to relish his summary. “It's not exactly our choice, Commander. We can propose areas of research, but our funding points us down certain avenues and away from others. The Shkval has come up at inter-agency meetings. We have a foreign technology tracking program. But when the director proposed test-bedding something of our own, as recently as four years ago, PMS-415 downplayed it. And you may disagree, but they have sound reasoning behind that decision.”

“How so?” Henrickson said.

Pirrell went to the whiteboard. “This is no wonder weapon. It sounds scary, but when you look closely, it's less intimidating. It's fast, but it goes deaf and blind inside that bubble as soon as they fire it. Finally, power density's a critical limiter. As it always has been with torpedoes. Even with low drag, pushing metal through the water that fast takes an incredible amount of thrust. Even with hydroreactive metal gas generation—that's what we think the Russians are using—that means, short range.”

“How short?” Henrickson asked.

“We estimate Shkval at less than three thousand yards.”

“And we know this, how?” Dan asked.

The door cracked an inch or two; they all went silent.

It opened the rest of the way, and a captain in dress blues came in. He looked as if he'd just come from having his official picture taken. Dan started to get up, then noticed none of the others rose and sank back. “Gene Boscow,” said Chone. “ONR. He asked to sit in, that all right? He chairs Antimine Weaponry now, but he dates back to the CAV-X project Charlie mentioned.”

ONR was the Officer of Naval Research, which funded and administered the various labs, centers, and universities that developed technologies for the Navy. “I don't remember, I wasn't there, and I lost the T-shirt,” Boscow said, shaking
hands around the table. “We digging that up again? What's the occasion?”

Dan said, “Dan Lenson, sir. From TAG, Little Creek. We're trying to get smart on supercavitating vehicles.”

“Lenson? You said Lenson?”

“Yes, sir.”

“
Horn?
”

“Her CO.”

Boscow nodded, lips pushed out. “Heard of you. Sounds like you managed to—well. I guess that's beside the point, here. Supercavitating vehicles? I'd try Yurly Savchenko, in Kiev.”

“Well, he doesn't work for us, sir.” When they were seated again he asked Boscow, “So you were on the CAV-X project? Why didn't that work, Captain?”

“It
did
work.” Boscow sounded surprised. “Though we had vehicle control issues—how to stabilize the bubble cavity, how to vector the flow for low drag. We didn't have vectorable nozzles then. Not small enough to go on a torpedo. So we were limited to fins, and whenever the fin pierces the bubble, there's an area we couldn't dynamically model—we didn't have the computational capacity then to model turbulent flow.

“We finally figured out the corkscrewing was due to the tail hammering back and forth from one side of the cavity to the other. We had plenty of power with the TM-382—a neat little dual-thrust engine we could siphon gas off of to feed the cavity—but we sized everything for that thrust regime, and when motor development got zeroed out we couldn't go to a lower-power unit with that diameter body of rotation. The project rolled up its eyes and died.”

Henrickson pressed, “But you could have made it work?”

Boscow shrugged. “The Russians did.”

Dan asked why ONR and NUSC hadn't thought a superfast weapon worth pursuing. Boscow said, “Well, a rocket-propelled supercavitator, take away the glamor, it's really nothing but the old Mark 45 Astor—fast, straight-run, nuke
warhead—except louder and shorter-range. Today, the main use we see for something like the Shkval is in antisubmarine scenarios.”

They discussed how the weapon could be employed. Boscow said the main effect would be in a radical compression of the time available for the decisionmaker's detect-to-engage sequence—or as he called it, DLAK, for detect, localize, attack, and kill. “The loop execute time goes down to maybe a minute and a half total, instead of seven to eight minutes. The major advantage for the guy who has it, if he's being attacked, he can turn the tables, especially if your round is wire-guided, which most all of our weapons now are.”

Dan understood that; Mullaly had said much the same back at TAG. “Okay, but that's all sub on sub. What about surface ships?”

Pirrell said, “The original Henschel design, the HS 294, was an antiship weapon.”

Chone said, “As far as I can see, the only time a superfast straight-runner gives you an advantage is when you have the drop on the surface platform. Either that, or against a technologically sophisticated enemy that can jam or decoy homers.”

Dan rubbed his face, remembering the Korea Strait, the wake-homing torpedoes no one had thought the enemy had until ships had started exploding. He didn't want to face a homer that ran at two hundred knots and couldn't be decoyed. “Okay . . . thanks for backgrounding us. But we're getting to the tough part. And, like they say in the movies, this can't go outside this room.”

He waited until they nodded. “I can't address sources. But we have intel the Russians have solved the homing issue.”

Pirrell sat up straighter; Chone, who'd been polishing his glasses, stopped. Boscow narrowed his eyes and whistled. “How?”

“That's what we don't know.”

“What we thought you could tell us,” Henrickson put in. “At least, if it's possible. Because if it is, our tactical assumptions change radically.”

The scientists looked at each other. “I guess they would,” Chone said.

“It would be fearsome then,” Boscow said. He was patting his pockets as if looking for a cigarette.

The discussion went technical. Dan was fascinated at how they all seemed to drop their personalities and, moving up to the table, before long were so deep in impedance of supercavitating flows, sensor topology, wavelet theory, and pa ram e ter extraction that even Henrickson looked nonplussed. They seized paper and begin scribbling equations, or drawing rough supercavities with variously shaped bodies within them. At one point Boscow seemed convinced that a partially supercavitated body that trailed a flexible stinger might be able to register enough of a return sonar pulse that acoustic homing was possible, but Chone showed him he was wrong.

Pirrell was arguing for what he called “heterodox” solutions. “The high vehicle speed and bubble noise rules out any kind of acoustic guidance. Even water-based guidance: V sub I in a dense medium's too slow to keep up with the update rate. Thus, we're forced to conclude it has to be guided by a non-water-based system.”

“Wire guidance? I don't think so.”

“Maybe electromagnetic?”

“Translation?” Dan said.

“Radio-controlled,” Henrickson said.

“I got that, damn it. But what about the sensors? Are you saying the sensors are offboard?”

“Possibly,” the younger scientist said, but his tone was cautious. “Can't you give us anything more to work with?”

He hadn't mentioned the Admiralty, but he didn't think that had any bearing on the technical aspect. Chone and Boscow were raising their voices now, pushing equations back and forth. He raised his, too. “Uh, Chandra . . . Doctor Chone?”

“I told you—no, you'll still have to pierce the interface. And anytime you do that, there's instability in the reentrant jet intensity—yeah?”

“Uh, the impression I'm getting here—”

“Is that we'll need some time to study the question.”

“Is that you don't know?”

Chone smiled condescendingly. “It's not that we ‘don't know.' In most technical matters, Commander, once you know something can be done, you're halfway to doing it yourself. My opinion is, your most likely possibility is some kind of simplistic acoustic guidance.”

“How would that work?”

The older scientist turned a sketch for him to see. “Two fold-out vanes near the base of the vehicle. Passive transducers on the tips. A rocket jet puts out mainly high frequency sound. If the transducers are carefully tuned, enough low-frequency signal might come through that they could pick up a carrier's screws. The vehicle travels at a constant depth, so all it needs is left-right homing, bang-bang, down the middle to the target.”

“They wouldn't be at the base,” Boscow put in. “Tail fins would be right in the flow. They'd have to be on canards, up front. Unless you want a tail boom—”

“It won't have a
tail boom
. Supercavity closure means a reentrant jet—”

“Captain, we've heard from Dr. Chone and Dr. Pirrell. How would you guide this thing?” Dan interrupted. “Any other possibilities?”

Boscow squinted. “We've played around on paper. Penn State, the Applied Research Lab, I mean. Wire guidance, or fiber optic, but there's that fucking jet back there. Or, have the weapon sense the magnetic field of the target, like a magnetic mine. But that's effective only at very short ranges—fifty to sixty yards. The local fields of the weapon itself, its own steel and electrical currents, are much more powerful than the external field you're trying to pick up.”

Chone stretched in his wheelchair, so thoroughly Dan heard his spine pop. “To really answer your question, Commander? We can argue over how it could be done, but bottom line, we're just speculating. If we actually knew how it was guided, OPNAV could set money aside to evaluate it.
NAVSEA would task us, 415 or 404 would manage us, and we'd emulate it in the Weapons Analysis Facility. Reverse engineer from that, then breadboard a countermeasure. But we need details. Plans, circuit diagrams, programming, sensor specifications. Best of all—”

“A complete round.”

Chone smiled. “Exactly. Best of all.”

 

There didn't seem to be much to add to that. Pirrell offered to take him through the Weapons Analysis Facility, where he watched a disconcertingly intelligent Block III ADCAP Mark 48 warhead track a virtual Chinese Xia-class sub under twenty feet of ice. They “saw” everything the warhead saw, watched every decision it made; as far as its computer knew, it was two hundred feet down in the deep Arctic. It made him wonder how much of what he himself thought was authentic, unquestionable, might be only illusion. That took an hour, then they had tomato soup and sandwiches in Building 990. “Let's head on out of here,” Dan muttered when the scientist went back for a refill on his Coke. Henrickson hesitated, but finally nodded.

They stopped on the way to the gate to look at the bay and the great spidery bridge that vaulted across it. The Narragansett glittered in the noon light, a gray-green expanse that made Dan wish he was sailing now.

 

The grass on Warden Field was greener than he remembered it; the sky, the hill-walled Severn even lovelier. The steady bass thud of the Naval Academy Band echoed from the walls of the alumni auditorium as the first glittering of the oncoming parade swung into view.

He hadn't come back to Annapolis that often over the years. Walking through the Yard with Blair on his arm, memories surfaced. When he'd walked these bricks as a mid, women had been a mystery, a yearning, seen only on weekends or when you went home on leave. Now on the carefully tended walks young women marched in dark blue, their faces as serious as those of the men.

“Did you ever think, when you were here, there'd be women?” his wife asked.

“Never crossed my mind. And if it had, I'd have hated the idea.”

She grinned. “Changed your opinion?”

“Worked with too many of 'em to think they're not just as good as the guys.”

In her heels Blair was taller than he was. Her hair was shining blond and she slouched, even standing. He'd met her in the Persian Gulf, when she'd been the chief adviser to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Now she was undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness in an administration as unpopular with the military as any had ever been. Which puzzled Dan, as she seemed to spend most of her time fighting for better pay, better housing, increased readiness . . . though she didn't automatically believe the latest and greatest missile or radar was worth any price. When she got angry, people got out of her way. He'd seen her intimidate four-star generals. She'd turned that emotionless logic on him a couple of times, and he didn't relish it happening again. But she didn't hold a grudge, and when they argued, making up made it worth staying.