The Weapon by David Poyer Page A

stiff in the wind, the motionless boats, the distant golden spires, all were the same.
    He lifted his Seiko and caught the sweep hand. A little over thirty seconds. He raised his eyes to the river, then returned them to the watch. He did this again, then lifted his head, and stared at the faraway barge.
    A brilliant point ignited, so overpowering his legs dropped him into a hunch and his arms jerked up to shield his face. All he could think was:
nuclear
. De Cary flinched, too. Behind them others cried out as a double crack like the earth splitting rolled over the city and then echoed, rebounding from hundreds of buildings, and across the whole center of Moscow birds whirled up crying and darting as if to escape the sudden advent of an apex predator.
    â€œHoly smoke,” Henrickson muttered. “That wasn’t RDX.”
    Dan straightened to see distant specks of debris raining down over a two-hundred-yard-wide circle, above which a white mushroom hearted with orange fire rolled upward. It lofted like a balloon till the wind took it, driving it off the river and off over the city, still rising, still milling, but rapidly thinning, so fast he suddenly grasped what it was: not so much smoke, though it contained smoke, as a cloud of superheated steam, condensing into microscopic droplets as it hit the cold fall air. And beneath it, behind it, no trace of the barge, the flag, the panel, whatsoever. Only that roiled foam, rocking and steaming.
    A murmur ran along the embankment. As one, the faces, swarthy, dark, pale, turned back to the guest barge.
    Aboard which, at a word of command, the techs stood aside. A middle-aged brunette with wind-blushed cheeks stepped to a microphone and began reading from a clipboard. Russian first, then what sounded like Chinese, Arabic, and other languages. She seemed to be fluent in them all. Then she got to English.
    â€œYou have just witnessed live demonstration of underwater missile weapons system. The warhead detonated is small demonstrator model. Full size ‘Shkval’ export model double this size with much larger warhead. Komponent Corporation offers underwater missile for sale or lease. Discuss with us terms. Full system is available with credits through special program Ministry of Defense.
    â€œNew announcements from Komponent, maker of advanced underwater weaponry for national defense. Shkval-K is armed with shaped-charge warhead designed to burn through submerged armor, backed with rods of depleted uranium as incendiary. You see effect of quarter-sized warhead on moored ship today. Full-sized warhead will burn through one meter steel or five meters reinforced concrete, not counting fracture effect, with shaped charge penetrator permitting entry of uranium rods two meters long. These combust upon contact with air, water, or petroleum fuel. Optimally effective weapon against even the most difficult target at sea.”
    Beside him Henrickson sucked a breath, de Cary stiffened. A cold wave propagated up Dan’s spine.
    Depleted uranium was the heavy metal left over when fissionable isotope was extracted for use in weapons or reactors. Relatively inert radiologically, though there were those who disagreed, it was twice as heavy as lead. The U.S. packaged it in antitank rounds, in place of conventional explosives. When a “magic bullet” slammed into a tank, it, it burned its way through solid steel, then sprayed apart inside the turret in an inferno of phosphorouslike flame that ended any possibility of life.
    But what she was describing wasn’t a tank killer. This combination of speed, penetration, and terminal effect could only have been designed to penetrate the carefully crafted, highly classified combination of heavy underwater protection—mainly of HY-80, though other steels were used, too—and empty voids evolved over decades to protect U.S. Forrestal-and Nimitz-class carriers from torpedo attack.
    Up till now, modern carriers had been so fast