As a musical fanfare trumpeted in the back of the room, both spotlights dimmed and the screen came to life, the only view on the screen a photo of the deep blue sea. The view backed up to reveal that the sea was seen through the front view screen of a large airplane.
Yang was led by the elbow to a large armchair, sinking deeply into the upholstery while mesmerized by the vision of the seaplane landing. The camera and microphone must have been mounted on the mission commander’s head, since all the views seemed to come from the commander’s viewpoint.
Yang stared open-mouthed as the movie showed the submersible nearing the deck of the submarine. Men dived down the open hatch, their automatic pistols dropping the crewmen of the Korean submarine as if they were cardboard targets. Then the final minutes as the commander set the ship to begin sinking, rushing to get out of the hull. When the screen showed the submersible hatch popping open to a panorama of the sea, Yang started clapping and cheering. Feng and Loen followed suit, all three bursting into wide smiles of approval.
But the presentation was not yet over. The screen burst to life again. The face of a news reporter from Shanghai flashed up, reporting that the Korean submarine Dai Gu had been lost with all hands, the only trace of it the floating buoy that had broadcast a distress signal.
The clip again faded to black. Auditorium lights came back up dimly as a spotlight opened on the podium.
A navy commander stood there, resplendent in a dark uniform, gold stripes on his sleeves, ribbons on his chest.
“Good afternoon. Chairman Yang, General Feng, and Admiral Loen. My name is Commander Chu Huafeng.
The last time you saw me I was requesting funding for the submersible you have just seen succeed in hijacking a submerged underway nuclear submarine.
“I won’t bore you with any further comments on the operational test mission of the Red Dagger. However, I do want to mention one development to you.
“In ten days six advanced-technology Japanese Rising Sun-class nuclear attack submarines will put to sea out of Yokosuka.” Chu looked over at Mai Sheng, who smiled back at him. “I propose to deploy the Red Dagger and the other submersible units and take command of the Rising Sun submarines. Once we have captured them, we will station ourselves in the East China Sea, where we will keep the West from assisting the Whites.
With control of the East China Sea assured, the ground forces of the PLA should be able to take back Hong Kong and Tsingtao and Shanghai.”
Chairman Yang stared at the navy commander, a hard frown coming over his face. As he rose to his feet the frown became a black thundercloud. He walked slowly, menacingly up to the podium. To his credit, the commander returned the Chairman’s gaze steadily. When Yang was within striking distance of the commander, he suddenly pulled Commander Chu into a bear hug, slapping his back and laughing. The tension in the room immediately evaporated, and the only sounds were the clapping and cheering of the flag officers and Mai Sheng.
“Commander Chu,” Yang said, his voice sonorous in the huge room, “as of this moment you are no longer a mere commander. You have proved yourself to me and to your nation. I hereby promote you to the rank of Rear Admiral. Congratulations.”
Chu looked over at Lieutenant Mai Sheng, who nodded solemnly at him, her dark eyes shining. Despite his modesty, Chu suddenly felt that victory had just been conceived, and that he was the one who would deliver it to the people in this room.
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 23 western pacific 200 kilometers south of tokyo bay Admiral Chu Hua-Feng dozed in the pilot-in-command seat of the Tupolev TU-187 seaplane, his hands crossed over his taut abdominal muscles, leaning far back in the reclined seat, a black blindfold strapped over his eyes.
The seaplane rocked gently in the calm sea. The only sound was the slight blowing of the ventilation system, which pulled in the salty, fishy-smelling sea air.
In Chu’s dream he was walking with his father in a sepia-tinted image, the deck of his father’s destroyer under their feet, the Saturday morning sunshine making stark shadows on the ship’s decks. Chu’s five-year-old voice was asking one question after another, questions that would seem odd now, but in his little boy mind had seemed vitally important. Questions like, what’s a missile launcher, what’s a missile do, why do we need missiles?
The elder Chu answered each one patiently, steadily, as if being questioned by a government official, except that the answers were filled with endearments, which for his father meant calling him “my little warrior” and “fighter Chu.”
But suddenly his father, then Lieutenant Commander Chu Hsueh-Fan, turned to him in the open space between a missile battery and a torpedo launcher, dropping down to one knee, his face so close to young Chu’s that he could smell his father’s cigarette-smoke-tinged breath and see the bloodshot lines in his eyes.
“Young warrior, there is danger below. You must hurry. You must finish quickly. If you stay too long, they will come for you, and they are strong.”
“But, Father, what do you mean?”
“Hurry, my son. Finish quickly. Do not linger.”
“But I don’t understand,” Chu whined.
“There is a satellite update. Admiral,” his father said, his face beginning to change in shape, becoming unfocused.
“What?” “A satellite update. Admiral,” the voice said. “Are you awake?”
Chu pulled off his blindfold and blinked several times.
The face of the copilot was close in his vision. Chu pushed him back and yanked the lever of the seat, bringing it upright.
“Say that again,” Chu said, the dream already gone, with no trace of it left in his memory. He knew he’d seen something he should remember, but it had slipped away.
“We have a satellite update. Admiral. Commander Lo has the data at the console aft.”
Chu wrenched himself out of the command seat and hurried aft, his body unsteady from being awakened suddenly, in addition to the rocking of the aircraft floating in the sea.
At the console, Lo Sun sat in the seat inside the wraparound panels. Chu crouched down to look at Lo’s display.
It was a high-definition still photograph, taken from the air, focused downward on a harbor. Three ships were clearly shown in the center of the deep channel, their wakes white across the darkness of the calm water. The ships looked odd, without pointed bows and square sterns and flat decks. They were cigar shaped, dull gray, in minimal contrast to the surrounding water. The picture was a photograph of his future ship. Soon it would put to sea, and soon after that he would board it and make it his own. Together he and that ship would make history.
The blue laser locked onto the hull steaming slowly in front of them. The heads-up display pointed in the direction of the vessel, the range indicator showing the target only two hundred meters ahead.
Chu throttled up and the submersible accelerated until he felt the shaking of the craft in the wake of the big submarine. The screw, more of a water-jet propulsor, put an incredible amount of turbulence into the water, even at this slow speed. The enormous amount of horsepower required to push eight thousand metric tons of submarine through the ocean stirred and churned up the water for miles astern. Chu was careful to approach the ship from its port rear quadrant rather than directly astern. There a collision could occur from the unpredictability of the wake vortex, an unexpected swirl able to toss his small craft into a rudder and slice open his hull.
Still the wake current pushed him downward, then upward, the computer correcting the ship’s attitude.
Above Chu’s head in the hemispherical view port the blue Pacific waves washed gently across his field of vision.
The target ship was still not visible despite the clearness of the water. He had no need for the high-intensity spotlights so close to the surface, but although visibility was up to fifty meters, he still could see only blue haze ahead.
The blue laser range count came steadily down to a hundred meters, then eighty, soon sixty. Chu strained his eyes looking for the sternm of the submarine. As his eyes
began to water, Chu blinking it away, he thought he saw something, but it was not above, where he’d expected it, but deeper. He swallowed, staring at the sheer size of the hull approaching in the blue fog around him.
The hull diameter was much bigger than he’d expected, even though he knew every dimension, every available bit of data in existence about the Rising Sun. But it was one thing to know something intellectually, quite another to experience it in person, especially like this. Chu swallowed and concentrated, pulling his control yoke upward to ascend closer to the surface.
The heads-up display showed him at ten clicks, jogging speed, which was a disadvantage if the wake of the propulsor water jet pushed his submersible harder than his onboard computer could accept. A stray current from the wake could force him to surface and make him broach, a potential disaster. Being observed from a periscope was hardly a way to sneak up on a target submarine.
And he was so shallow that his speed didn’t afford much control here, where the Bernoulli suction force from the broad expanse of the hull would compete with the suction from the surface above. The submersible could either broach or slam into the submarine hull, both accidents having the potential to ruin the surprise.
Chu felt like he was walking a tightrope, failure on either side. The odds were against him, but he had done this before, a hundred times. He had logged over two dozen dockings with the practice target submarines, some deep, some at mast-broach depth, some fast, others hovering, and over two hundred dockings in the simulator at the Lushun base, and one actual successful approach on the Korean submarine. He could do this, he promised himself.
He brought the submersible higher, driving forward, beginning to overtake the slow submarine. The huge ship wallowed at mast-broach depth, rocking gently from side to side in the one-meter swells. It was time to put the Red Dagger in the danger zone, the narrow throat of water between the sub’s top hull deck and the surface.
He felt completely one with the submersible, its onboard computer an extension of himself. His eyes were wide, his nostrils flared, his forehead beaded with sweat, his breathing coming in gasps, an athlete running for the goal line. The view port showed the gray hull below him, looking like the top surface of a dolphin, the same coloring and texture. The silvery glint of the waves above him suddenly changed to a bright white. The dull gray of the submarine hull showed sharp lines of light shimmering over its surface, as if Chu were looking at the bottom of a swimming pool, the bright web of light moving and changing with the sunshine. The sun must have appeared from behind a cloud, Chu thought in the back of his mind.
A rivulet of sweat ran into his eye, forcing him to blink it away. He gritted his teeth, edging the ship deeper as he felt it start to stray toward the waves overhead.
Just as he evaded the suction pulling him upward, the suction of the hull pulled him back down. All this depth-control struggle would exhaust the onboard coils if he couldn’t complete the rendezvous in a few moments.
Again Chu wiped his mind blank—only the waves above, the sub below, and the heads-up display constituting his world. For the first time since putting the submersible between the sub and the surface, he allowed himself to read the digits of the heads-up display.
One number of the display read off the range to the aft lip of the sub’s fin. The second number showed him the distance to the aft escape trunk hatch just forward of the X-tail.
The display numerals confused Chu for a moment.
The distance to the escape hatch was negative—he had gone too far. The fin trailing edge was far ahead, but the escape trunk was behind him. The aft part of the submersible hull would actually be between the surfaces of the X-tail when the docking skirt was over the escape trunk—at least it would be if Mai’s data were correct.
Chu throttled back, allowing the submarine to surge slightly ahead. With the after escape hatch this close to the X-tail and the suction of the propulsor, the approach was much more difficult than it had been to the Korean ship, where the hatch had been far forward of the screw.
At least this ship had a thicker anechoic coating, the dolphin skin, designed to minimize drag and reflected sonar noise. It would provide a rubbery cushion in the event Chu smashed down onto the hull. Perhaps, he thought, it would be better to do that than prolong this energy-wasting dance with the submarine.
The numerals of the display rolled back until the docking skirt was within two meters of the calculated position of the hatch. Chu energized the bottom-scanning video camera at the docking skirt, looking for the hatch, and then released control of the submersible to the onboard computer to allow it to bring the vessel in for the docking. But as Chu released the yoke, the Red Dagger began to shake and oscillate, finally heading for the surface, then plunging toward the deck. Chu cursed and grabbed the yoke, frustrated and angry. The computer had failed him, and the dolphin skin surface of the ship was making the location of the hatch impossible to see.
Chu put the submersible close to the fin and again slowed down, this time knowing he would have to approach the hatch on his own. After five exhausting minutes he worked the submersible back to where it had been before, keeping station over the sub’s escape hatch.
He drove the craft on while searching the video image for the hatch. The more he tried to do it, though, the harder it got to control the submersible. Lo Sun would have to help him.
“Mr. First, quickly, do you have the docking-skirt video up?”
“Yes, Ad—”
“Fine, you talk me into the hatch. I can’t maneuver and look for the hatch at the same time. Computer’s broken. Hurry!”
“You’re at plus two, starboard one point six—”
“Dammit, just tell me how much to come left or right—”
“Back slow, come left, just a hair, good, ahead a half meter, more, more. Now! Down!”
Chu brought the vessel down to the deck of the submarine, the contact light, the surface of the sub rubbery.
“No, now we’re too far ahead. Don’t pump down yet.
Can you back us up? You’ve got ten centimeters, maybe less.”
Chu pulled back on the throttle, the suction from the sub keeping him down, the submersible sliding in increments until Lo called that he was centered over the hatch. Chu flooded the small ballast tank, trimming the vessel heavy so that it would stay down on the slippery hull. A high-pressure air bottle pushed air into the skirt and water out of a slot at the skirt bottom. The pump, at deeper depths, would suck the water overboard and allow the space to be filled with air. Since they were shallow, the air pressure alone pushed the water out.
The heads-up display showed the vacuum established.
He should be able to kill the engines, the powerful suction from the docking skirt keeping the two ships together.
Chu gently pulled back on the throttle until the engines were idling. He kept waiting for the disaster of the skirt failing or flooding, eliminating the link between the vessels, but the vacuum held. At last Chu cut the motors and toggled off the coil power, unbuckled his harness, and withdrew from the control couch. When he stood, shaking out his cramped limbs, he found he was soaked from head to toe with sweat. He wiped his forehead and accepted a towel and water bottle from one of his men.
Lo waggled his hands to loosen them up after spending the last hour pointing at display panels. Other than Chu and Lo and Wang—the pilot who would shut the hatches after the platoon invaded and then who would take the Red Dagger back to the seaplane—the men were all wearing their masks and scuba bottles. The canned air would prevent the men from breathing radioactive dust or steam from the reactor spaces. Once they were in the habitable command compartment forward, they would ditch the masks. Chu and Lo shrugged into their gear.
“Open the hatch,” Chu said.
As Lo undogged the hatch, a hiss of compressed air leaked in from the docking skirt. He unlatched the heavy hatch, and the spring force pushed it slowly upward to the open latch. Down below a half meter, inside the wide docking
skirt, the rubbery gray skin of the submarine glistened with droplets, a neat circle carved in the hull outlining the hatch. In the center of the circle was the expected hole for insertion of the ISO key. Lo handed the key to Chu like a nurse passing a scalpel.
Chu inserted it and began to spin it clockwise—the opposite direction to a normal valve—and had a bad moment when nothing happened. Could the Japanese have chained and locked the hatch? It would seem to make sense, since this was an entry into a radioactive space with the reactor operating. But if it was locked, the only way in would be with an acetylene torch, which Chu did not have.
Then the hatch budged, just a hair. He looked up at Lo, keeping his expression one of calm and authority.
“Ready, First?”
Lo Sun took a deep breath, put on his mask, and looked over at the other men. “Ready, Admiral. Let’s steal a submarine.”
“Set event time zero. Insert on my mark,” Chu commanded.
He donned his own air mask, the men gathering close to the hatch. “Three, two, one, go!”
Chu pulled the hatch fully open, his eyes wide in expectation.
The hatch clicked into the open latch. The hot, stuffy air from down below rose into the clammy cold of the submersible’s atmosphere. There was no light coming from the opening, just a dark, gaping maw.
Chu snapped on his vest flashlight button, the beam shining out from his chest. He strapped on a headband light and adjusted it downward. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest and in his ears, his breathing loud in the air mask. He would enter the hatchway first, then Lo Sun, then the other six men. The crew was smaller than on the Korean attack mission. The highly automated Rising Sun submarine required only a few men to operate her, using only one small habitable space.
Chu’s former crew members were now lending their experience to the other five submersible teams.
The hatch led to the diesel-battery compartment, aft of the reactor compartment, and there was no shielding from the operating reactor here. Unfortunately, they could not make an entry into the forward escape hatch, because the distance between the hatch and the forward edge of the fin was too short—the submersible would not fit without colliding with the fin. They’d have to shut down the reactor since they could not survive the radiation, thereby alerting the Japanese crew. But there was nothing he could do about it. They’d have to run the risk.
Piranha Firing Point Page 3