RED SUN ROGUE

by Taylor Zajonc

Alexis tapped her watch. “Captain—we’re overdue.”

  “The Scorpion isn’t leaving without us. The Japanese are expecting us back soon, and we’ll need to give them something concrete. After all, what’s the one rule of attending a fancy Texan barbeque?”

  “Never arrive empty-handed,” grinned Alexis, flipping on the small office light. Jonah booted up the system and was rewarded with a scrolling startup screen in Korean characters. The dedicated surveillance system churned through an automatic internal diagnostic, beginning with a yellow-blinking status map of the immense facility.

  It was bigger than Jonah had anticipated—the section with the submarine slipway was only one floor of the hive-like complex; beneath them, level after level of storage, research, and production facilities reached hundreds of feet further into the bedrock below. Internal security camera feeds began to flip by with increasing speed, images of counterfeit pharma, narcotics, crates of fake Japanese cigarettes, and a veritable underground warehouse of small arms and military explosives—and dozens upon dozens of dead men awkwardly juxtaposed against aging propaganda posters of smiling children and bountiful harvests.

  “Did you see that?” asked Alexis as an image of a collapsed tunnel-like entrance flashed into view for an instant, the wide subterranean roadway completely sealed by fallen rock. Jonah paused the feed, spotting a cluster of ventilation pipes sheered by the force of the ceiling as it fell.

  “These bases are designed to seal off and function autonomously in wartime,” said Jonah, pointing to the facility layout. “Something detonated the explosives at the entrance, but they also wrecked the exhaust pipes and eventually filled the entire facility with carbon monoxide from the diesel generators here, on the lowest level.”

  “Why wouldn’t they divert the exhaust? Or simply turn off the generators?” asked Alexis in complete confusion.

  “That I can’t answer,” said Jonah. “Something is deeply fucked down here. Sun-Hi—can you use a computer?”

  “Yes! I love computer! Minecraft, Zoo Tycoon!”

  Jonah was taken aback for a moment. He’d heard about the North Korean digital black market, Chinese laptops, and cell phones, USB drives full of soap operas and foreign music. Apparently the electronic distribution network went a lot deeper than he’d expected. He gave Sun-Hi the chair. “Grab everything—every recorded video feed, every document, every photo, activity log, anything that could tell us what happened here. The Japanese can piece it together later for themselves, but I want to give them as much to work with as possible.”

  Sun-Hi brought up a blinking prompt and began to plug in a few simple commands. A magnetic tape backup system began to whirr in the servers behind them, collecting terabytes of information.

  “Have you done something like this before?” asked Alexis, surprised.

  “Yes. Many time. Very dangerous.”

  “Where? What did you do?”

  “Radio station had internet. I break through firewall and download collected works Avril Lavigne, Kelly Clark-son! Girl power, so forbidden!”

  A muffled thump sounded from above them. Thin layers of dust trickled from the ceiling, shimmering in their flashlights as it clung to the poisoned air.

  “The fuck was that?” asked Alexis moments before two more thumps rumbled through the facility. More dust rained down, thicker this time.

  Jonah considered the concrete ceiling for a moment before walking several steps over to the map on the wall. He mentally estimated the distance between the underground base and the massive, bore-fixed artillery. No question—they were definitely close enough. “I think we’re getting shelled,” he said finally. No doubt the North Koreans knew they’d lost control of the facility. Seeing Sun-Hi’s unauthorized activity in their defense network could have been all the excuse they’d need to bury the base and its secrets forever.

  “Shelled?!”

  “Sun-Hi . . . I don’t suppose you tripped any alarms when you got into the system?”

  “Um, maybe?” she said, apologetically wincing as she minimized a flashing red warning sign with dancing Korean characters.

  There wasn’t any point in making an issue over the mistake—it was already too late. The thumps were coming in faster succession now. A framed portrait of Kim Jong-un tumbled from the wall, glass shattering as it hit the concrete floor.

  “Is this going to become an issue for us?” said Alexis as she pointed upwards towards the sound of the impacts.

  “Probably bunker buster artillery,” said Jonah. “Armored casing, delayed fuse. The North Koreans love ’em.”

  Alexis crossed her arms. “You are not making me feel safer.”

  “I ask them nicely to stop,” announced Sun-Hi. Before Jonah could stop her, she pulled up a chat window and sent a message through North Korea’s secure military communications network.

  Jonah pulled her away from the terminal, the chair squeaking across the concrete. “No more speaking with the guys shooting at us,” he ordered.

  “Again, are we in trouble here?” Alexis watched another long, shimmering line of dust fall from the ceiling.

  “Could be worse,” said Jonah dismissively. “We’ve got to be two, three hundred feet below the surface here. It’d probably take them ten years minimum of continuous bombardment to put a shell into this room.”

  “They say no,” said Sun-Hi, looking up from the computer terminal. “They not stop.”

  WHAM!

  The blast was closer this time, knocking chairs over as high-tech foreign military equipment slid off the tables and onto the floor. Cracks spread across the ceiling like a spider-web as the concrete rumbled and shifted above them.

  “You still pretty sure about that ten years boss?” shouted Alexis, waving angrily at Jonah as she spoke.

  “Yeah—we gotta go now,” said Jonah. He ripped the magnetic tape out of the server as Alexis swept memory cards and diskettes off the desk and into her hands. The copy wasn’t finished, but their Japanese masters would have to make do with what they’d already grabbed. “They clearly don’t build bunkers like they used to.”

  “Or bombs.” Alexis said, grabbing one last stack of diskettes.

  The facility lights flickered as Jonah, Alexis, and Sun-Hi broke into a run, sprinting out of the engineering laboratory towards the main corridor. The North Korean shells were coming faster now, a steady barrage of impacts and muffled explosions.

  Jonah was first out the door, slamming into Hassan, knocking them both to the ground. Jonah’s mask went flying off his face, rubber fasteners snapping as his nearly-empty air tank bounced end over end across the concrete floor before coming to a rest below a mural of the Pentagon burning under an onslaught of North Korean missiles. Holding his breath, he started to scramble towards the mask on hands and knees.

  “You’ll live without it!” wheezed Hassan. He dragged Jonah to his feet by an elbow, and gave him a push. “Run!”

  The four sprinted down the corridor, racing towards the submarine. The first big wave of dizziness hit Jonah almost immediately, dropping him to his knees as he passed the pillars. Dalmar stood in front of the fallen gangplank, waving them in.

  The underground submarine tunnel was in bad shape, with clusters of basketball-sized boulders raining from the ceiling with the concussion of every thundering shell impact. The falling rocks slammed into the concrete and the waterway, pounding the hull of the Scorpion with one grinding gong after another. Fortunately, Vitaly had the submarine’s engines already running at full tilt, black smoke pouring out of the stack.

  Hassan leapt first, hurling himself over the edge and onto the deck of the Scorpion. Landing, he whipped around as Dalmar assisted Alexis with her running start, giving her a mid-air push across the watery gap and onto the submarine. Sun-Hi skidded to a stop at the edge of the concrete, teetering on the edge before Dalmar picked her up and bodily threw her into Hassan and Alexis’ arms like a shot put. There wasn’t time to use the diver lockout compartment—Hassan and Alexis yanked ope
n the deck hatch, spilling harsh light into the underground chamber.

  The breath caught in Jonah’s lungs, leaving him to gasp as he stumbled to his hands and knees once more, dragging himself towards the concrete slipway, his vision swimming as his empty stomach contracted violently. Dalmar strode over towards Jonah purposefully before grasping him underneath the armpit and leg. The pirate then swung Jonah over his shoulders with a fireman’s carry.

  “Talk to me, Dalmar, what is the fucking plan here?” croaked Jonah from his mid-air suspension.

  “Do you trust me, brother?”

  Jonah didn’t have time to answer, but strongly suspected his response would have been a resounding I’ll need a minute to think about it first. The corridor behind them began to collapse, a violent whoosh of dust bellowing out of the hallway as the ceiling came down like an avalanche. Jonah knew it’d be moments before the submarine tunnel came down as well. Dalmar grunted as he kneeled to a sprinter’s start position, ignoring the boulders raining from the ceiling like a meteor storm. He was up again with a snap, sprinting towards the edge with Jonah on his shoulders, stopping just short of the edge as he flung Jonah across the gap.

  Tumbling through the air, Jonah smacked against the side of the Scorpion as he fell just short of the deck. Hassan and Alexis threw themselves over the side, barely grabbing onto a wrist and ankle as Sun-Hi shrieked in the background. The three awkwardly dragged Jonah back onto the deck as Dalmar easily made the leap, landing with a thud almost as loud as an impacting boulder. The pirate pitched Jonah down the deck hatch with one arm as the others climbed into the submarine after him. The rest of the crew now inside, Dalmar squeezed through the hatch and slammed it closed behind him.

  Flat on the deck, Jonah gulped fresh air as Hassan gently slapped the side of his face. Boulders rained down onto the submarine in a cascade of heavy blows that echoed throughout the narrow hull.

  “What the fuck is happening out there?” screamed Marissa as she loomed over Jonah, assault rifle clenched in her white knuckles, and her index finger twitching on the trigger. Dalmar glared at her as he yanked the weapon from her grasp, clicked the safety back on, and rested it against the nearest wall.

  Jonah sucked in another breath, his vision clearing as he pulled himself up to his feet and walked the last few lengths to the command compartment, not bothering to answer Marissa. He clapped a hand on Vitaly’s shoulder. “Can you navigate us out of this tunnel at flank speed?”

  Vitaly didn’t answer as he re-directed power from the throbbing engines to the propellers. The transmission squealed as it struggled to redirect torque, blades biting into the frothing waters. The submarine leapt forward, bow planes painfully scraping along the concrete slipway as Vitaly fought to vector the powerful engine thrust.

  “We may lose paint, captain!”

  “Easy! Easy!” shouted Jonah. “Get her to starboard before you wreck the stabilizer!”

  “Vitaly know! Egg do not teach hen!”

  The Scorpion began to round the blind corner, more curving tunnel ahead as she gained speed, her massive bow wake washing over the concrete bulwarks on either side of the channel. The internal collapse of the facility was increasing exponentially, entire pillars splitting under the unending concussions of exploding shells as the tunnel ceiling crumbled above them.

  “How are we going to explain this to the Japanese?” shouted Hassan, wincing as a massive rock tumbled from the cave’s ceiling and slammed against the conning tower before rolling off the deck and into the water.

  “I don’t know just yet,” retorted Jonah. “We may have to figure that out on the way back. But they wouldn’t have sent us here if flattening the entire facility was an unacceptable risk.”

  “You like backward King Midas!” exclaimed Vitaly from his station, fingers flying across the console as he struggled to keep the speeding submarine under control. “Everything you touch turn to shit!”

  The last stretch of the curved horseshoe-shaped tunnel straightened over the last two hundred meters, revealing a set of massive steel hanger doors on the Scorpion’s grainy interior monitors. Everyone gasped. They were sealed in. Any escape to the ocean cut off.

  “Captain! We must reverse engines!” shouted Vitaly.

  “Full speed! We’ll punch through!”

  “We crush bow, sink us!”

  “If the ceiling comes down, we’re dead anyway!”

  Alexis leapt to her feet, shoving Jonah aside as she grabbed the periscope, flicking through the lenses. Her feed was on the monitor, giving Jonah a close-up look. He unconsciously gulped—the steel was thicker than he expected, more than likely built to take a direct hit from a heavy navy battleship shell. They didn’t have a chance in hell of piercing the armor with the fragile hull of the Scorpion.

  “Got it!” called Alexis. She leapt away from the periscope, almost knocking Jonah over again as she slammed herself down in front of the communications console. Jonah stole a look back up at the monitors—it was too late to reverse thrust. The chamber behind them had begun to completely collapse, with entire pillars exploding into concrete fragments and dust.

  The space between the doors suddenly split, sunlight streaming through the gap as the steel barrier began to slowly open. Alexis whooped in excitement, but Vitaly just gritted his teeth, all the while inputting the final adjustments to their heading in the seconds before impact.

  And then the bow of the Scorpion was free, leaping out of the underground submarine base, rake splitting the first of the stormy whitecaps. The still-opening hanger doors scraped against the hull, groaning and grinding as they birthed the submarine into the open sea.

  Alexis slumped back off the communications chair and onto the deck. She lay on her back and stared up against the claustrophobic metal ceiling above with index finger on each temple. “That really shouldn’t have worked,” she mumbled.

  “What did you do?” asked Hassan, leaning down over her.

  “I figured the door control was a standard Siemens control unit,” she said, draping an arm over her eyes in relief. “They’re used for everything from airplane hangars to security gates. But everybody forgets to reset the remote control password from the default.”

  “What’s the default?” asked Jonah, not sure if he really wanted to hear the answer.

  “Zero-zero-zero . . . zero.”

  “You just typed in a bunch of zeros and hoped for the best?” demanded Hassan, horrified.

  “If it worked, it worked,” Jonah mumbled, resting a hand against a bulkhead to steady himself. “But let’s not do that again. We’re seriously going to run out of luck one of these days.”

  Hassan kneaded Alexis’ shoulders. “Not too soon, one hopes.”

  “Vitaly, bring us to four hundred fifty feet below, silent running.”

  “Aye, Captain—I have detected signal again, da?”

  “Our friend, the autonomous sonobuoy,” said Jonah, nodding. “Can we get down in the trench again, or are we still too banged up?”

  “Is no problem, Captain—” Vitaly said as he began to plot the course below the now-familiar low-frequency sonar signal. Then he stopped dead, the color draining from his face. “The signal! It moves!”

  “It’s not a sonobuoy?”

  “No—is North Korea attack submarine! Dead ahead, seven hundred meter!”

  “Alexis, engine room!” bellowed Jonah. He didn’t have to say it twice. She leapt to her feet and sprinted towards the stern. Hassan took her place at the communications console and yanked the hydrophone set roughly around his ears.

  “It’s hard to hear anything over the blasts,” Hassan called out. “Wait—I just heard a distinct mechanical sound like a . . . like a big clunk!”

  “Those would be torpedo doors opening,” spat Jonah through a clenched jaw. “But, they won’t have time to get a proper fix on us, not with all the artillery screwing up their sonar. They’re shooting from the hip. Vitaly, full power to the engines! Charge them!”

  Vi
taly increased power to the electric engines, the sound of their own churning propellers filling the Scorpion’s command compartment. Hassan again pressed the hydrophones against his ears, straining to listen for any external sounds amidst the din. “I hear buzzing props! Torpedo in the water!”

  “Steady on!”

  And then the high-pitched whine of the torpedo was all around them, the Scorpion jolted as the underwater missile slammed into the side of the conning tower, bounced off, and clanged down the entire length of the hurtling submarine. There was a brief pause before a muffled explosion well astern as it detonated, the retort of the sudden blast dissipating to the sound of the Scorpion’s propellers.

  “Four hundred meters to North Korean attack submarine,” Vitaly said. “Torpedo warhead too close to prime, it bounce off! Please tell me you did not learn trick from Hunt for Red October!”

  “What?” protested Jonah. “It’s a film classic!”

  “My god—you didn’t even read the book, did you?” demanded Hassan.

  “Vitaly—best guess on classification of incoming submarine,” Jonah shouted, ignoring the doctor.

  “I think Romeo class? Like twin sister of Scorpion! Standard for North Korea.”

  “We’re going to race her topside—full engine power, depth planes to full bubble ascent! Emergency blow!”

  Vitaly grinned as he yanked back on the submarine’s yolk until the column smacked against its metal restrictor, and the Scorpion’s ballast tanks filled with a hissing woosh. The submarine lurched upwards, groaning as she thrust through the water column toward the distant surface.

  “NK sub is matching ascent angle!” Vitaly shouted. “Moving to intercept! Two hundred meters!”

  The twin submarines climbed toward each other in the water like jousting whales, rib joints resetting as the pressure of the ocean gave way. Jonah reached up to hold onto the ceiling, standing on his toes as the deck angled up beneath him.

  “More power!” shouted Jonah, punching the intercom to Alexis in the engine room. “Anything you got—I need it over the next ten seconds!”

  Alexis must have found some last remaining joule or watt hiding somewhere in the battery bank, because the Scorpion surged forward, engines screaming. Hassan nearly lost his grip on the console, splaying his feet to keep from tumbling out of his seat and down along the steep deck.