Piranha: Firing Point

Chapter 1 Sunday October 13

The men’s room sparkled. Italian marble stall walls gleamed in the warm light of an ornate crystal chandelier.

A babbling fountain was set into the polished tile of the floor, and the jets of clear water were reflected in a rainbow shining high overhead on the ornate Indonesian tigerwood carvings in the ceiling. Deeply polished pine planks lined the walls. The sinks were streaked marble, the faucets solid gold. An armed Red Guard stood stiffly at the door.

Commander Chu Hua-Feng saw none of it. He stood before the gold framed mirror and stared at his reflection.

The black coveralls of the Red Dagger mission had been left behind. He was wearing a black tunic with the gold stripes of his rank of full commander, his four combat medals gleaming. Despite a knock at the door, Chu continued to gaze at his face in the mirror. There was no narcissism in his look, only disbelief. The face staring back at him could have been his father’s: the same high, severe cheekbones, broad nose, dark stern eyes, and severe square chin below full lips. His height was within a hairsbreadth of his father’s. And though he had worshipped his father, the mirror’s image brought not pride but deep regret and sadness.

His father, Chu Hsueh-Fan, had been the admiral in command of the Lushun Northern Fleet. He’d been aboard his flagship, the aircraft carrier Shaoguan, when his fleet and his ship were sunk by a group of rogue American submarines trying to break out of the Go Hai Bay outside of Beijing after one of them had been captured spying and the others came to the rescue. The catastrophic sinking of the Shaoguan had happened ten years before, when young Chu had been a mere junior lieutenant aviation officer flying an antisubmarine Yak-36A vertical-takeoff jet. He had had a front seat for the sinking of the flagship. He’d seen one of the submarines fire a supersonic ship-killing missile. The missile had flown out of the sea, the arc of the rocket’s flame trail a perfect parabola, leading directly to Chu’s father’s ship.

Shaoguan had taken the hit amidships, exploded into flames, rolled over, and vanished into the gray sea.

Young Chu could only watch helplessly, his only depth charge already expended against the evasive criminal submarines. Though his plane was running on fumes, he was determined to remain hovering over the bay to watch the sinking of the American murderers, until the U.S. fleet’s supersonic fighter jets had come screaming in, missiles flying. His Yak had lost a wing. Chu had ejected, but his twenty-two-year old weapons officer and friend Lo Yun had not. The one-winged Yak had plummeted to the sea, exploding into a blinding fireball just before hitting the water. Chu had floated in the deep water of the bay for almost forty hours. The waves washing over his face mixed with angry tears of frustration, while somehow he knew that despite the evidence before him, he would not die. It was the middle of a rainy night when rescue finally arrived, in the form of a Udaloy destroyer. There were no helicopters — they had all been downed by the American fighter jet’s missiles.

Chu had been lucky, or at least so he was told. He had escaped without a scratch. The remainder of the fleet’s sailors and officers had not fared as well. Of the nearly seventy ships of the task force, half had gone down with all hands. Over three thousand men had died that day. All because a wolfpack of murderous submarines had torpedoed their way out of the bay that they had been in spying.

The horror of that day was a line of demarcation across Chu’s life, and after watching his father’s ship explode and capsize, he would forever be haunted.

When the pain had eased, after over four years, and he felt he could begin to move on with his life, he realized that he had been overtaken by an obsession, a specter that filled his nights with vivid dreams, that made him toss and turn until he was tangled in sweaty sheets.

The obsession was with the power of a stealthy nuclear submarine.

When naval power was measured, there was an amazing force multiplier associated with a submerged attack submarine — the way it could hide, invisibly, and reach out to alter history, just as it had in the Falklands war, then in the Go Hai Bay, and finally in the American blockade of Japan, when a handful of Japanese Destiny submarines had put an entire U.S. battle fleet on the bottom of the Pacific. Four years after Shaoguan sank, Chu’s naval career had turned away from aviation and toward nuclear submarines.

There was only one problem. Red China was landlocked now that White China had come close to winning the civil war and had taken up the entire coastline from Hong Kong to Penglai. Only Go Hai Bay east of Beijing remained in Red China’s hands, and the approaches to the Korea Bay and the East China Sea were completely blocked by White China. It was a miserable situation, one that Red China would be forced to live with for the foreseeable future — until Chu had formulated his revolutionary plan, the plan that had brought him here to the Great Hall of the People.

The knocking at the door continued, until finally a female voice called out Chu’s name. He blinked, finally turning from the mirror toward the door. A frowning woman in a military uniform stood in the half-open doorway. Her uniform was an olive full-length tunic over trousers, with the shoulder boards of a People’s Liberation Army officer, a gold cord wrapped around her shoulder as a sign that she was a staff officer to the leadership. She was tall and slim, the uniform unable to take away an impression of gracefulness. Her black hair gleamed in the bright lights of the room. Her face was sculpted and severe, prominent cheekbones beneath almond-shaped dark eyes, her mouth unsmiling. Lieutenant Mai Sheng was looking at Chu intently.

“You’ll be late. Commander. Let’s go.”

Chu nodded and followed her out into the ornate corridor.

His mind had already turned to the briefing coming up when something she said over her shoulder intruded on his thoughts.

“You shouldn’t spend so much time admiring yourself, Commander. That’s my job.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say. Lieutenant?” He had come out of his reverie long enough to pick up on the echo of her words. She had spoken tentatively, with the slightest hint of a tremble. He blinked at her, half in surprise, half in eagerness.

“Nothing, sir,” she said, smiling slightly.

Chu didn’t smile back, not to her face. He had known Mai Sheng for her entire life, since his father and hers were colleagues. For a long time Chu had never really noticed her — she was just a child, a friend of the family, an annoying little sister, and he was busy with his studies.

Ten years ago, though, just before the outbreak of the civil war, she had come to an Admiralty function.

She was still young, barely in her first year of college, her hair pulled back, her limbs thin and fragile like a young doe’s. The war was imminent, and Chu was in no mood for romance, but he had been amused and even flattered to realize that Mai was flirting with him, looking up at him, touching his arm, laughing at everything he said. Absent was the usual young girl’s shyness, replaced by the charm of a grown woman. When he had excused himself to have a drink with Lo Yun, his backseat weapons officer, he couldn’t help noticing her eyes following him. Only now did he realize he had the beginnings of feelings for the woman, at the most inconvenient time.

He bit the inside of his lip and forced himself back to the present. Ahead was the most important briefing of his life, a briefing that would start a war. With that thought, Mai Sheng became just another military aide, walking him to the briefing theater. Finally they arrived at a dead end in the corridor, where tall, wide, heavy mahogany carved double doors were flanked by two Red Guards. Both came to attention and saluted.

“Here we are. Commander.” Her smile was gone, replaced with an iron manner, as if her thoughts had paralleled his own.

One of the guards opened the doors to cavernous darkness. The room’s walls were shrouded in dark foam soundproofing material. Thick carpeting deadened Chu’s footsteps. The ceiling was black, also covered in the dark rippling foam. Fifty steps into the room, a half dozen overstuffed armchairs faced a screen five meters tall. To one side was a cutaway quarter-scale model of the submersible Red Dagger. On the other side of the screen was the actual submersible itself, with a red-carpeted stairway leading to the port hatch and a second one leading to the upper hatch. Inside a building and out of its element, the submersible seemed ungainly and huge. Between the screen and the model was a podium. Chu walked to it and looked down on the console set into the podium surface, unaware of Lieutenant Mai standing next to him.

“I need to talk to you,” she said quietly.

“Not now,” Chu said, still reviewing his intended speech to Chairman Yang, Admiral Loen, and General Feng.

“We have an hour.”

“Why did you call me out of the men’s room? I thought we were on for two o’clock.” He swallowed, wondering if she wanted to discuss something personal he wasn’t ready for, but her face remained set in a military frown.

“The briefing has been moved to three. But I need the time to brief you on a recent development. You’ll need to know this for your presentation. Not even the chairman knows this yet.”

Chu stiffened, watching her.

“We’ve found out about an exercise being conducted by Japan in the Pacific. In ten days the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force will put to sea with six submarines of the new Rising Sun class. They are doing their sea trials as a flotilla, and when that is complete, they will move on to a sub-versus-sub combat simulation.”

Chu almost choked. “How do you know this? How reliable is this information? What exactly is the purpose of the exercise? Will surface ships be involved?”

Mai Sheng smiled, briefing Chu as fast as she could.

Chairman Yang Pow was now in his eighties. He was a big man, his addiction to rich food no secret to his inner circle. On a trip to the United States thirty years ago, he had first tasted a double cheeseburger, and his life had never quite been the same.

But despite his weight and age, he carried himself with the dignity and strength of an emperor from one of the dynasties long past. He walked quickly, with the inexplicable grace of the large, toward the double doors of the briefing theater. Yang had a round and open face, now beginning to show the lines of his age. Beneath his eyes were dark blotches, which had always been there, but were becoming much more pronounced. Above the dark patches Yang’s eyes were large and brown and understanding, hiding behind black horned-rimmed glasses. The lenses of the glasses were almost flat, so little did they correct Yang’s eyesight, but it was said that Yang was imitating the leaders of the past, and whether he really needed the big black glasses or not, they made him feel more comfortable.

Yang had been in power for almost eighteen years.

He had had a nice run of eight years before the imperial aggression of the Taiwanese had flared.

Led by a diabolical general named Wong Chen, the White Army of the New Kuomintang broke out of their safety on the island and made landfall in rebellious Shanghai. At first Beijing had not taken the rebellion seriously, but soon Shanghai fell to the Whites, and the port was opened to incoming equipment and ships. By the time the People’s Liberation Army could respond, the Whites had consolidated a growing beachhead on the Chinese mainland.

The war raged for six months as the Whites moved deep into Communist China, taking one city after the next. Yang, under severe pressure, rejected all recommendations to use nuclear weapons on the invading White forces, insisting that using nuclear devices on his own land would just force the people into the arms of the New Kuomintang. As the Whites, with their superior equipment and training, pushed the PLA back and north, he came under severe criticism for that stance, but to this day he stood by it, even if it had resulted in a divided China.

The end of the war had also come at his insistence, as he negotiated a truce with Shanghai, allowing them to retain their land on the east coast. He forced them to give up claims to a strip of territory to the north and west, which would have sectioned Red China into two regions, in exchange for territory as far north as Penglai at the mouth of Beijing’s Go Hai Bay. In less than a year, the White Army had seemingly won, forced Yang’s PLA back, and established a Western-oriented democracy on the Asian continent, taking China’s most wealthy cities from Hong Kong to Tsingtao.

Yang had waited for his chance to strike back. He had given the enemy time, time to get soft and complacent. He would allow White China to forget about the war and the past, and when they least expected it, he would invade from the west and cast them into the sea.

Unfortunately, there was one major obstacle, and that was the damned East China Sea itself. The rest of the world would not watch and wait dumbstruck while Red China attacked White China. The West would come to help — particularly the Americans, those perpetual suckers for the underdog — and they would bring aircraft carriers and troop ships and amphibious landing ships and tanks and paratroopers and helicopters and supersonic jets.

Without a blue-water navy, without control of the seas, he would not win the war against the traitorous Whites. Many decades before a man named Alfred Thayer Mahan had written volume after volume about sea power, and over and over he had preached that the way to win a war was to control the “sea lines of communication,” the blood vessels and arteries of sea commerce.

In the dawn of the second decade of the new century, the advice held — without control of the sea, he could not control the war.

There was no solution, not in the near term, Yang thought. And he was old now, feeling his age as his bones grew weak and his body infirm. His father and his father’s father lay in their graves, and both would be deeply disappointed and saddened by his yielding of land to the rebels. He had consoled himself with the knowledge that White China was temporary, but now he was beginning to doubt himself. Could it really be that he would go down in history as the chairman who had allowed China to be partitioned and violated?

Two steps behind and to his left walked Lieutenant Mai Sheng, his personal aide, an intelligence officer of the People’s Liberation Army. Mai had been with him since her first assignment on the Suchow front during the civil war. She had been deployed on the front lines as the White Army tank battalions had forced the PLA back. Mai had been in intelligence even then, and had been captured and injured during the battle. She had proved herself a vicious and resourceful fighter, full of high spirits and fresh ideas. Yet she was much more than that. Yang had known Mai’s beautiful and lonely mother, Xu Meng, over twenty-five years ago. Though no one but he and Xu knew of their relationship, gossips had noticed that Mai Sheng looked much like her mother and eerily like Yang himself.

Yang had sworn a dual oath. First, that he would protect Mai’s life and her career, and second, that no one would ever know that he was protecting her. But his caution had seemed scarcely necessary, because Mai was at once icily competent and fiercely independent. Protection of her career had never been a problem, but protection of her life had. He had insisted that her orders be cut to be his personal aide, and for the first year she had accepted it, but lately she had shown a desire to return to a combat company. He would not be able to keep her much longer, and perhaps it was time to let her fly with her own wings. But Mai’s problems would now have to take a backseat to the matter at hand, the briefing being given by Commander Chu Huafeng.

Yang had decided to allow the briefing on his schedule, not because of its importance but because Mai had insisted.

On Yang’s right was PLA General Feng Xuk, commander in chief of the People’s Liberation Army. On his left was Admiral Loen Dun, the supreme commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or what was left of it. When the White Army had taken control of the east coast, there had been only one port to return to— Lushun, the old Port Arthur in the north of Go Hai Bay. That had effectively bottled up the fleet behind the Lushun-Penglai Gap. Since then few of the ships had been used or maintained. The frontline destroyers, frigates, and helicopter carriers had lain tied up, rusting and decayed. There was no longer any point in even thinking there was any form of PLA Navy.

At the door to the briefing theater, the two Red Guard troops came to rigid attention, both saluting, then one opening the door. Yang and the others walked into the dimness of the theater, the temperature some ten degrees below that of the corridor. As the door shut behind him, Yang found himself in complete darkness.

At first he blamed the darkness on the infirmity of his aging eyes, but then he realized that he truly was standing in a blacked-out room.

Suddenly a single spotlight burst to life, shining down on a huge machine towering over his head. It was some kind of boat or submarine. Then Yang realized what the briefing was about — the submersible that the young navy officer Chu had once briefed him on long ago.

A second spotlight flared up on a smaller form of the submersible, but this one cut in half to reveal the interior.

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.