Piranha: Firing Point

Chapter 2 Wednesday October 23

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 stern 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.

An image loomed in his mind of an experiment commissioned by the PLA Navy Medical Command to see what would happen to a man entering an operating reactor space. A video had shown a prisoner from the civil war left at the Wuhan Electrical Generating Station’s reactor-compartment door. Motivated by some hidden leverage — family members in prison, promised humane treatment perhaps — the prisoner opened the hatch and entered the containment, where the reactor churned out hot, pressurized water for the power plant as well as a tremendous flux of gamma rays and neutrons and alpha particles. As the prisoner descended the ladder, the hair on top of his head immediately stood on end. At the bottom of the ladder the man’s scrawny frame had become chunky, his bony face filling out until his cheeks bulged, the prisoner swelling quickly, liquid rushing to his radiation-damaged tissue while gas pockets grew inside him.

The enlarged prisoner limped as he dismounted the ladder, suddenly stumbling and blind, feeling his way with one grotesquely swollen hand, his other on his eyes.

The prisoner’s skin steadily changed from a pale to a deep purple shade. The man, becoming nearly spherical from the swelling, sank to his knees, his skin black, his eyes swollen shut, his face toward the lower-level camera.

In the next moment he literally exploded, the gases inside him blowing his body apart, blood and organs flying from his abdominal cavity.

Chu lowered himself into the hatch, his boot finding a ladder rung. He descended into the darkness, his headband light showing a narrow vertical tunnel with only a ladder, some cables and pipes. The tunnel was faired in with sheet metal, polished aluminum from the look of it The tunnel was still too dark to tell how far down it went.

Chu stopped just below the hatchway, looking for the emergency cutoff switch for the reactor. Intelligence data had indicated that the trip switch would be a large T-handle, although the manual was vague about its exact location. There was also an automatic reactor-kill circuit wired to the hatch itself so that anyone opening it while the reactor was running would trip the reactor. This was only for someone standing on the deck while the ship was at the pier, though. The circuit would typically be disabled at sea — after all, who would expect an outer hatch to be opened when the ship was submerged? And so, for all Chu knew, the reactor had continued to operate as he came in. It would irradiate him with a lethal dose of gamma and neutron radiation until he found the cursed kill switch.

He spun around, one hand on the ladder, the other feeling for a switch. Near the hatch hinge he thought he felt something, and found a rotary switch. Yet in the flashlight beam it looked nothing like the intelligence manual’s sketch of the reactor-kill switch. It was most likely the tunnel light switch, and it might set off some kind of alarm or intercom circuit, blowing their surprise.

To his right, Chu’s light beam illuminated a computer display panel. There was an electronic eye, several small display screens, a keypad, and a row of variable-function keys. Chu turned away from it. The emergency switch should be located somewhere at the hatch opening. It would be large, with red coloring or yellow and black stripes, not just a computer panel. Unless this hull was different from the intelligence manual, he thought with a surge of dread, with no emergency cutoff lever.

He tilted his head up, the circle of light from above showing Lo’s torso leaning down. Chu’s eye followed the outside periphery of the hatchway. Finally he found a protruding panel opposite the hinge spring, a T-handle painted bright red with Japanese symbols next to it.

Chu reached for the cutoff lever and tried to turn it.

Nothing happened. The switch wouldn’t move. He looked at the writing by the switch, forced himself to concentrate, and realized his mistake. The switch had to be pulled far out before being rotated. He pulled and turned it, listening hard for changes to see if he had tripped out the reactor, but nothing seemed different.

Maybe the plant had tripped itself off when he first opened the hatch.

But even if it had, he remained in danger. The unshielded reactor would drop only to six percent power even after being tripped. The radiation coming from it would be less intense, but still lethal, as the reactions calmed down in the core. It would take years for a reactor’s radiation to reach “safe” levels and in the hours after tripping it, a lethal dose of radiation would be absorbed in just a fraction of an hour. Chu and his team had mere minutes to make it to the forward compartment, on the other side of the radiation shielding.

“Insert! Let’s go,” Chu yelled into his mask microphone.

He put his boots outside the rungs of the ladder and slid down quickly, gripping only the vertical bars of the ladder. The tunnel continued downward two levels, until the lower hatch became visible in a wider spot in the tunnel. He leaned down and spun the chrome wheel in the circular hatch. By the time he opened it, the remainder of his platoon had joined him. When he pulled the hatch up, bright light blasted into the tunnel from the lower level of the diesel-battery compartment, the space painted a stark hospital white. A ladder could be seen leading from the lower tunnel hatch to a catwalk-style deck grating.

Chu lowered himself through the hatch, sliding the remainder of the way down to the deck grating. While he waited for his platoon to follow he reached into his vest pocket for his AK-80, loading an oversize twenty-round clip. The space was cramped and hot, lit up with intense lights — for what reason, Chu could only guess, perhaps so that the room could be examined by cameras to make sure there was no flooding or oil leaks or a hundred other things that could go wrong in a machinery space. Above him were two levels of catwalks, with similar see-through deck grating. The area where he stood, at the centerline hatch stepoff, was sandwiched between the aft curving bulkhead and a large piece of equipment.

It was either the emergency diesel engine or the battery housing, Chu thought, but there was no time to sightsee.

Next to the hatchway landing was another computer display terminal with another camera eye. Chu glared at it.

That had to be a bad sign. For all he knew, there would be a greeting party waiting for him.

The thought spurred him on. “Let’s go! Move it!”

Chu waved the platoon to follow him down the catwalk to the starboard side, where the catwalk continued forward. Chu leaned against the weight of his equipment and began sprinting to the forward bulkhead.

The starboard passageway dead-ended at the forward bulkhead of the compartment and continued transversely back to the centerline. Chu rounded the corner and advanced to the passageway’s end. There he brought his men to a halt. Before them was a large hatch. This would lead into the reactor compartment, on their way forward. Above the hatch was a large red-lit panel, Japanese script evident, the red light flashing.

“What’s the annunciator alarm say?” Chu asked Lo Sun, who understood Japanese. Chu’s expertise was Korean and English.

“‘High radiation area,’ Admiral.”

“Let’s go.”

“Sir, is it possible the reactor is still operating?” Lo asked, frowning.

“Doesn’t matter. There’s no shielding at this bulkhead. This space is as radioactive as the reactor compartment. If that reactor is up and running, we’re already dead men.”

He reached for the hatch-dogging mechanism and spun the chrome wheel rapidly, the hatch dogs slowly rolling back until the wheel stopped. Chu pushed the hatch open into the compartment, stepped over the calf-high coaming and into the reactor compartment.

In comparison to the diesel-battery compartment, the reactor compartment was stiflingly hot and humid. The space was as well lit as the diesel compartment, but the equipment crowded everywhere made it seem dimmer.

Bizarre shadows were thrown by the irregularly spaced and sized vessels, pumps, and pipes. Chu stood immediately aft of a large tank, the curving flank of it reaching three decks high. This must be the reactor shield tank, he thought, the tank surrounding the reactor vessel, the vessel itself half the size of the entire inner hull. Chu ducked around it to starboard, but the catwalk ended at the curving line of the hull. He pushed back through a crowd of men entering the hatch, heading to port, where the catwalk passed three huge vertical pieces of equipment — reactor circulation pumps, according to the intel manual — and continued forward. The catwalk grew narrow and serpentine, going around what Chu knew to be the liquid metal surge vessel, then forward between the four steam generator vessels to the forward bulkhead.

The forward bulkhead, which would lead to the steam compartment, was crowded with tanks and pipes. Tucked between them was another large hatch. Chu had reached for hatch dog mechanism when a loud snap resounded throughout the compartment.

The snap was followed by several more. Frantically Chu spun the forward hatch mechanism. The loud noises were most likely reactor control rod-drive motors. By now Wang, the submersible pilot, would have shut the lower and upper hatch to the diesel compartment, and the automatic circuit would have cleared of its reactor trip indications. Either the crew was restarting the reactor or the computer system was doing it for them. Chu got the hatch opened and rushed through it, shouting to his men to go. Remembering the video of the dying medical experiment prisoner, Chu raced through the steam compartment, past the heavy equipment — condensers, turbines, piping, pumps. They had to reach the hatch to the command compartment before the reactor came back online.

At the forward bulkhead of the steam compartment Chu halted in confusion. In front of him was a hatch, but there was also a ladder leading to the catwalk one level above. And through the grating of the catwalk of the elevated deck Chu could see a second hatch. In spite of the need to get out of there, Chu stopped and forced himself to think. He realized he was breathing like a sprinter, his air bottles probably containing only minutes or seconds of air. He tried to picture the floor plans and maps he had memorized of the ship. None had shown a middle-level hatch.

The lower hatch should open to the lower level of the command compartment, where the electrical panels and the second captain computer modules were housed. The upper hatch must allow entry to the middle level, where the officers’ messroom and staterooms were. It would make more sense to enter on the lower level, where the space was most likely unoccupied. Opening the hatch to the middle level, where all the hotel accommodations for the crew were located, would be suicidal.

When he reached out for the hatch-dogging mechanism for the lower hatch and tried to spin it, though, it would not budge. He motioned several of his men over, and together they tried to open the hatch, to no avail.

The dogging wheel was hitting a hitch and going nowhere.

Good God, Chu thought. The hatch was locked, obviously to protect the crew in the command compartment.

And with the hatch locked, Chu and his platoon were trapped in the engine room of a nuclear submarine with a reactor about to be restarted. Within minutes he and his men would look like that civil war prisoner.

A loud voice, lilting and female sounding but electronically generated, seemed to boom around them, but was muffled by the forward compartment bulkhead. Lo Sun stared at him with wide eyes.

“What did that voice say?” Chu spat.

“Sir, it said, ‘The reactor is critical.”

We’re dead, Chu thought, as the hair at the nape of his neck began to stand on end.

Chu stepped back from the doomed operation to open the lower hatch.

The dogging mechanism had obviously been chained and locked from the other side for safety, and there was no way to shoot through or blast through the hatch, at least no way that made any sense. Even if he’d brought hand grenades strong enough to smash through the hatch, with all its lead shielding, it would have been stupid to use them — they’d never be able to restart the reactor and sail the ship with a gaping hole in the nuclear shield.

“Up the ladder,” he commanded, dimly aware that his voice still remained level and authoritative, despite the mortal fear he felt rising in his throat, turning his stomach, If Lo was correct that the announcement had said “The reactor is critical,” the unit was spewing a tremendous amount of radiation even now. But a critical reactor was not the worst — the reactor power would increase by a factor of ten thousand, maybe a hundred thousand, before it was supplying power to the liquid-metal power loop. He had to get out of there now.

He charged up the ladder, the third man up to the catwalk landing after Lo and Lieutenant Li Xinmin. Lo grunted with exertion trying to turn the dogging wheel of this hatch, but it wouldn’t budge. Chu bent his back to the task, his sweaty hands on two spokes of the wheel, Lo’s on two others, and together they heaved. Chu gave it every ounce of strength he had left, knowing that if this didn’t work, nothing mattered. This would be his last act on earth. As he heaved against the wheel, he wondered if he would see scenes from his life, as folklore reported people did in the final moments before death.

There was no movie show, but as he stared at the unmoving wheel, he did feel one regret, that he had failed to connect with Mai Sheng. He abruptly pushed the thought from his mind and continued straining. Finally he quit, dropping to the deck.

“It’s no good. Admiral. We’re trapped,” Lo said.

Chu looked at him, too winded to reply.

“Get on the wheel, each man to a spoke, and heave together when I say,” Chu growled into his mask microphone.

He could feel his breathing becoming labored, his tank almost out of air. He had pulled himself up from the deck, glaring at Lo Sun for his expression of hopelessness.

He had put six men on the wheel, stepping on each other, six shoulders crowding together. They were probably more interfering with each other then helping, but what else could Chu do?

“Now! Pull together!” he shouted. The men strained, their breathing loud through their air packs. As Chu watched, disappointment and fear and frustration mingled into a feeling of pent-up rage. Just as he was ready to scream, two things happened — the men stopped, two of them falling to the catwalk deck, the effort a failure, and Chu’s air ran out, the regulator wheezing to a halt, Chu sucking in his face mask.

In anger he pulled off his mask and threw it toward the deck, sweat and spittle flying from it. The mask swung on its air hose, wrapping around his neck and continuing around his head, striking him in the face from the other side. All of a sudden the answer dawned on him, and the answer and the comedy of his mask hitting him in the head combined to make him start to laugh, three quick, choked rasps escaping his throat before he clamped down, his men staring at him.

The answer was simple. Just as he had thrown the mask but couldn’t throw it away, the dogging wheel was just as constrained. He’d seen the mechanism up close, and in the panic of the moment he had not registered what he was looking at. But now it was clear. So clear he felt like a fool.

A loud but indistinct voice sounded from the forward bulkhead as Chu made his way to the hatch.

“Was that the ship announcing system?” he asked Lo.

“What did it say?”

“Sir,” Lo Sun huffed, his own air low, “it said, ‘The reactor is in the power range.’ We’re being fried right now—”

“Get a hold of yourself. First,” Chu spat.

At the hatch-dogging mechanism, he leaned far over the chrome wheel, putting his face down to the hub.

There a circular chrome ring surrounded the wheel shaft where it entered the hatch bearing — but only from the top did it look like a ring. On the right side a small protrusion extended from it, a small nipple. Chu felt the nipple, moving his fingers slowly around the outside of it. On the other side of the nipple was a set of gear teeth ground into the shaft of the dogging wheel, and pushed into the gear teeth was a single protrusion of metal from the ring. It was a simple mechanical interlock. The hatch wasn’t chained and padlocked; it was just interlocked to avoid inadvertent opening from vibrations of the ship.

All he had to do was pull up on the nipple and disconnect the key of the ring from the gear teeth of the shaft, and the wheel would be free to rotate. He turned the wheel clockwise, as if to shut the hatch, freed the ring key from the teeth, pulled up the locking-ring nipple, then turned the wheel counterclockwise. The wheel spun rapidly as if oiled that very morning.

The hatch dogs unlatched, the wheel spinning quickly, until the hatch was ready to be opened, outward toward the forward compartment. Suddenly their situation had changed. No longer were they fighting for their survival, running from a nuclear reactor about to cook them like mice in a microwave oven, but were now about to assault and capture a foreign warship. The difference was startling. They were about to change from prey to hunters in an instant.

Chu had to restrain himself from pushing the hatch open and bolting for the safety of the shielded compartment.

He had to prepare the men, ready their weapons, and ready himself to attack. It would take only a second, but it was a second he couldn’t afford to let slip by. He turned his back to the hatch, and eyed the men steadily while he grabbed his AK-80 and dropped his air bottles.

The men, just as panicked as he had been, immediately realized what he was doing. Discarding their air bottles, they put in their earphones to their VHF radios, strapped on their boom microphones. Without saying a word, he looked quickly at each of his men, then turned back around.

He put his hand on the hatch, ready to charge into the middle level. On the other side a half dozen armed officers of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force could be waiting for him. His heart rate climbed, his breathing coming rapidly. There was no turning back now.

Commander Suruki Gama felt a sickness settle in his stomach like a cold rock. What he’d expected to be the most eventful day in his life — the maiden voyage of the Rising Sun-class submarine fleet — was in fact eventful, but in a hideously twisted way.

Perhaps it was the way the day had begun. The phone call that had awakened him at one o’clock in the morning started the day. The Second Captain computer system with its female human voice interface called him to tell him the status of the submarine. “Automatic sequence notification for Captain Gama. Please authenticate.”

The voice would repeat those words over and over until Gama spoke his rank and name. The call reported that the reactor was critical. It took Gama twenty minutes to fall back asleep. The two o’clock call reported that the reactor was at operating temperature. At three a.m. the steam plant was up and functional. At four the ship was on internal power, being divorced from shore power. At five a.m., with dawn’s light seeping into the bedroom from a part in the curtains, the alarm clock buzzed insistently, and Gama, enraged and sick from the sleepless night, picked up the clock and hurled it across the room.

He had arrived at the pier and gone to the plateglass windows of the concourse pier building overlooking the submarine tied up at the berth below. SS-403 was the hull number of his Rising Sun-class attack submarine.

Gama had been given the opportunity to name the ship himself, and in line with the orders of fleet headquarters that the Rising Sun class be named after natural phenomena, Gama had given SS-403 the name Arctic Storm.

There was something deeply important in christening an oceangoing ship, and this name resonated with Gama, for reasons beyond the grasp of his conscious mind.

The ship was a stubby-cylinder, the hull extremely wide compared to conventional nuclear-submarine designs, and relatively short in length. The fin protruded starkly from the hull, its shape rounded and tapered aft, and it jutted impossibly high above the vessel, the fin height roughly equal to the diameter of the hull itself.

Aft, the rudder was an X-shape, the surfaces of the X at once rudder and elevator plane. Other than the forward hatch opening and the windows set into the forward edge of the fin, the hull was smooth and unmarked, its skin slick like that of a shark, the material a sonar-evading foam coating over high-tensile steel.

After he had met with his first officer and spoken to the Second Captain computer system. Admiral Tanaka, the fleet commander, had come aboard, greeting Gama warmly, then leaving without saying much. Gama looked after him, knowing that the old man had lost his only son in the American blockade battle. At that point Gama went to the surface control space on top of the fin, and he and his first officer had taken Arctic Storm to sea.

A hundred kilometers south, Gama submerged the Arctic Storm to a depth of a hundred meters. Five hours later, the ship was taken through her paces, a highspeed, maximum-depth run, including a torpedo-evasion maneuver when the ship was under the control of the Second Captain system. The hull groaned from the pressure of the depth, the deck rolling deeply through the turns. A single tenth of a degree of control surface-angle error potentially could put the ship below crush depth, where the weight of the water above would rupture the hull like a steamroller crushing an egg.

An hour after that the ship had come to mast-broach depth to connect with Yokosuka headquarters for the video conference linking each ship’s captain to Admiral Tanaka. It was then that the nightmare had begun.

The reactor had been tripped. Gama had broken his video connection and run to the control room. Strapping himself into the command console’s cocoon-like wraparound panels, he investigated why the ship had lost the reactor. To his back, his chief mechanical officer insisted on starting the emergency diesel, but Gama held him off, equally insistent that they find out what was going on. Finally he traced the problem to the after escape trunk hatch relay, which made no sense. The loss of electrical power from losing the reactor had killed the video surveillance system, and by the time it was back up, the trunk appeared dry, yet the lower hatch had registered being opened and then shut.

Meanwhile the ship began to behave oddly, acting as if the vessel was heavy aft. After three minutes of interrogating the Second Captain, the computer finally reported a sudden addition of weight near the X-tail rudder minutes before the shutdown. That weight had been added over the exact location of the after escape hatch.

Fumio Sugimota, Gama’s first officer, had gone white, saying that it must be a DSRV, a deep-submergence rescue vehicle, that had added the weight. At first Suruki Gama had disagreed with him. The thought of some sort of commando force trying to take the ship was ludicrous.

But then the video camera on the steam module middle level revealed what looked like a large group of frogmen assembled at the forward hatch, all of them carrying large machine pistols. In what was seeming like a dream, he found himself giving rapid orders to prepare to fight off an invasion of his submarine.

“Ship Control Officer, take the deck,” Gama ordered Lieutenant Jintsu at the ship-control console. Releasing his five-point harness, he tossed his headset to the deck and hurried out of the room.

As Gama dashed aft along the wood-lined passageway, the Second Captain’s voice rang out throughout the compartment, “The reactor is self-sustaining.” That meant the chief mechanical officer had recovered the nuclear reactor. Simultaneously the fans came on, their deep bass reverberating overhead, the ducts blowing frosty gusts into Gama’s sweat-soaked hair. At least one casualty was over.

Halfway down the passageway toward Gama’s stateroom, a few steps from the ladder to the middle level, he saw his stateroom door slam open and his three most senior officers burst from the room. Sugimota was in the lead, carrying an R-35 automatic rifle in each hand, as if he’d known Gama would come. Without a word Sugimota handed over one of the rifles and then followed Gama down the steep staircase to the middle level.

In contrast to the upper level’s functionality, the middle level was more lavishly furnished. Bright crystal light fixtures protruding from the bulkheads near the overhead shone down on polished wood grain paneling and carpeting with a vine and leaf pattern on a blue field.

The bottom of the stairway emerged into the centerline passageway. On the right, a row of doors opened onto the officers’ staterooms. The doors on the left led to the recreational center — the galley and messroom, officers’ conference room, and exercise area. The passageway continued aft to the compartment bulkhead, dead-ending at a hatch to the steam compartment. The hatch on this side was covered with wood paneling, disguising its presence.

Gama paused, aware that he was at a severe disadvantage, despite the fact that defending a piece of territory was easier than attacking it. He thought back to his days as a midshipman, his cross-training with the Self-Defense Force, dashing through a forest with a helmet, dark green facial camouflage, an R-35 automatic rifle in his hand. The whole drill had seemed like a childish game of playing soldier. So it felt now, except his stomach was churning with anxiety — anxiety that he would lose his command, the ship he’d been entrusted, the trillion-yen miracle machine for which he held absolute responsibility.

That, and fear he was about to get killed.

Gama fought to clear his mind, to flush away such negative thoughts. No matter what, he would conduct himself as a commanding officer, the ship’s captain.

His next order was made with a deep voice, hard as steel, without a single tremor. “First, stand by the hatch to the steam module. Navigator, take the doorway of stateroom three. Ops Officer, you take the doorway to the messroom. I’ll help Sugimota. When these men come in, all of you shoot low. They’ll come in crawling, expecting you to aim high. Everyone clear?”

The others were suddenly reassured. Off they ran to their tasks, unaware of the struggle Gama was fighting inside.

Lieutenant Commander Umigiri, the young navigator, looked at him with narrowed eyes, any fear he was feeling masked. Gama frowned at him, surprised that the youth could exhibit such self-control. “Sir, what if these are our men, sent on an exercise by Admiral Tanaka to test us?”

“Impossible,” Gama spat, continuing aft with Sugimota. “I’d have been briefed on it. No more discussion. Everyone, take your safeties to the off position. Here they—”

Chu was about to shove the hatch open when a speaker overhead suddenly blasted out a female Japanese voice.

“The reactor is self-sustaining.”

“What did she say?” Chu asked Lo, but in the next moment he already knew. The eerie quiet of the ship was replaced by a booming roar, coming from the overhead.

Chu realized the air conditioning was coming back on.

“The reactor is back on-line,” Lo said, glancing over.

“Hold it, men,” Chu said quietly. Defenders might already be coming, so it would be best to enter the space prepared. “Weapons at ready. Insert on my mark… three, two—”

Chu was amazed to discover that he fully expected to die. Never before, not even when he had ejected from the exploding wreck of his Yak over Go Hai Bay, had he ever thought he was anywhere near death. But now he could feel it, just on the other side of this hatch.

Beyond was not some uncaring darkness but an animated spirit, ready to take him. It was as if a voice had trumpeted into his skull: Chu Hua-Feng is a dead man.

With that thought he became filled with violent fury, anger at himself, at this fouled-up mission, at the killers of his father, at the Japanese, and at life itself. The anger was like a fireball that burned him from the inside. He sneered viciously, baring his teeth.

A furious scream erupted from his lips the instant before he smashed the hatch open with an explosive thrust.

He surged into the compartment, his weapon lowered, the silenced rounds bursting from his pistol.

Just before the hatch, Fumio Sugimota lifted his R-35 rifle, his index finger just barely brushing the trigger. The rifle’s safety was off, the clip loaded, a round in the chamber.

Suddenly the hatch exploded outward at him with a speed he never thought possible for such a heavy device.

With iron force it smashed him in the forearm and spun him around. Even before he could register the snap of his bone breaking, the hatch smacked into the wall of the passageway, then rebounded from the bulkhead rubber stop and cracked into his face, shattering his nose.

He had the briefest impression of figures standing inside the open hatchway. One of them let loose a rasping, phlegm-laced war whoop. Just before the hatch swung back in his face, he tried to raise the weapon to fire it.

He did not hear the thump of the AK-80 firing in automatic mode, the supersonic crack of four 9-mm heavy-grain rounds.

He didn’t feel the bullets as they pierced his chest, his upper arm, upper back, lower back. It seemed as if he were pushed, hard, back into the hatch, and then he had the strangest sensation of floating, his body suddenly boneless and unable to support his weight. He was falling in slow motion toward the deck, and as he fell he looked at the intricate pattern set into the carpet, repeating dull-colored interlacing vines and leaves. He’d never really noticed before, but it suddenly seemed fascinating as he plunged toward it. The pattern expanded rapidly and vibrated as he bounced once on the deck, then stopped moving.

He kept watching the vines and the leaves, amazed at how interesting the pattern was as a redness became added to it, a sort of paint or liquid spreading over the pattern. At the same time he noticed that he was cold, as if lying outside in the snow. The red then became a sort of grayish black, the dirty green of the vine a shade of light gray. The gray shades, synchronized, began to become darker together, the picture fading as if from a television screen that had lost its power, the view becoming dark black. At first the black was shiny, but then the shimmer began to dim until there was nothing but the dull liquid blackness, and the liquid gave way to vapor, until the blackness was nothing and he was surrounded by nothing and there was nothing.

The door crashed aside, taking much more effort than Chu had expected.

Then he saw that the hatch had spun a Japanese officer against the wall. Still screaming, Chu turned briefly toward the officer, his AK-80 pistol smoothly arcing as well. He squeezed the trigger just for a fraction of a second, enough for the weapon to cough out four rounds at the upper body of the Japanese man. A line of bullet holes popped red dots on his orange coveralls.

Instinctively the arc of the gun swung back to the only other man in the passageway. Chu had a split-second impression of a slender man, also in orange coveralls, with multiple patches and insignia on his uniform, holding an automatic rifle with both hands, the weapon aimed at Chu’s knees. Chu’s trigger, almost of its own volition, squeezed, firing three rounds. Bright red blood sprayed onto the man’s torso. At first he spun a half turn, but then froze. Chu’s sense of time had dramatically dilated with the adrenaline, and the man’s collapse to the deck took what seemed like an hour. Chu didn’t wait, he charged the man, still only a half lungful into his scream of fury. It was Chu’s push more than the bullet wounds that dropped the man to the deck.

Suruki Gama looked up and saw his worst nightmare.

The hatch flew open so violently that Gama was sure a hand grenade had gone off, yet the explosion sounded strange, an angry human scream, a shriek straight from the bowels of Hell. The opening hatch pushed aside Sugimota as if he were a doll, slamming him into the bulkhead.

A tall, thin phantom, covered from head to toe in black, burst through the opening. His mouth was open, his red tongue stark against his white teeth. A glaringly bright light shone from his thick chest, the glint from it momentarily blinding Gama.

Behind the phantom stood several other men in black, all clutching machine pistols. With that realization Gama raised his R-35 to aim at the invader’s chest. Before he could fire, a hot razor sliced into him. Bright red arterial blood spurted from the right side of his chest. Gama watched several droplets of the blood fly up and outward, gliding gracefully toward the bulkhead, where they splattered, and Gama realized his view now was completely filled by the bulkhead. Somehow the entire room, the entire ship, had spun around, and the men from the pantry were gone, leaving him to a blood-splashed wall of wood.

The scream continued, and Gama felt something — a truck perhaps — crash into him. He plummeted to the deck, the feeling of heat deep in his right side insistent.

It took quite a while to fall to the deck. As the carpeted deck came up to meet him, the room swiveled until the deck was vertical, turning what had been the deck to a wall. Gama stayed glued to that wall, oddly not sliding toward the pantry.

Sounds now, thumping, boots on carpeting, shaking the deck where his right ear rested. Coughing sounds, whooshing noises — bullets, he thought. Finally the scream from the first invader ended, replaced by short staccato whimpers from other men, one coming from somewhere overhead, the second from behind him. The thumping noises continued. He thought he saw a boot, close in his vision, dull black, no laces… he stared at it without blinking.

A hand on his cheek, the fingers blunt, coarse, warm, pulling his face over. The world swirled by, rotating around him. What was once the overhead of the compartment came into view. A black unfocused shape crouched beside him, the shape possessing two eyes, a slash of a mouth.

Loud guttural sounds from the mouth of the shape.

Gama could not blink, his eyes frozen looking at the overhead. The hand on his cheek withdrew, and the ship swirled around again, until he saw just the carpeting and the wood in front of him, both beginning to fade in and out.

He felt his tongue fall out of his mouth, the fibers of the carpet irritating it. A copper taste seeped in, the red of his own blood flowing over the carpet and into his mouth. Still unable to blink, he lay like that until it seemed as if he were lying in ice water, the cold coming for him and finding him.

On the outside of his vision a border of darkness grew, forming a tunnel. The tunnel seemed to chase away the colors of the wood and carpet until they were spots of two tones of gray shrinking further to a small dot, the dot not so much winking out as swallowed by the black of the tunnel walls.

There was only dark, and there had only ever been dark, and he felt an acceptance of that. Yes, that was the word, acceptance. It was proper. It was… all.

As Chu advanced down the corridor, he looked for the flesh of faces, the black extensions of rifle barrels, the orange of Japanese uniforms. In the second door on the left side he saw all three — a rifle barrel pointed low, a pale face with dark eyes looking in panic up at him, an orange Uniform proclaiming his position. Chu’s reflexes took over, all the drills, all the simulations, paying off.

Four rounds clicked off, puncturing this face, changing it to a red and gray pulp.

A sudden motion from the right. Chu saw another figure, another wide-eyed face, another rifle barrel.

Three rounds in the man’s face, and the rifle barrel flew away from the body.

Chu spun around, checking behind him. His men had emerged from the hatch, moving slowly. Lo Sun was kicking open the doors on the right side close to the dead bodies. Chu turned back, continuing on, his eyes wide, his weapon up. There were doors on either side of the passageway. He slammed each open, weapon raised. Nothing in the first two on the left, a fleeting impression of berthing quarters revealed behind each door. The two doors on the right also revealed empty rooms, wider and more open rooms — recreational areas or dining facilities.

At the corridor’s end Chu reached a door near a ship’s ladder, a narrow, steep metal staircase, one flight leading up and aft, the other leading down and aft. He checked both ladders, then kicked in the door. Inside was a stainless steel and chrome bathroom, with three stalls, two showers, and three sinks. The open area was empty. Chu ran to the right, looking into the stalls, all the doors latched open, the room apparently empty. A door at the wall between sinks captured his attention. He opened it but found only the raw foam-insulated steel of the hull.

Several doors on the near and far walls revealed only storage space. Chu turned and left, emerging back into the carpeted corridor.

“U, below to the computer level. Take Yong. Zhang, secure the computer room. Xhiu, take the radio space. Lo, captain’s stateroom. Chen, take the first officer’s cabin. I’ll go first and secure the control room. Upperlevel officers, join me there when your spaces are secure. Report by radio in one minute. Mark!”

Chu grabbed the shining chrome rail to the ladder, spun himself around, and launched himself upward, three steps at a time, the platoon right behind him.

Chu ejected his clip even though it had a half dozen rounds left in it He wasn’t sure of the exact number of bullets remaining in the clip, and he didn’t care. He would enter the occupied upper level with a full clip.

The half-spent clip clattered to the deck far below, the new one clicking into place as he climbed the final steps of the ladder, emerging on the aft end of the wood-paneled passageway leading forward from the captain’s and first officer’s staterooms. He turned the corner and sprinted the five meters past the radio room and the computer room to the opening at the end of the passageway, where a heavy plastic curtain was pulled aside and fastened with a restraining strap. He knew the room layout by heart, having read and reread Mai Sheng’s intelligence manual so many times he could reproduce it by hand.

The worst problem in hijacking a submarine was taking over the control room itself. Coming in firing could cripple vital equipment, leaving them with scrap metal instead of a warship. Yet coming in without shooting was suicidal. The only reasonable solution was to use surprise as an ally, assassinating the control room crew members before they could react.

He had faced failure and death fully a half dozen times today, but the next meeting with potential failure — and death — he feared. That he had beat the odds so far made this even harder. The submarine was almost in his grasp, and here he was, about to lose it all if just one officer in the control room leveled an automatic rifle at him.

His death would not doom just him, it would doom the mission. Not just the attack on this submarine, but the sea battle he had planned in the East China Sea. If this mission had a glaring flaw, it was that too much expertise was concentrated in Chu’s own skull. Dammit, he cursed. One bullet, and Red China would never become the People’s Republic of China. His brainchild would be stillborn.

The pessimism rising in him fueled an anger far beyond the moment. That fury ignited him as he roared into the control room with another evil shriek.

When Captain Gama had thrown off his harness and dashed out the door, he had shifted control of the ship to Lieutenant Teshio Jintsu.

Jintsu had trembled as he had strapped himself into the command-console seat, the leather of it still warm from Gama’s body. His hands shaking, he had selected the command compartment middle-level video monitor.

He had watched while the commandos had burst out of the aft pantry and gunned down all four senior officers.

He heard the screaming of the first commando, a tall black-faced vision from a nightmare, the coughing sounds of gunfire, the horrifying liquid thumps of the officers hitting the deck, the forward-looking camera showing the skulls of two officers rupture, spilling blood and brains to the deck. The commandos worked their way forward to the ladder, and Jintsu quickly brought up the camera monitoring the upper-level passageway.

The lead commando ran down the corridor toward control — toward him. With only seconds left, seconds before death, a choked whimper escaped from his lips.

Tears of fear and frustration streaked down his cheeks, Jintsu horribly embarrassed that he was disintegrating during the worst crisis of his life. He tried to think, to regain control of himself, but his thoughts spiraled uselessly in panic. Feeling detaching from himself, he watched as he slowly unbuckled the five-point harness and stood from the couch. He hurried around to the far corner of the room, the last seconds of his life counting off.

Teshio Jintsu looked around one last time, then shut his eyes, clamped them shut, and put his hands over his face.

He had a vague impression of a dimly lit space, humming with electronic displays, air blowing coldly into the room, a cocoon-like cockpit in front of him, the tops of the consoles a half-meter higher than his eye level. Two consoles were located farther aft, mostly obscured by the first. There was a console on his immediate left. Far over his right shoulder, two steps led up to the elevated platform to the first console, and behind it in the corner was an odd arrangement that must be the periscope station.

Chu’s war cry died in his throat as he found himself in an empty room. In his all-encompassing first glance, his head swiveling from left to right looking for the Japanese, he could see the console on the left, and its seat was empty. What he could see of the aft consoles was likewise empty. He stepped up to the elevated platform, ensuring the first console was deserted. The periscope station was empty. He looked down on the aft consoles to confirm his initial impression — they were deserted.

His AK-80 still at the ready, he slowly crept back down from the elevated deck to the main level. He was walking around the tall equipment console of the first station when he heard something, a muffled wet sniffle.

He spun to his left. Ahead of him was the starboard bulkhead. As he walked toward it, he saw a cramped, unused space between the outboard console of the single forward-facing cockpit and the curve of the bulkhead’s equipment panels. Stuffed into the space was a man— no, just a kid — in orange coveralls. His knees were crammed up under his chin, his body curled into a ball, tears streaking his cheeks from shut lids, both hands held up, palms outward imploringly, both hands trembling uncontrollably.

Chu’s pistol came down slowly until the barrel was aimed precisely between the youth’s eyes. He tensed his finger on the trigger.

“Mother of God,” Chu said finally, holstering the pistol.

He reached down and pulled the shaking kid to his feet by the front of his coveralls. He towed him out of the control room to the upper-level passageway. He dumped him back on the deck, the young officer still shaking, his eyes still shut, his hands shielding his face.

Chu pulled out the AK-80 and put the silencer to the man’s forehead.

There was no equipment here that could be damaged.

Chu could put an entire clip into the officer and not hurt the ship a bit. The Rising Sun was now his. The men of his platoon had gathered at the forward end of the compartment, and Lo Sun gave him the sign that all was secure. This kid was the last obstacle between Chu and command of this submarine.

There was no way he could let the officer live. The risk was too great. There was simply too much damage to the mission he could do. And there was no time to deal with a hostage. Chu’s op order briefing manual had specifically prohibited any commander from sparing a single Japanese officer.

Chu knew it was time to kill the officer. He squeezed his finger on the trigger, but stopped when the boy started to whimper.

The more Chu looked at him, the more he reminded him of Lo Yun, brother of his first officer, the way Lo Yun had looked ten years ago when he had been Chu’s Yak-36A backseat weapons officer. Lo Yun had been twenty-three years old when he died, about the same age as this youth.

The whimpering continued. Chu’s barrel remained on his forehead. His men looked at him wide-eyed.

Time to kill him. Now. One bullet and the mission continues. It would be quick. Painless. Over in a second. Just one more mess to clean up and the ship was his.

“Oh, fuck,” Chu said, hating himself for what he was about to do. He put the silenced pistol barrel in the boy’s right eye. He squeezed the trigger slowly.

The bang of the pistol was loud, despite the silencer.

The youth’s head exploded, leaving brains against the bulkhead behind him and blood on the carpeting, a raw, meaty, liquid mess where an innocent face had been.

“Lieutenant Wong, clean this up.” Chu holstered the pistol and walked to the door of his stateroom.

There, in privacy. Admiral Chu Hua-Feng, current commanding officer of the MSDF submarine Artic Storm and admiral-in-command of a fleet of the most advanced submarines in history, bent over and vomited.

Five minutes later he sank to the deck, his eyes shut, his fingers pressed to his eye sockets, muttering two words to himself, repeating them over and over — “Good God… good God…”

Chu went to the control console. He had to loosen the five-point harness for his larger frame. The leather of the seat was comfortable, the arrangement of the consoles well designed. He spent a few moments scanning the panels. All of them displayed Japanese script, even the camera view out the top of the fin, showing the silvery undersides of the waves approaching the ship.

The periscope was down, the instrument’s mast lowered sometime during their invasion of the ship. Chu had not yet grasped how to raise the device, nor did he intend to.

But that was the essence of the problem of the moment — and the problems seemed endless — getting the ship to do what Chu wanted it to do. This vessel had very few knobs, control yokes, function keys, or dedicated instrument dials, just a cluster of computer workstations.

All were characterized by an arrangement of high-definition flat-panel and holographic displays. This was not a ship that he could treat like the Korean vessel, finding a tersely written procedure in a dogeared manual, then push some buttons, open an automatic-valve joystick, dial in a depth rate, push a control yoke to change control-surface positions.

No, this ship was completely commanded by the computer system. On the plus side, Chu had managed to raid the ship and take it over without a single bullet entering a computer cabinet. And without the slightest scratch to his crew. On the negative side, the ship continued steaming under the control of the advanced computer system, and the intelligence briefing manuals’ details were sketchy about the system. It was either very simple to operate or hopelessly difficult. Continuing adding up the negatives, the ship was at mast-broach depth, shallow enough that a ten-meter-long pole — be it periscope or radio antenna or electronic emission-detection antenna — would poke out of the sea five meters. Which meant the top of the sail was only five or ten meters beneath the surface. Which meant an approaching ship could smash into them and cripple them, maybe even sink them.

So far this ship was blind and deaf. It was an unfamiliar dog without a leash.

Chu knew he had to get the ship deep and steam west, away from the Japanese fleet, now possibly alerted to the fact that their submarines were in the hands of rogue forces. He had to hurry.

Forward, in the computer room, Chu had stationed his computer expert. Lieutenant Zhang Peng. Right now Zhang would be speed-reading the manuals embedded in the computer software, paging through displays, researching the control system. It might take him weeks to understand how to give the simplest order to the computer, or even to become acquainted with how to take manual control of the ship with the computer out of the loop.

Chu ran his hands through his close-cropped hair, staring helplessly at the computer display of the fin camera.

He opened his mouth to call out to Zhang, but instead checked his watch. It had been only three minutes since the last time he had demanded an update, and Zhang’s reply had been the same one he’d given before that— status unchanged.

“Right one effective degree rudder, change course to one eight five, aye, sir,” the Second Captain’s odd-sounding female voice responded in Chu’s headset. Chu had ordered Zhang to shift the system to English, the language all crew members understood.

Chu had retrieved the cordless headset off the deck near the console. It was a strange mechanism, with one earphone, a boom microphone, and a device that pointed at his right eye as if trying to read where he was looking.

A display in the lower center of Chu’s console changed from a readout of tank levels to show computer animation of the submarine ahead. The depiction was strangely real, with waves that caused shimmering patterns on the sub’s upper deck. The aft X-tail of the animation blinked, flashing red appearing on the control surfaces. The view suddenly rotated so that the observer looked down on the ship as it began to turn right slowly, from a superimposed line labeled 180, another line five degrees clockwise labeled 185. The numerals 185 blinked for a second as the Second Captain’s voice again spoke in his earphone: “The ship is steady on course one eight five, sir. All control surfaces now at zero effective rudder.”

Chu wondered what his script read at this point.

Shrugging, he said, “Very good.”

“Seems to work. Admiral,” from Zhang.

Inside, Chu smiled. The plan was working. It was time to drive the ship deep, then steer westward to the East China Sea and get out of the sea-trials area. The Japanese surface fleet would be coming soon, looking for their missing submarines. Once he’d made some miles east, he would need to communicate with his satellite— to tell the PLA Admiralty the good news — and with the other unit commanders. Then he’d instruct the seaplanes to drop their explosives and cargo of wreckage into the sea. They were loaded with oil tanks, pieces of fabric, scraps of plastic piping, some electrical cables, about a ton of floating detritus each, all designed to buy time, to create the impression to the Japanese navy hierarchy that their subs had all sunk.

More important than that was to learn the ship, how to drive it, how to fight it, and how to make the Second Captain completely functional.

He was bone tired, and there were hours and hours of work to do. But then, so much had gone right They had done it, they had actually done it.

Chu felt like a proud father watching a son walk his first steps. His plan, his brainchild, was working.