Piranha Firing Point

by Michael Dimercurio

  Piranha firing Point by Michael DiMercurio

  “A nuclear submarine fleet is the future of the armed forces. The number of tanks and guns will be reduced as well as the infantry, but a modem Navy is a totally different thing.”

  —russian army marshal pavel gracev, former Russian minister of defense,

  1993

  “It is becoming increasingly clear that the next substantial U.S. naval expedition abroad—the next Desert Storm—may well face an enemy with submarines in its order of battle.”

  —captain Bruce linder, U.S. navy commander, fleet antisubmarine warfare training center U.S. naval institute proceedings, may 1996

  “The location where we will engage the enemy must not become known to them. If it is not known, then the positions they must prepare to defend will be numerous … [and] the forces we will engage will be few.” —sun-tzu, the art of war

  “Ex Scientia—Tridens.” (from knowledge—sea power) —motto of the U.S. naval academy

  “Gentlemen, one thing I’ve learned at sea is that the procedure manuals are written by people who have never been on the business end of a torpedo with the plant crashing around them, with the captain shouting for power, where a second’s delay can mean death. The meaning of being an officer in our navy is knowing more than those operation manuals, knowing how to play when you’re hurt, when the ship is going down and you need to keep shooting anyway. That’s really it, isn’t it, men? The ability to play hurt. That’s the only way we’ll ever win a war. And in fact, that’s the only way you can live your lives. Do that for me, guys. Learn to play hurt.”

  —admiral kinnaird R. mckee, director navy nuclear propulsion program AND former superintendent, U.S. naval academy, ADDRESSING THE atlantic fleet submarine officers, norfolk, virginia, 1984

  “I still have one torpedo and two main engines.” —captain michael pacino, USS seawolf, AT THE MOUTH OF THE go hai bay, SURROUNDED BY chinese DESTROYERS AND AIRCRAFT PROLOGUE.

  The last engine died as the plunging aircraft tilted into a steep dead-stick turn, the crosswind shaking the wings, the view ahead filled only with deep blue ocean. The waves grew alarmingly close, coming impossibly fast toward the windshield. A moment later the plane smashed violently into the water.

  The pilot was hurled into his seat’s five-point harness, fighting the wheel and the rudder pedals, until the massive four-engine seaplane glided to a halt and began rolling in the gentle swells of the East China Sea. The pilot glanced one last time at the panel and nodded at the copilot. Shrugging off the harness, he moved aft through the flight-deck door and into the large aft cabin. Looking up at him were two dozen pair of eyes, some steely cold, some excited, a few bored, but none anxious.

  The pilot turned to the starboard side of the cabin, where a crowded deck-to-overhead console was set against the bulkhead to the cockpit. A small, intense man sat in the console, the panels and keypads and trackballs encircling him. One of the panels graphically depicted the aircraft on the surface, a door opening in the underhull. a ball on a cable lowering into the sea, a set of numbers rolling up as the ball sank into the depths of the ocean. A panel next to the graphic display filled with dots swimming in a darker field, until the dots coalesced into a bright spot moving slowly across the screen.

  “She’ll pass close in ten minutes. Commander Chu, five hundred meters east. She’s slow, at fifteen clicks.

  That puts mount-up time now, deploy time in two minutes, with three minutes of contingency time. It’s tight, but we can do it.”

  Commander Chu Hua-Feng stepped to the center of the cabin and looked at the men. Each of them was clad in unmarked black coveralls, their belts holding machine pistols, grenades, and daggers.

  “Attention, fighters,” he said, his voice deep, projecting without effort. Thin but muscular, Chu stood one hundred eighty centimeters, taller in his rubber-soled boots, towering over the crew. He was in his mid-thirties, which was odd in the Red Chinese PLA Navy, where senior officers were inevitably gray-haired. He carried himself with the air of unquestioned authority, as if he had been the oldest brother, used to command since infancy. The unblinking eyes of the twenty-four men stared at him.

  “We mount up in thirty seconds,” Chu continued.

  “Rendezvous with the target Korean submarine will be in twelve minutes. Each of you has been training for this moment for the past year. The practice runs are over now. This is it, our operational test.” Chu paused, narrowing his eyes to a glare. “The doubting eyes of the Admiralty are on us. They have said it can’t be done, that no one can sneak up and steal a nuclear submarine, under way and steaming deep beneath the surface. But when this mission is over, and we prove it can be done, the result will change the map of China. And every one of you knows what that will mean.” Chu paused again, scanning the faces. His own face crinkled into unlikely laugh lines around his eyes and across his nose. “Very well, men. Good luck to all of you. Mister First, are you ready?”

  Lieutenant Commander Lo Sun stood up from the sonar console, stripping off the headset, and nodded.

  “Ready, Commander.”

  “Excellent. Platoon, mount up!”

  Immediately the men stood and filed quickly aft in the gently rocking cabin to the aft bulkhead hatch. One after another the men ducked into the hatchway, until the compartment was empty except for Chu. He looked forward into the cabin, and saw the copilot in the door of the flight deck. Chu flipped him a salute, glanced around the big plane one last time, and entered the opening, shutting the cabin hatch behind him.

  Inside the cramped red-lit interior of the submersible, he made his way past the men to the control console forward. The control couch was a contoured pad allowing the pilot to lie on his stomach with his head, shoulders, and arms protruding into a high-pressure plastic view port bubble. This was completely black, as if it had been painted over. Chu strapped on his earpiece and boom mike, tested the circuit, and gave a crisp order to the seaplane copilot. Immediately bright light flashed into the cockpit as the bomb-bay-style doors opened in the belly of the seaplane, admitting the October afternoon light.

  Below Chu, in the view port, the sea lapped steadily against the doors of. the bay. Chu glanced up at an overhead console and pulled an orange T-handle, releasing the submersible Red Dagger from the seaplane. Chu’s stomach flipped as the vessel tumbled from the plane’s bay. The waves rose to meet the view port, then splashed over the plastic bubble. As the ten-meter-long ship sank into the water, the view showed only deep blue, becoming darker as the heads-up display indicated the depth of the submersible. Within a minute the view port was again black, the waves and the seaplane now a hundred meters overhead.

  The submarine loomed ahead in the powerful spotlights, long and cylindrical and fat and black. The escape hatch was his landing target. The submersible’s computer took over on automatic control, guiding them down to the hatch, attempting to match the submarine’s speed and bring down their airlock skirt precisely over the hatch ring.

  According to the intelligence brief from Mai Sheng, his PLA intelligence contact, the sub was the Korean vessel Dae Gu, a Los Angeles 6881-class submarine, formerly the USS Louisville, sold to Korea four years ago under an American program allowing U.S. allies to purchase older nuclear-powered attack submarines as long as Americans were allowed to monitor and control the nuclear material of the reactor core. The intel brief had described the escape hatch location where Chu was to make his landing. The airlock led below to the sparsely occupied engine room of the huge vessel.

  With a gentle thud the submersible Red Dagger touched down on the deck of the target submarine. Chu flooded a ballast tank, making the submersible heavier by a few tons. That would keep it fast to the submarine’
s deck. A quiet hiss sounded as the airlock at the underhull was pumped down, creating an air seal between the submersible and submarine hatches.

  The docking was complete. Chu powered down the submersible, leaving only minimal power on for the interior lights and the computer. Chu pulled himself off the control couch, his muscles aching from the cramped position, and moved aft out of the cockpit. Lo Sun operated the hatch panel. Large steel dogs rotated, and the lower hatch slowly retracted into the submersible hull. Below, bathed in the hot spotlight circle, the black hatch of the submarine was revealed. There was not much to it, only a circular groove cut in the black non-skid paint of the hull, the metal still wet from the seawater.

  Chu pulled a T-wrench from the tool bag on the bulkhead.

  In the center of the hatch below was a small hole with a square metal peg recessed into it. Submarine hatches had been manufactured to ISO standards for the last few decades; that way a sunken submarine could be rescued by any foreign ship happening by. Sub escape hatches could be operated by anyone with a standard salvage tool kit. Chu bent over and spun the T-wrench clockwise until he heard and felt a metallic clunk. He looked up at Lo.

  “Set time minus one. Platoon, don equipment.”

  Chu shrugged into a harness with a dual scuba-type air bottle. Grabbing a gas mask hanging from the hose to the bottles’ regulator, he hung it around his neck.

  Then he belted on two automatic pistols and a bandolier of grenades. Finally, he fitted his earpiece and boom microphone, looked up at his men, and saw that they were ready.

  “Mr. Lo, set time zero when I pull up the hatch.

  There’ll be an indication in their control room as soon as we open it I want the ship taken within two minutes.

  Insert on my mark. Five, four, three, two, one, now!”

  Chu plunged his fingers into a recessed groove and pulled up the hatch. Despite its mass, it was mounted on a counterbalanced spring and came up easily. Chu latched it in the open position, found the ladder down into the escape trunk, and noiselessly slid down the rails into the dark chamber. Switching on a battle lantern to see, he bent low to spin the central chrome wheel of the lower hatch. He pulled it up and latched it. The hatch opened into the brightness of the engine room below.

  The sound of whining turbines came up from the hatch, accompanied by a cloud of heavy steam.

  Chu slid down the second ladder. As his boots hit the deck of the engine room, he raised his AK-80 automatic pistol in his right hand, the long silencer screwed in. He stepped away from the ladderway as his men came down behind him, their boots quiet on the rungs. Chu walked silently aft past the motor control center to the nuclear control space. He looked in the narrow side door. The men inside were deeply involved in a conversation, the Korean syllables melodic in the space.

  Chu snapped off three rounds per man, efficiently dropping the nearest at the throttle, the next two at a long console. The officer standing behind the three men looked over in confusion. His expression became a death mask as two bullets silently ripped into his chest. He sank to the floor slowly, his eyes shutting as his face clunked onto the deck.

  After Chu waved one of his men into the room, he continued aft, dropping his spent clip and reloading without looking down. The noise grew to a shrieking roar of steam. He saw a figure between the two large turbines.

  Chu fired and hit the man in the bicep. The man, an older officer, lunged in an attempt to hide, but Chu raced in and squeezed off another four rounds into the man’s chest. Blood began to run on the deckplates of the catwalk between the turbines as Chu continued aft.

  He found another watchstander aft of the reduction gear and killed him, then ducked down a ladder to the middle level. There’d be one down here too. It took less than sixty seconds to find the man, standing between two turbines with a clipboard, checking a gauge. Suddenly he clutched his chest, blood spurting over his palm. Too late he looked up to see Chu, then sprawled onto the deck.

  By the time Chu returned from the lower level, he found his platoon gathered at the opening to a ladder.

  Lo Sun motioned them to the port side, where he’d located the duct leading to the fan room forward of the reactor compartment, where the air was redistributed throughout the ship. Chu gave the signal, and the men strapped on their gas masks. They checked the seals and valves in their regulators. Chu put his face into his own mask, testing the coppery, dry air. Then he fired four shots, shattering the mesh covering the duct. He took a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, and hurled it into the duct, waiting to hear it explode. There was no loud report, only a dull thud as the hydrogen cyanide canister burst apart. The deadly gas would now be sucked to the fan room.

  The door to the control room was open. As Chu hurried in and looked around, the dead men registered first.

  They seemed to be everywhere. Considering how choked the room was with equipment, he was surprised that the American technology required so many individuals to run the ship. On his right was a ship-control station, where two men were slumped over airplane-style control yokes. One of his men pulled a Korean helmsman up from his seat, tossing him into the forward passageway, then taking the control yoke himself. Others did likewise, until the passageway was piled with bodies and the men of the Red Dagger platoon occupied every control station. Chu stepped up onto the periscope stand and checked the room. The two men at the ship-control consoles were maintaining depth at what the numerals said 550. That must be feet rather than meters, he thought, recalling the depth of the submersible and the fact that the deck had never taken a down angle during their assault. The speed indicator read 15, which would mean knots instead of meters per second.

  Chu craned his neck around a periscope pole to look at the wraparound panel on the port side. He noticed red circles indicating the open hatch aft. The rest of the control room was much less important. With a nod at one of his men, Chu gave the next order—to harvest every technical manual they could find, given four minutes.

  One man went into the sonar display room, piling up books. Chu found a book cabinet at the chart table, and withdrew a manual marked Submarine Standard Operating Procedures. Chu began scanning it—stopping only when he heard a loud explosion behind the periscope stand. One of the men had blown apart the tumbler of a safe. Once the smoke cleared, the contents of the safe were withdrawn and added to a pile on the deck. Other safes throughout the ship would likewise be yielding up their contents.

  Time was short, Chu thought, anxiously adjusting his gas mask. Their air supplies would run out in mere minutes.

  At last he found the procedure he was looking for.

  “Turn the engine knob to stop,” he called out, his voice distorted through the mask.

  The man at the ship-control console rotated a dial with a needle set in the face from the area marked standard to stop. A second needle set into the face clicked to the stop square, ringing a small bell, the answer from the nuclear control room aft. In the engine room Chu’s men would be shutting the throttle valves to the steam turbines.

  Chu watched the speed indicator as it dropped from 15 to 12, then to 10. He hurried to the wraparound port panel. He scanned through the procedure manual, searching for the hovering system chapter. If he could stop the ship, they could depart without fighting the forward velocity of the vessel. He paged through several computer displays on the main flat panel, finally finding the display for the hovering system, and selected the presets the procedure called for on the checklist.

  He looked over the speed panel. The ship’s speed was now nearing zero. It would be like stopping the engines on a blimp, he thought. Now they would either sink, pop up to the surface, or tilt forward or aft. It depended on how the ship had been before they slowed. He waited as the ship glided to a halt. He selected the ship’s desired depth using a computer control on the display, then squinted at the display to see the ship’s actual depth.

  The two matched. The ship was hovering.

  With one rapid twist of the depth-rate
dial, Chu commanded the computer to send the ship plunging vertically downward, to sink to her crush depth.

  “Extract!” he commanded.

  “Go!” Chu hissed. There was no time for him to climb into the control seat. One of the platoon pilots had already climbed onto the view port couch and flooded the hatch skirt, breaking the connection between the two ships. The depth of the two vessels would be at least four hundred meters, not far from the crush depth of the submarine. The Red Dagger could descend to almost seven hundred meters before its titanium hull began to fail, but it would do no good for the submarine’s hull failure to take the submersible down with it.

  The water jets spun up, and the Red Dagger accelerated away from the still descending abandoned submarine.

  The deck of the submersible angled sharply upward as it made its emergency ascent. Emergency, because its atmosphere remained poisoned with the deadly hydrogen cyanide gas from the grenade detonated on the submarine below, and each man’s air was running out. Chu could feel his own air supply dwindling. It was getting much harder to pull each breath from the mask. Finally the submersible reached the surface, and the pilot began to ventilate the interior. A blast of fresh air blew over Chu’s sweaty coveralls, chilling him. He waited as long as he could, until the bottle gave up, its air completely exhausted. Hoping the submersible was now safe, he pulled off the sweaty mask and pulled in a breath of salty sea air. The other members of the platoon were watching him, waiting to see if he would collapse to the deck. He took a second pull and nodded solemnly at the men. They all pulled off their masks, relief breaking out on their faces.

  A violent shriek sounded through the sea around them, then a roaring screech of ripping metal. Quickly it died to a barely discernible groan.

  “Sub’s hull is imploding,” Lo Sun said. “It must have hit crush depth.”

  Without answering, Chu climbed to the upper compartment hatch, where he looked out a view port revealing the cloudy sky above. He engaged a control, and the hatch came open. Chu put his head out above the hatch ring and looked out over the calm sea. The mostly submerged submersible hull was barely visible beneath him.