Piranha: Firing Point mp-5

by Michael Dimercurio

  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 join
ed 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.<
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  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.