Piranha: Firing Point

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 sternm 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.