Piranha: Firing Point

Chu looked out the periscope and commanded, “Darkwing unit two liftoff in three, two, one, mark! And laser guidance, I have the aircraft in the crosshairs.”

“Darkwing missile two away, sir,” Lo Sun said from the command console. The huge maritime patrol plane was dipping so close to the water that the bomb-bay doors were almost skimming the waves. Chu had gotten the ship to periscope depth, manning battle stations, just seconds before. It was as if the airplane knew where they were. He hadn’t circled or done a search; he’d come right in from nowhere. The Second Captain had given them only about seven seconds’ warning of the aircraft, but in that time Chu had bolted from his stateroom table, shouted at the ship-control officer to take the vessel up, and grabbed the periscope.

He felt a sudden chill. The Americans were coming for him. This was something he hadn’t anticipated, that the Japanese would have cooperated and told the Americans about the Rising Suns.

His thoughts were interrupted as the trail of the missile flashed into his view in the periscope.

Toscano watched the navigation display with one eye, the instruments with the other. It was time.

“Drop unit one.”

The copilot pulled up on the console Yo-Yo drop lever, and the plane lifted slightly as the two-ton weight left the plane.

There was a brief flash of light from something out the window of the cockpit before the airplane exploded.

The airframe disintegrated. Toscano’s body was ripped in half at the seat belt, the father of two dead before he even realized he’d been hit.

Tens of thousands of pieces of debris rained down on the water. A jet engine, nearly intact, splashed into the water not far from the Yo-Yo as the unit sank into the water of the East China Sea, its surface transmitter being barely missed by several pieces of what had been the plane’s tail section.

Deep underwater, the Yo-Yo unit began transmitting up the cable line to the surface transmitter, seeing the deep water around it with the acoustic daylight imaging.

The sea around it was full of medium-sized chunks of debris sinking on their way to the bottom. What was left of the cockpit sailed by a few minutes after. Soon the sea calmed, and there was only the ocean and the soli tary shape of the submarine, lurking above at periscope depth, some twelve hundred yards away.

Five P-5 Pegasus patrol planes had taken off from Kagoshima.

Five of them took missile hits as they flew near or over the Arctic Storm’s position. Five of them disintegrated and hit the water, their crews all dead.

The first Yo-Yo made it into the water, but the others blew up with their aircraft.

No other P-5s were operational at Kagoshima, and if there had been, it didn’t matter, since all the Yo-Yo remote pods were expended. There were no spares.

Five aircraft down. Admiral Chu Hua-Feng pulled off his sweaty headset, there at the periscope station, and wiped his forehead.

Though he did not know it, he had won the first round.

POINT ECHO HOLD POSITION

USS DEVILFISH, SSNX-1

“The AWACS radar plane over Kagoshima reported it lost all five P-5 aircraft,” Paully White reported from the radio repeater console.

“What do you mean, lost them?” Patton asked.

“They dropped off the radar. The AWACS watch the aircraft with a look-down radar, since the P-5s fly too low for land-based radar to see them, and they reported that all five Pegasus planes hit the drink.”

“I’m getting a Yo-Yo display,” Porter said from battlecontrol position one. “And a confirmed target, designate submerged warship.”

Pacino bolted upright from his leaning position at the plot table. This was serious. The P-5s most likely had come under attack from the Rising Sun’s sub-to-air heat-seeking missiles. Pacino blinked, then looked over at Patton. The Yo-Yos were scrubbed. The damned Rising Sun commander had blown Pacino’s patrol aircraft out of the sky, and now he was forced into Plan B. Fortu nately, he’d seen the need to put the Sharkeye remote sensors aboard Javelin cruise-missile airframes. Without them this mission would already be over.

“Conn, Sonar,” a voice said over Pacino’s headset! “we have a detect on Mark 12 Yo-Yo unit one thirty miles southwest of Yakushima Island. Detect is confirmed submerged submarine.”

“Designate the contact Target One,” Patton commanded.

He walked across the room to the battlecontrol station zero, the first in line on the starboard side, and climbed in. Pacino followed suit, climbing into station four, the aft-most station. Lowering the canopy over his head down to waist level, he then pulled the helmet over his headset. A yellow screen came up, and the bluish orb of a contact, about a half mile away, appeared.

“Switch to battlecontrol virtual display on Yo-Yo one.”