Piranha: Firing Point

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.