Piranha: Firing Point

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 joined 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.