Piranha: Firing Point

There a circular chrome ring surrounded the wheel shaft where it entered the hatch bearing — but only from the top did it look like a ring. On the right side a small protrusion extended from it, a small nipple. Chu felt the nipple, moving his fingers slowly around the outside of it. On the other side of the nipple was a set of gear teeth ground into the shaft of the dogging wheel, and pushed into the gear teeth was a single protrusion of metal from the ring. It was a simple mechanical interlock. The hatch wasn’t chained and padlocked; it was just interlocked to avoid inadvertent opening from vibrations of the ship.

All he had to do was pull up on the nipple and disconnect the key of the ring from the gear teeth of the shaft, and the wheel would be free to rotate. He turned the wheel clockwise, as if to shut the hatch, freed the ring key from the teeth, pulled up the locking-ring nipple, then turned the wheel counterclockwise. The wheel spun rapidly as if oiled that very morning.

The hatch dogs unlatched, the wheel spinning quickly, until the hatch was ready to be opened, outward toward the forward compartment. Suddenly their situation had changed. No longer were they fighting for their survival, running from a nuclear reactor about to cook them like mice in a microwave oven, but were now about to assault and capture a foreign warship. The difference was startling. They were about to change from prey to hunters in an instant.

Chu had to restrain himself from pushing the hatch open and bolting for the safety of the shielded compartment.

He had to prepare the men, ready their weapons, and ready himself to attack. It would take only a second, but it was a second he couldn’t afford to let slip by. He turned his back to the hatch, and eyed the men steadily while he grabbed his AK-80 and dropped his air bottles.

The men, just as panicked as he had been, immediately realized what he was doing. Discarding their air bottles, they put in their earphones to their VHF radios, strapped on their boom microphones. Without saying a word, he looked quickly at each of his men, then turned back around.

He put his hand on the hatch, ready to charge into the middle level. On the other side a half dozen armed officers of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force could be waiting for him. His heart rate climbed, his breathing coming rapidly. There was no turning back now.

* * *

Commander Suruki Gama felt a sickness settle in his stomach like a cold rock. What he’d expected to be the most eventful day in his life — the maiden voyage of the Rising Sun-class submarine fleet — was in fact eventful, but in a hideously twisted way.

Perhaps it was the way the day had begun. The phone call that had awakened him at one o’clock in the morning started the day. The Second Captain computer system with its female human voice interface called him to tell him the status of the submarine. “Automatic sequence notification for Captain Gama. Please authenticate.”

The voice would repeat those words over and over until Gama spoke his rank and name. The call reported that the reactor was critical. It took Gama twenty minutes to fall back asleep. The two o’clock call reported that the reactor was at operating temperature. At three a.m. the steam plant was up and functional. At four the ship was on internal power, being divorced from shore power. At five a.m., with dawn’s light seeping into the bedroom from a part in the curtains, the alarm clock buzzed insistently, and Gama, enraged and sick from the sleepless night, picked up the clock and hurled it across the room.

He had arrived at the pier and gone to the plateglass windows of the concourse pier building overlooking the submarine tied up at the berth below. SS-403 was the hull number of his Rising Sun-class attack submarine.

Gama had been given the opportunity to name the ship himself, and in line with the orders of fleet headquarters that the Rising Sun class be named after natural phenomena, Gama had given SS-403 the name Arctic Storm.

There was something deeply important in christening an oceangoing ship, and this name resonated with Gama, for reasons beyond the grasp of his conscious mind.

The ship was a stubby-cylinder, the hull extremely wide compared to conventional nuclear-submarine designs, and relatively short in length. The fin protruded starkly from the hull, its shape rounded and tapered aft, and it jutted impossibly high above the vessel, the fin height roughly equal to the diameter of the hull itself.

Aft, the rudder was an X-shape, the surfaces of the X at once rudder and elevator plane. Other than the forward hatch opening and the windows set into the forward edge of the fin, the hull was smooth and unmarked, its skin slick like that of a shark, the material a sonar-evading foam coating over high-tensile steel.